"It's Christmas at Ground Zero"

So I'm sitting at school listening (invisible in my silence) to two of my friends arguing about the military and the Middle East. An Iranian-American and a Jamacian-American officer in the military. In their arguments over whether or not America could or would take out Iran, I'm sure they had some intelligent discussions over my head. But, one aspect of the conversation really caught my ear...

"If America goes into Iran....They'll destroy the enemy until it's just little pockets of the enemy with AK-47s."

"Yeah, fine, but that'll piss of the Chinese and the Russians and they'll come in."

"Yeah, I'd like to see Russia try to get us. We'd nuke 'em back so fast."

All this gong back and forth about who would nuke who next or fastest or where or whatever, I just kept thinking, somewhere in all this nuking, we're already all dead. Winning, but no one left for it to matter. Like dying young is "beating" the life insurance company, like the general mentioned in our Wills and Trusts book, King Pyrrhus, who said "another such victory and we are lost." Or like that episode of Red Dwarf where they're on the wax planet and Rimmer becomes the general for the good guys: Santa Claus, Ghandi, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Lincoln, and the like. In the end, they "defeat" the bad guys: Hitler, Mousillini, etc, are all dead. But so are all the inhabitants of the planet! Lister points this out to Rimmer, but Rimmer is too busy basking in his lone glory for having defeated the bad guys.

This type of "winning" gets us nowhere.

You see now - there's a reason that often the safest I've ever felt was in my mud hut in the middle of Africa.

note on the title

(Original Post)

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