A better comparison..? YES!
Okay, picture war. War is brutal. War is violent. Picture your head exploding in a thousand pieces. Do you feel anything? No. You're dead, but death is inevitable. At least you were graced with a quick and painless demise. Now, you're out on the battle field. A searing pain rends through your gut and you collapse to the ground, clutching your abdomen and gasping. A field medic rushes out quickly, dodging bullets. He carries you off to a tent. You are operated on. The pain was excruciating, but you will survive. It will soon be forgotten. Or picture yourself being gutted. Your warm intestines spill out of you, splattering your crotch in bodily fluids and a deep crimson shower. The agony is unbearable - you think you're going to pass out - and grace be, you do. Your mind quickly slips to black, partly from the blood loss, partly from the terrible pain. And you never, ever wake up. Or maybe you do - all patched up, your insides okay - just a very nasty flesh wound, and some blood loss. Your stomach hurts, feels like indegistion, but you'll be okay. Here, have some more morphine... doesn't that feel better? Soon you'll go home. You'll go home to your clean, sterile home, and have something to eat. Your wife will make you breakfast every morning again. Your children will grow up happy knowing their father proudly served for freedom, and if you should die before you wake, your name will be spoken in an awed hush and forever will you live on in the memories and spirits of those masses you liberated from oppression, your sacrifice great though you are one. Will you go home to your family, or go home to God, soldier? Its up to you, but either way, you know you'll go into open, loving arms.
Flash forward to your Utopia without war. Billions upon billions of people. AIDS and Hepatitis have spread rapidly throughout the population, going unchecked due to the world's massive growth. Nature is put into a violent strangle hold and quickly spirals out of control. Entire forests are destroyed to build shanty towns, bleak wood and tin buildings erected like some warped churches meant to give hope to a crippled mass. Food - food is so scarce. So many people to feed, and yet the natural world has been destroyed to make room and to feed the rich, who are now defined as those who can afford to live in ghettos, under martial law, with no freedoms. Those are the rich. You walk the lonely streets of cities. Lonely? With so many people? You wonder to yourself. The words echo in your mind, and you realise that for all the people, there are no souls, just empty, glassy eyes begging for release from a long standing torment. You look down at your feet and see the emaciated body of a young child. She is no more than ten. Her lips are coated with a thin white film and you can quite clearly see her ribs. Flies walk on her, those tiny winged carrion eaters not even waiting for the soon to come death. Once some good high tech medical equipment could have saved her life, fed her an IV drip while doctors worked her back on solid food, but technology has made no leaps and bounds like it used to during war-time. Quite the opposite, it is as sparse as a healthy person, been hoarded by the few. Her mother sits by a brick wall, an equally thin waif huddled in a brown rag, trying desperately to cover her tiny body that has been ravaged by cold and hunger. You can see the puffy red circles around her eyes from the silent tears. You see those salty streaks of liquid creeping slowly down what could have been such beautiful cheeks. She has nobody now, her child lies dying no more than five feet in front of you. Yet you walk on. Apathy is your companion, it will not leave you. Once you felt. Once you were alive and you could touch and see and feel and hear. Now all you can grasp are the skeletal remains of buildings long collapsed since nobody could lift themselves for long enough to fix them. You look at an alcove in one such edifice, and the crumpled form of an old man lies beneath a blanket of old news papers. Years old, you'd guess by the terrible taint of brown. He coughs, and with that cough comes bile and blood. Once he could have received medical attention, but now that the world's population totals more than 11 billion, he can barely afford a three-eyed fish from the local polluted pond. And what with nature being raped so cruelly away, no natural occuring medicine or plant deritives could be formulated to make a single aspirin to comfort his tumourous headache. He looks at you in passing, as if you're some curious oddity, maybe the Messiah, somehow different from the ragged masses around, come from on high to free them, to love them and to reaffirm them, to set them free from this terrible, never ending nightmare. You walk silenty passed him. Soldiers in gas masks with assault rifles loaded with riot rounds and tear gas launchers stand near a tank, barking orders of curfew, and shouting that any who violate the no-violence laws will be dealt with swiftly and without mercy. The saline stench of that irony assails your nostrils, seemingly infused with the sweat of the camouflage-clad warriors. It brings back a memory - a distant memory. Once you were alive. You remember. You remember the last day - the last day you fought, the last day of fighting, ever, so many years ago. You had watched your friends die, some horribly decapitated by tank rounds. And the day you were discharged was the day the world peace accord was signed, and all fighting ended forever. Once you were alive. A doctor - he gave you some morphine and reassured you that even if the worst happened, you'd be loved and remembered forever for what you did -- saved your life after a terrible disemboweling. And you got this instead. Welcome to your future, soldier.
[This message has been edited by Bad.Mojo (edited 04-05-2000).]
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