when evolution selects its agents, it does so at a cost.
it makes demands in exchange for singularity.
and you may be asked to do something against your very nature.
suddenly, the change in your life that should have been wonderful comes as a betrayal.
it may seem cruel, but the goal is nothing short of self-preservation.
survival.
this force, evolution, is not sentimental.
like the earth itself, it knows only the hard facts of life’s struggle with death.
all you can do is hope and trust that when you’ve served its needs faithfully, there may still remain some glimmer of the life you once knew.

we all imagine ourselves the agents of our destiny, capabale of determining our own fate.
but have we truly any choice in when we rise?
or when we fall?
or does a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction?
is it evolution that takes us by the hand?
does science point our way?
or is it God who intervenes, keeping us safe?
for all his bluster, it is the sad province of man that he cannot choose his triumph.
he can only choose how he will stand when the call of destiny comes.
hoping that he’ll have the courage to answer.

where does it come from, this quest, this need to solve life’s mysteries, when the simplest of questions can never be answered.
why are we here?
what is the soul?
why do we dream?
perhaps we’d be better off not looking at all.
not delving, not yearning.
that’s not human nature.
not the human heart.
that is not why we are here.
this quest, this need to solve life’s mysteries: in the end, what does it matter when the human heart can only find a meaning in the smallest of moments.

while Christian tradition favored literal images of its gods and saints, Islam focused on calligraphy and geometric patterns to represent the beauty of God’s universe. Islamic tradition held that only God could create life, and therefore man has no place creating images of life – not gods, not people, not even animals. a Muslim Michelangelo, for example, would never have painted God’s face on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; he would have inscribed the NAME of God. depicting God’s face would be considered blasphemy. both Christianity and Islam are logocentric, meaning they are focused on THE WORD. in Christian tradition, the Word became flesh in the book of John: “and the Word was made flesh, and He dwelt among us.” therefore, it was acceptable to depict the word as having a human form. in Islamic tradition, however, the Word DID NOT become flesh, and therefore the Word needs to remain in the form of a word: in most cases, calligraphic renderings of the names of the holy figures of Islam.

when it is nuclear weapons, people are either fatalistic or never believe its going to happen. with biological warfare or biological terrorism, it is imaginable.
and if the right plague gets loose, its lights out world, and not in a quick incandescent flash but slowly, as it spreads from the sick to the healthy, and the dead lie rotting where they fall, a Grade B movie coming to your neighborhood soon.
bugs are bugs. they dont know cows from pigs from people. they dont know defensive research from offensive research. they dont know preventive vaccines from air-burst bombs. hell, they dont even know if they’re good or bad.

in July 16th, 1945, in the mountains outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the world’s first atomic bomb exploded.
a white light pierced the sky with such intensity that a blind girl claimed to see the flash from a hundred miles away.
after witnessing the explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted a fragment of the Bhagavad Gita, declaring; “i am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
his colleague, Ken Bainbridge, put it another way when he leaned close to Oppenheimer and whispered; “now we’re all sons of bitches.”

‘terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence – OUR violence – which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.

terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.

it has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale.

terror, terror, terror, terror.

it is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil.

Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror.

in August of 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas.
today, we are fighting forever.
the war is eternal.
the enemy is eternal, his face changing in our screens.

once he lived in Cairo and sported a mustache and nationalized the Suez Canal.
then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin.
then he wore a muslim Imam’s gown and ate yoghurt in Teheran and planned Islamic Revolution.
then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly mustache and resided in a series of palaces in Baghdad.

terror, terror, terror.

finally, he wore a Keffiyah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then, again, a master of terror, linked by his Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who once lived in the Afghan cave.

soldier and civilian, they die in their tens of thousands because death has been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we can talk about ‘target – rich environments’ and ‘collateral damage’ – that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing – and report the victory parades ,the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
governments like it this way. they want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us’, victory or defeat. but war is primarily not about victory or defeat, but about death and the infliction of death.
it represents the total failure of the human spirit.

the first man who fenced off a piece of land and said; “this is mine”, and found people naïve to believe him was the true founder of Civil Society.
from how many crimes,wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditch and crying to his fellows; “beware of listening to this impostor! you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself to nobody”- Jean Jacques Rousseau,French philosopher.

masks.

all of us wear masks.

they can be worn out of love, and the desire to remain close to those around us.

to spare them from the complicated reality of our frayed psyches.

we trade honesty for companionship.

and in the process, never truly know the hearts closest to us.

so much danger in this world is hidden behind masks.

we tell our children stories of Good and Evil, while knowing its not that simple.

true evil doesnt give us time to fight.or to be afraid.

we keep our heads down, never bothering to look behind the masks.and in doing so, we resign ourselves to terrible fates we can never see coming.