A Beautiful Life
Neda.Tragedy wears the face of a beautiful young woman.
Ideology breaks hearts even as it bleeds out the innocent.
Horror is the eyes going slack, at the end of a young life destroyed.
Revolution is costly, and none of the lives lost will be forgotten either by those who love them, nor those who took them.
Agony carries the misery of the loss, never balanced by honesty nor truth nor fairness nor love.
Hope dwells in the tears of the masses, tears of loss, and tears from the gas.
Anger sits heavy in the breast, railing NO! against the pointless lies and self-serving violence of the leadership.
Power is found in guns and terror, but also in righteous beliefs and solidarity.
Strength can only be rooted in the love of family, the support of neighbors, and the caring of a world unwilling to let this crime stand.
Faith can sustain believers, but it is the children that create the space where a new world can grow.
Courage can be recognized, in the videos and the texts, but cannot be impelled and should never be expected nor demanded.
There is a purity in combat, not a glory, certainly not a promise for a bright future, but in the smoky chaotic violence of a moment forever frozen in time, our hearts are savaged and our souls are thrown to the cracked asphalt in the wild confusion of the shouts and gunfire, but in the very same way that everyone is tainted by the horror of the confrontation, in the high keening madness of a fight that leaves your life behind you, hopefully to be retrieved later when you have recaptured your sanity, you make decisions that, should you survive the revolution, you will describe to your grandchildren fifty years on, eyes glistening with the names of the fallen.
Later, when the roaring in your ears is quieted, and a somber silence lies across the field, the lonely broken dead lie crumpled, bled out, the ultimate cost for the ultimate conflict.
Neda.
Lost forever to her family and her friends, even as she is embraced by a world horrified and angered by her loss. And the awful, bloody irony that they took her life in order to undermine their OWN system.
Do not misunderstand. You can't define who is and who is not a combatant in a war zone. Who will live, who will die, who will win the day. The price paid is not measured by contribution, but merely by participation. And at the end, the dead offer the only real truth...
posted by mikey @ 6:04 PM
10 Comments:
I have some experience with Iranian immigrants, and I often get to see the life-before-and-after pictures.
What a lovely bunch of people, and so often gratifyingly happy once they've settled elsewhere.
Dammit Bubba.
I know. I KNOW.
But fuck. I want to hunt this pissant with and AKA and a story down and I want to open him up like a cheap can of beans.
I KNOW, dammit. I'm buying the package, not the truth. But as near as I can tell, she just got too hot in the car and and walked out to get some air.
She was NOT supposed to fucking DIE. Those vietnmese kids that walked into our vaunted firepower weren't supposed to DIE. Those Bosnian families weren't supposed to DIE.
The fact that there's nothing I can do just makes me want to do something even more.
Shit.
You just did it, y'know.
Goddamit, Bubba, for the sake of the tattered but desperately important remnants of our humanity, I hope with all I've got you're right.
Because, truth be told, I feel complicit...
Beautiful post. And yeah, the limits that come with being mortal humans really suck. It's probably best that way, though, given the level of destruction we can deliver even with the limited powers we have.
Your hard-earned insights into the whole life-and-death thing give your writing some serious force, especially on matters like this. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
RIP, Neda.
Not that it changes any of the basic points you make, but - via an Monday 8:12pm (ET) update by HuffPo's Nico Pitney - you and just about everyone else have a picture of the wrong Neda. The correct one can be found (supposedly/presumably/hopefully) here. A somewhat "cleaner" presentation of the same photo can be found here.
Sheesh, she looks even more like the kid she is in the correct photo...
Assuming I correctly understood the content of that second link, the incorrectly identified Neda would probably appreciate having her image removed from circulation as much as is possible, given the potentially hostile response it may provoke from the ruling thugs in the Iranian regime.
I pray for peace quickly in Iran.
It's always the kids that die in wars, not the old fucks who are really responsible.
There is no such thing as a winnable war, ZRM. If only we could teach that in school early and often.
AG is both right and wrong.
On a relative basis, there is always a "winner" because there is always a "loser". This is actually fairly easily determined.
Everybody loses, but the "winner" loses LESS.
America is the best historical example of this. By fighting all our wars since the mid 19th century in other countries, we have managed to lose much less in war than has traditionally been common.
The fact that wars only cost americans soldiers and money is the primary reason americans LOVE war so much.
It is also the reason why a small, localized attack on the northeast in the late summer of 2001 caused a national meltdown. To most countries in war, 3000 casualties was just a bad MORNING.
The Russians lost over 23 MILLION people in just four years in WWII. They watched our collective loss of bearings after that sunny September morning with a kind of a bemused impatience.
The whole world would be much better off if some of the last three generations of Americans had dealt with invasion, occupation and large scale conflict.
Even while looking at pictures of Chechnya or Faluja, Americans cannot grasp the horror of what they routinely wish to unleash...
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