I don't know where my head is at right now. Really. I have conflicting thoughts fighting for air time inside my thick skull. I've got testosterone-driven stress and tenseness coursing through my system. Modern life has that affect on me sometimes. I swear I almost beat the crap out of the pizza guy tonight for being too slow to understand my order. My patience has run thin and my attention span is splintered.

So here I am at eleven o'clock in the evening trying to figure out what I am going to write here in my diary entry. I could postulate some moralistic mountain-top experience/lesson from days gone by. I could rant on and on about the politics of the world, or of the scene, or of a number of other things. But I won't. Instead I'll just talk about right now.

Right now, I am sipping a glass of red wine and wrapping myself into the night. Mentally commanding my faculties to set themselves at ease. My wife, and the baby in her belly, are sound asleep in bed. My two year old boy is sound asleep as well. I got my slippers on and Johnny Cash singing to me. I think I can think now. And this is what I think.

I don't care what you're politics -- left, right, center -- irrelevant to what I'm thinking. I turn on the TV and watch the news. I listen to the talk radio shows on the AM dial. I read my history. I read my current events. These things we see, these events that are whispering around us, they always had a voice. They always reared their heads. War and humanity made an undying pact with each other from the inception of humankind. And it was a necessary pact.

Evil exists and it needs to be recognized and confronted. Death is part of life and it won't go away. The buzz words of the current climate -- terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, nerve agents, -- pick your term. These things are no different than the swords and shields of yesteryear in that they were merely used as weapons of promoting evil and tyranny or of protecting and preserving freedom. Like a knife that can be used to kill or to spread butter, these weapons only inherit meaning by the intentions of the ones using them. War is war, regardless of the weaponry involved. But the world was different in the wars of yesteryear.

Wars weren't played out in front of our eyes on 24 hour news stations in the days of old. In those days, travel and communication were limited, and wars took years to plan, years to fight, and many years to recover from. The world was smaller and war didn't threaten the globe as the source of an extinguishing threat of annihilation.

Communication is now ever-extensive and instant. Travel is quick, far-reaching, and largely affordable. Technologies of war are within the practical grasp and financial means of even the poorest of nations and even the most bereft of individuals. These are not simple times.

Advancements and achievements seem to be paradoxically driving us to a hastening demise, even as we spend countless hours and sleepless nights perfecting and accelerating them. Don't get me wrong -- I don't see this changing, and I participate in this process every day by virtue of my lifestyle, but I see it for what it is. This ever-increasing awareness of the world has a "global" community, as a smaller planet, the notion of humans beings on earth feeling like borderless inhabitants -- this growing sensibility brings with it a host of implications to daily living, to international affairs, and to the status of the human condition and the vulnerability of both good and evil.

For the record, I am for this coming war. I believe it is a just and necessary one. I believe war is a tragic moral choice that in times of conflict between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, democracy and terror, has to be made. If I thought it could be avoided and yield the same result, I'd grab a sign and protest. But I can't be intellectually honest and even entertain such a thought.

I don't like the idea of killing people, intentionally or unintentionally. I do however, think there is a moral and historical difference between killing and murdering. There are justifiable reasons to kill and the moral triumphs of history have taught us this crucial discernment.

Nonetheless, when I get my news every day, when I get out of bed and embrace the challenges and hecticness of each day, I often yearn for a simpler time where such news was not part of my daily scope of thoughts and was not part of the shaping of my world view. I wish all of this would fade into the background. Too much work. Too much information. Too much entertainment. Too much mail. Too many people. Too much analysis. Too much conflict. Too much. Life gets quicker, more intense, and feverishly fast-paced year after year. Advancement after advancement. War after war.

I am too skeptical to ever fall prey to subscribing to the wishing for the "good 'ol days" because I know that if truth be told, the good 'ol days were never really that good after all. But hell, I'm sure they were better than these. Yeah, Rob, I hear you. I too want to fly away to a better day.

-- THORP, 02/01/03

Click here for previous diary entries.