Thousands of years have passed and men seem to have learned little in the interim, seem doomed to repeat ancient mistakes. Do we once again mass arms, material and troops? War condemns everyone who fights, win or lose. War leaves behind all the wrong things, pain, dissatisfaction and revenge. What’s war about but killing and dying. Wars are not fought with guts or even with weapons. In the end they are struggles of consciousness. Whatever happens it is a choice that has to be made, made out of a certain consciousness. I ask myself, how do we know if the choice is right or wrong? I tell myself that peace can’t grow out of violence yet it did in Japan after they dropped the atomic bomb. They forced peace on the Japanese by clearing away the underbrush to make space and light but was it morally right?

Sometimes it seems to me that we go over the same arguments. Violence or non-violence, how to struggle, where to draw the lines. Debate after debate, while around us violence continues to rage unchecked. War is a great waster, much in the preparation as in waging it. The end never justifies the means. I’ve come to understand that the means shape the ends. Force seems so clear, so simple, so direct. But meeting force with force produces nothing but what is already known and planned for and expected. It’s what’s already been done over and over before. We become what we do. If we do this, how do we become something better? How can we make them build something together through the force of arms? Will it change things for the future? Or will not the same problems exist?

How do you separate fate from coincidence or chance, or the laws of statistical probability for that matter? I’ve asked myself if the lines of probability spin out like that of the World Wide Web? Do they become similar to the search for information on the Internet where time after time; you go down one road, after another, hunting sometimes finding but most times unable to find what you are looking for in the mass of information available? Some paths lead to promise, other paths lead to darkness, some are filled with goodness, others traffic nothing but evilness.

We are shown the world through superficiality - a montage of images flashing across movie and television screens, seen for a moment in time, then forgotten as other images jostle to make room for tomorrow's. We've become harden to the atrocities we know exist and we switch off our emotions because we don't want to know, not really, because it's not our problem. Life is cruel. It's cruel every where, even in Australia. In some countries the cruelties are less concealed.

The words of Tennyson come to mind

So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
With no language but a cry.

I cry for this world and for what will be ... and pray that in some way, before it's too late, that we'll see the light ...