The Fallout

Tonight, I intend to break from my usual format to share something from a different shade of my mind or a different place in my heart. I was not even planning to write anything tonight, but I cannot seem to shake the urge to share something with you. So, prepare yourselves, readers. Whatever comes out of me now will be honest and perhaps even uncomfortable; I can feel it. 

Here's the ugly truth of it, men are mean, and women are broken. Or maybe men are broken, and women are mean. Either way, hell, both ways, they hurt each other. They hurt each other so badly. But I think they break long before they ever get to that seemingly irreversible stage of constant warfare. I think they break as children, under the oppressive cloud of smoking cannons from which other men and other women fired insults and the explosive results of their own pain at each other. 

Their parents had cannons, but with the progression of our species has come the development of nuclear destruction. With more and more ways to communicate, there are more and more ways to destroy the lives of people one once claimed to love--a picture on a screen here, a snide digital message there, a never-ending stream of what someone wants someone else to think life looks like now. The fight has gone global. The casualties are mounting. It isn't so primitive anymore, nor can it be concealed behind closed doors. The battles are in the streets, on the air as well as in the air. 

The saddest thing is that few of these mean and broken men and women ever mean to expose their children to such toxic air. They never mean to go to war in the first place. In fact, these wars come out of declarations of life-long commitment and peace. Everyone is always assuming that they'll be the exception to the rule. But whoever is making the rules of this sick game doesn't particularly care about exceptions, and he isn't interested in broadcasting the plight of those who manage to live in peace. He's a war-mongering fiend, and his propaganda is so influential, he doesn't ever have to pay for advertisement. The fallout in the lives of his pawns is a beacon seen for miles.

Oh these poor children, carrying their plastic guns around, are forced to breathe this sulphuric mess in and out every day. They are raised up in nuclear war zones, mutated and warped until their lost innocence is nothing more than collateral damage, and then thrusted into a world pretending it isn't on fire and expected to participate in the charades of adulthood. How does one escape that? What can one possibly do to counteract that? How does one keep these little children from pressing all the same buttons, believing all the same lies, hurling all the same showers of destruction on the ones they will love someday? 

As the fights spill into the streets and society becomes more keenly aware of the injustices once perpetuated behind closed doors, does it bring change or just more of the same? Does the smell of blood wreak in our nostrils? How do we solve the greatest problem of all--reconciliation? There are a seemingly-infinite number of variables to consider, and they differ in every human being. And yet, each specific situation, with all it's variables, seems to lead to the same place--brokenness. Broken men. Broken women. Broken children. 

The same ultimate super-problem (the singular combined result of countless miniature problems) seen again and again leads me to believe there must be some ultimate super-answer that can account for each unique element of each unique situation and tie it all together again. What if unity is a choice? What if it isn't an idea striving to be realized, but a person calling out to all who will hear? What if these poor children never have to lose their innocence because their innocence did not belong to them in the first place? Perhaps that innocence is not inherently inside the children themselves, but is the result of the connection they have to someone who provides it. Perhaps that connection is severed, and the answer to this whole mess is that we determine what connection is broken and plug back in to the source. 

Epilogue: 

Is anyone inherently mean? I don't know, but I believe everyone is inherently broken. And the only way to stop this war is not to stifle the meanness, but to mend the brokenness. It is a connection to the source of goodness that will restore goodness. Then, when we connect with our fellow vessels, we can pour goodness into them straight from the source, instead of pouring out whatever nuclear sludge from whatever radioactive rivers we've been storing in our inner reservoirs before we knew better. Those are the waters of death. It's time we found a new river.

I've heard of one.