part one: excuses.

The thoughts in this blog (or series of blogs) were concieved over the course of the 2-week holiday and I had to do some rethinking to place them into a properly constructed structure. However, this is still part one of my blogs concerning the subjects discussed in this entry. Enjoy!
--------

Men say:

"We do not cry. Shedding a tear now and then is reasonable, but bawling and sobbing is just ..pathetic. Let the women cry; yes, stay at home while we invade another country. We are men, therefore we are tough."

Please, don't jump to conclusions. It is not the way I see it. I believe many, if not all men cry - and men being boys who had reached 'adulthood'. I could imagine men bawling during the first few hours of D-Day, or men sobbing over the loss of their loved ones. However, I honestly think a number of men do hold the stereotypical image above as what 'seperates the men from the boys'.

I was taught years ago to always check the reliability of any given resource, be it the latest gossip, a newspaper article, even a 99.9% accurate documentary. Two years ago, Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" movie was shown to me (and my classmates) and we were then tasked to make an essay concluding whether or not the given resource was reliable enought to research about the American Revolution. I got a 5 out fo 7.

A friend of mine had asked me about countries having civil wars, brothers killing each other, neverending wars, and the absence of peace that eternally haunts the darkest of human hearts. I did not understand how that person may have felt, and even though I had tried to help, it was as futile as not speaking to that person at all. We were not seeing each other eye-to-eye and were both stuck in each other's worlds.

Well, that was the way I saw it.

I haven't seen my share of blood and violence, but I do have pictures of rage, anger, paranoia, and depression stuck in my mind; pictures that had made the world what it is now today. I play video games so violent that pictures of victims of war are now no different than that of beautifully-pixelized rays of light shown off a glass surface of a television. I've gotten so used to seeing newspaper headlines about dozens getting killed everyday in countries I do not live in that I don't even bother wondering why and how. That's my world, and somehow I just live through it each and every day.

On Tuesday, during Chapel, we watched a sermon about God creating the universe to show us how 'undescribable' he is in our eyes. The man who talked also showed amazing images of stars and nebulas that were billions and billions of light years away from Earth. He snapped all the time repeating: "A star is born *snap*, a star is born *snap*, every second a star is born." It was supposed to be touching, if not amazing. However, I snickered and repeated with a different, but true, version: "A child dies *snap*, a child dies *snap*, every second a child dies."

They say: "Life is priceless."

No. That's what they said.

Now it's worthless.

Referring to my previous blog entry, a lot of events happened that made me realize only a small segment of what my friend had tried so hard to explain to me. A friend of mine had died, on Valentine's day. My father's friend had died, early one morning. And had I known that my grandfather would die a few hours after we have left his house, I would have opened up my lazy eyelids and hugged and stayed with him until he dies. One reason why I get used to all the violence and the destruction is that it's happening so far away from home. My friend talked about what happened here. And still, it's just too far away from where I am to make any significant change in my life, to make me look back and say, "Pardon me?"


My father gave me a file in the form of a PowerPoint presentation a colleague had given him. It showed forensic photographs taken from various crime scenes and mortuaries across Indonesia. Needless to say, most of the bodies shown - or at least, body parts - belonged to dead people. There were pictures of victims who died due to stabbing wounds, suicide, drugs, road accidents. There were pictures of broken bones, blood, and splattered brain goo. They were downright horrifying.

At first I thought: "I've seen worse. Try me, dad." I was wrong. Dead wrong.
All I could think about after I ended the presentation was how people might even have the heart to take the lives of other people in such brutal fashions. I showed it the next day to a friend of mine, and he also had familiar thoughts on it. It was horrifying. If you wish to see it, I'd be 'glad' to show it to you; but think twice.. or probably three times. It's scarier than any horror/thriller movie you've ever seen. Why? Because it happened. That 'chunk of meat' once had a human soul in it. And now it's what? Mutilated, burned, skinned, disembowled... I know people abort their babies every single day, but..
--------

This blog isn't complete yet. And it'll go unfinished, but rather than letting it go unpublished. I'll end 'part one' here. :D