so here it is 3:52am in the morning, when i have to be up at 6am. I still am not able to sleep. This is day 2 now, heh…
though actually, i can actually tell you what i was thinking about in bed tonight. It wasn’t about work, and it wasn’t about my responsibilities, or my future, or even my past.
Rather as yesterday was remembrance day, and as I am Dutch, thinking about our liberation (as a nation) from our capitulation to Germany, during the 2nd world war, as well as the 20th anniversary of the final crumbling of the Iron Curtain – vis-a-vis – the Berlin wall, having watched a few documentaries, and having read a few stories from my own country, i began to think (when i put my head down) about how much the world has changed, but really remained the same.
More than all of these things though, i was thinking about those kids in their mid to late teens, and those whom are just into their 20-something, and I realized that none of them know a world without global conflict.
When i was growing up, yes sure, there was war, and there were issues with food and water shortages, but not at all like it is today.
They were far away conflicts. Africa, the Middle East (always the middle east), India and Pakistan (still today) and of course, there was a “cold war”.
For me, growing up, so many years after the 2nd world war, really, it didn’t end until 1989 when the “walls fell”.
And really, from that how many years of peace were there, where the entire globe wasn’t caught up in a conflict?
5? 8? 10?
Hard to say isn’t it? Because it wasn’t long after the walls fell that the US invaded Kuwait, to liberate it from Iraq.
Now it’s been almost a full decade, where troops have been in Iraq, after 9/11.
And I see the same concern and fear in the eyes of the young people today, regarding their experience with 9/11, to our fears, when we were young, of the cold war, and the Middle East and Gulf conflicts.
I can not pity the youth of today, anymore than I can glory the youth of my day, for each of us has experienced a different type of global turmoil.
I wonder though, are we as a species at all even capable of global peace? Sure, from a utopian perspective, we surely are, but really… individually.
You see, I do what you do everyday. I wake, I shower, I eat and I dress. Then I commute to some form of job, whether it be employed by someone else; as many of you; or whether you are as I am, and self employed, whom employs others.
Standing in line (as some of you do) in the morning, for my coffee, or latte, or mocha’s, as I’m sure many do in so many other cities, in countries far from these shores.
Each of us thinking about our loves, our lives, our children, our futures, and even our pasts, caught up in our own little spaces of the universe.
I know it is no different for those whom were born in an US (coalition) occupied Iraq during this last (ongoing) conflict; then it was for those growing up in a German occupied Europe.
It is the growth of only knowing war, and strife, and what we call “casualties of war”.
These same casualties of war which breeds bigotry, and hatred, and fears, not to mention all the underlying psychological damage which comes from that environment.
So we – as a species – again propagate the cycle upon a new innocent generation.
Because they will grow as you and I have grown, with their own ideas, and bigotries, and fears and doubts, acting as we have, with our bigotries, fears and doubts, knowing nothing. Just as we know nothing.
Still.
And I know for me personally, what it is like to have those bigotries; most of which (hopefully) I have faced directly and removed from my heart.
Just as many of you who read this (though just as many of you will deny such thoughts or tendencies) have bigotries, fears and doubts; which you are also passing on to your children.
There isn’t any point to this particular blog. Just things I was thinking on while I was laying in the dark, thinking about what my future would have been like if my parents, and grandparents had no experience with combat. Just as I wonder what kind of man I would be as a father to children I do not have, and what sad pathetic idiosyncratic bigotries I might have passed on; which many of you have passed on, unknowingly to your children.
Simple things, like crossing the street when a black person walks by, or counting your change when you perform a transaction with an Asian.
I realize that many of you say you do not do that, but of course, i also know that many of you do not examine yourselves to the level by which i examine every thought, idea, and activity of my day.
But then, that is ok really, it is human to deny one’s own flaws, and see the flaws of another.
I do remember, and as it is said in Dutch, “there is no celebration, without recollection (or commemoration).”
so it is what it is then 
God bless you all, and may the new world, be devoid of all that this world has
