Monday, March 13, 2023

Abandoning Humanity

 A Ukrainian soldier fires a mortar in Bakhmut

There is a polarizing struggle with our internal 

sense of the reaction that bursts through our 

consciousness, a tug between pity and empathy

evoking our own prejudices unerringly patterned 

by personal exposure linked to group identity.

The focus on reasonableness and not least

intelligence both abandoned when a people 

submit their future and that of their offspring 

to an authority that views them as puppets 

whose strings can readily be manipulated in 

deference to voices of compelling argument 

that there is nobility in purposeful death

that can be a virtuous undertaking -- both that

 of an enemy and the perpetrator of murder 

reflecting the exalted nature of a struggle 

against a purported enemy. Through the 

eternal blueprint of survival where identity 

and existence are paired with territorial envy

the antagonist's possessions flare into the 

fire of greed and violence impelling leaders 

to coerce their followers trapped in ethnic 

national colours of their duty to embark on 

a war whose prosecution results in fewer people

to contest a land mass of ancestral provenance

not their own. In the process celebrating

the conquest over the corpses of multitudes

the victims' and their own to satisfy whims

 of tyrannical sadists and psychopaths.

 

 

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