The Trojan War. It was meant to be the greatest war the world has ever known. Yet what was the point of it all? The folly of one man. The pride of another. The quest for glory, world domination, greed. Thousands of years ago, this war was fought. Men died, cities burned, history was made they say. Yet what have we gained from this great war? Nothing! There is nothing to be gained by war. Only death and destruction. There is no glory in death, there is only death! Death is the end of the journey. It is final as nothing else in this world.
What have men learned from the mistakes of the past? Nothing! It would seem that we are impervious to such lessons. Each generation goes on, vowing never to repeat the mistakes of the past, yet again and again we do. The Trojan War. The World Wars. The Vietnam War. The Sino-Japanese War. The war in Kashmir. The war in Israel. The Gulf War. The war against Terror. Men died in these wars, believing they were fighting to make the world a better place. The truth is, war breeds war. The victor on the field today will be the dead on the field tomorrow. Everyone dies. A soldier believes it is better to die in honour and glory than to die like a coward, old and toothless in bed. Yet it is death that is the ultimate victor. There is no sense in war. There is no sense in fighting. There is no sense in violence. There is only anger and hatred and pain. Ultimately there is death.
Can all the wrongs in the world be righted by the blood of innocents? Can it be put to right by the blood of the damned? Will the sins of this generation end if all the blood of the wrongdoers is spilt today? Or will we go on to make the same mistakes? Will we blindly follow the paths that seem so different to us, yet that lead us to the same end?
It seems that this is inevitable. Men are creatures of bloodshed and death. We are mortal, our lives brief. Yet we choose to throw it all away in the pursuit of glory, of honour, of happiness. We plant the seeds of our destructions in the fields of our success. Men are creatures who look at the future and therein lies our failure. Therein lies our weakness. Like the prophetess Cassandra who always predicted the future but was never believed, history cries out its warnings. Those warnings fall on deaf ears. Pleadings that drop like stones into the bottomless pools of ignorance.
We believe that we are invincible. We believe that we are smarter than our forefathers. We are not. We have technology that our ancestors did not, yet the same weakness runs in our veins. The same bloodlust. We have come a long way from the time of Achilles and Hector. Yet today a thousand Hectors and a thousand Achilles’ fight on and die on battlefields, uncounted, unsung, fallen heroes for whom there will be no tomorrow. For what did they give their lives? For whom did they shed their blood? Will it comfort their loved ones, now that they are dead and gone that they fought for honour? For glory? For what they believed was right.
Men say they fight because the other man does. The beginning has to come somewhere. Someone will have to stand up and say “I have seen the folly of our ways. It must end. Let it start with me.”
Just Me.