Primal Warfare

I am literally in love with this picture
and all of the questions it
arouses. As well as its harmony
with the end of this blog. Pay attention.

I wanted go to bed. I really did. But my fingers just want to type and my heart wants to write. So, fine, I'm up.


I sat with my Papa again tonight in his living room in Kansas City with the big Siamese cat who sits in the leather chair like a person and watches the Science Channel with us. My grandpa ate deli meat (ham, which I'm now craving... damn vegetarianism) and drank red boxed wine, and he talked about Mississippi. I saw all the colors with their sepia tones and the 1940's streets of Jackson, with the kiddy matinee on Saturday mornings and the hot tamales sold on the corner by the black man who'd been alive since the beginning of time. Life was beautiful. My Papa, the only boy in his family, became a nuclear physicist/chemist. He always tells me stories about things I've never heard. Tonight, he promised to show me something I'd never seen before. He was right.


He brought in a rolled up chart. When he opened it, my eyes adjusted to the colors, dates, and diagrams. It was a history of nuclear warfare from the beginning of production in America in the 1920's. He explained all the colors, the keys and showed me where he started helping out with the production. He pointed to the red lines, all the warheads that are currently stockpiled. "There's a piece of me in each of those. I helped invent things that stopped things from happening in the bombs. I also have something on Mars." Right, my Papa's also a genius I forgot to mention. But, instead of wondering about the effect of water on the corrosion of the chemicals and the effect of hydrogen on the corrosion of the soft metals like my grandad, I thought about how far we haven't come.


That's right. After almost one hundred years of nuclear warfare, we are no more civilized or advanced as a society it seems. We still have to be able to blackmail each other into "peaceful" situations, to be able to have the ability to blow up the whole of Russia 6 times over so that we are safe. That doesn't make me feel safe. It makes me feel... primitive. For all of the progress we have made in setting up societies and preserving cultures so many of us are still focused on preservation through a power struggle. The alpha male dominates. I'm not here to rant on the job of the "big brother" or to give my political stance on war or homeland security. That's another blog. I just wonder sometimes if our highly advanced progress in the area of destruction is really just a 21st century version of the first society's own tradition of the "one with the most wins." Or if it's just the human version of animal instincts. I wonder with all the ability to blow up countries, why we haven't figured out how to save them yet? While we could wipe Central America off the map with one submarine of missiles, why we haven't been able to even help them to have a decent standard of living. There's not answers to those questions that can take place in essay form. They take place in human form, spelled out in the footsteps of those who tend to the civilians who are ripped apart by the effects of the wars led by their leaders. They take place in the hands of the peace makers who cross borders and make dropping bombs obsolete in the face of beautiful humanity.


Will we ever learn? Probably not. But I hope that for the next generation what we have to show is more than a well preserved stockpile of nuclear warfare to brag about.