suicide in the trenches

Suicide in the Trenches


I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.


In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.


You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

-siegfried sassoon

patriots

some thoughts while reading how would a patriot act on the train this afternoon:

our government has expanded its power considerably over the last five years, as well as over the past century. where will it lead? i imagine there is always a tendency for systems to grow larger, more centralized, more intense and complex. what is the nature of this tendency? what are examples throughout history of nations growing larger, and eventually overstepping their bounds? what are the mechanisms by which nations fall (debt service, over-expanded military)? what about current talk of our nation becoming one of service jobs as opposed to industrial jobs? what does that really mean? what about all the tax cuts--extreme concentration of wealth, income disparity, loss of a middle class?

which is cause and which is effect?

anything!

i'm going to start writing now. i still don't have definite ideas of what i want to write about; but if i wait for them to appear fully-formed, i'll never write a damned thing. i spend most of my blog-reading time on politics, and i think i have a lot to say about the current state of affairs in american society, as well as the history (and future) of political thought. but i want this blog to focus on a wider field-of-view. over the past year or two i feel that i have made profound insights into humanity's place in the world; i would like to apply these insights both to my personal life and to the politics of our time, in hopes of changing the world for the better. i don't have grand plans for the blog per se; rather, i'd like to use it as a sounding board for my ideas, to help me better form them and learn from them.


just a few of the topics i'd like to expound:

• science as a way of discovering truth


• human morality, its purpose and uses, origins, inconsistencies, and future


• intense consciousness, its mechanism, origin, and singularness


• symbolic communication, and how it has created so much of human society


• evolution in its broadest sense: from the quark soup to "the universe studying itself" in the human mind


• politics/war/community vs. individual: looking at these issues in an evolutionary context


• biological life as systems using the 2nd law of thermodynamics to harness energy (?)


• complexity, hierarchy, centralization, evil?

the world's a wonderful place.

UPDATE: oh, also, lots on elites (which relates to hierarchy) and the way they guide 'history' as we know it; and are they really dumb/blind or in fact extremely intelligent? for instance, democrats like to say that the bush/cheney administration totally blundered the war by 'not planning for the aftermath', which appears to be true; but can it be said that they didn't want this result in the first place? their friends at halliburton and elsewhere within the military-industrial complex are receiving hundreds of billions of dollars for their efforts; the price of oil is up because of increased violence across the middle east, a direct result of the iraq invasion; and, despite the american public's ever-so-slowly diminishing support for the war, they've been able to secure (it seems) large military outposts across the country for years to come (years, they probably hope, filled with war for the remaining oil resources of the region). tie this into resources in general; the end of oil, etc.