Masopher's Mind

A person can live by themself in peace. They struggle with nature, but this is natural for all things struggle. The rocks struggle against each other in tectonic shifts, plants struggle against each other in competition for light and nutrients, animals struggle with each other to eat and not be eaten, to mate.

A person can live with less peace but more opportunities with a small group, like a family. They struggle against nature less but the occasional quarrel will break out.

The more people exist together the less they struggle against nature and the more they struggle against each other. I do not think that it is hate or ideologies or differences that cause this struggle. These things are just excuses, ways of rationalizing the necessity, the desire the nature of struggle. The only times we do not struggle against each other is when we have something in common to struggle against.

The Taliban do not like al qaeda. Al qaeda are Arab mercenaries and even though westerners can’t tell the difference Afghan Pashtun are not Arabs! But they see western soldiers as a common enemy in exactly the same way that the Pakistani, Saudi, Israeli and American governments saw the soviets as a common enemy.

Rationally speaking:

Ameri + Tali + Paki +Saudi =/= Soviet

Now that the soviets are gone the equation looks like this

Ameri =/= Tali + Paki +Saudi

Someone switched sides and went from ally to enemy. It was an easy switch, easy because it defies mathematic logic. It’s a false dichotomy. The “enemy” is not real.

On both sides, it is the poor that is dying. No millionaires or even wealthy people dying in the dust and blood. This is therefore also a class struggle. Wealthy families making decisions that make the world better for profits while hard working intelligent families (potential threats maybe?) are destroyed. The sun shines on rich and poor alike, thank whomever or whatever you like that they haven’t found a way to monopolize and sell that.

When sunlight touches the surface of most natural material, it causes chemical reaction. Atoms and molecules which were at rest (peace) are excited and like the soldier’s families, split apart by harsh photons. Even beyond that, particles cascade and crash into each other in the same way that wandering galaxies collide.

If Christianity, Islam and Hindus have come to this conclusion as well then I congratulate them whole heartedly but every Buddhist knows that with existence comes struggle and conflict. The only relief from conflict is the lack of existence.

We have been ‘blessed’ with the ability to understand this conflict that exists. And in our limited ways we try to alleviate it. Drugs, religion, ideologies, politics, law. But even these things seem to cause even more conflict.

Is this because these things seek to stop that which cannot be stopped? It’s not rhetorical, I don’t know.

I find alleviation from conflict when I admit my ignorance and ask questions. “Suffer the little children” a wise man once said. The innocent questions of a child. The universe has many answers to give and perhaps no final ones.

Beauty and tragedy are never more intimately combined when surveying the Afghan landscape.

Afghanistan is like a ghetto trapped between two suburbs. Geographically stuck between the arrogant former empire of the Persians and the no less arrogant Pakistanis, inheritors of the Muslim section of the British Empire in the subcontinent. The poverty is blinding, even for one who knows third world conditions. These people live a small step away from hovels. Their “cities” are very large sprawls of mud houses that start next to a craggy mountain and stretch into the horizon.

There are no Taliban here. Those men are in the hills laying traps and for Americans. These here are people. Some are angry, some are militant, some are power hungry, some are involved in war, many are uneducated, but most are just people. These people long for a normal life, they hope for better for themselves.

But do not get it wrong. In the blink of an eye these people can act in the most irrational way. Steeped in the fear which both drives and feeds superstition, poverty and violence the psyche of the people can move from man to beast with alarming speed.  And like beasts they are easily driven by the ones that prey upon them.

These people are flawed and undeveloped, but one does not beat a child to make him grow.  War only creates warriors and for long have the women of Afghanistan given birth to children of strife. Too long? The human condition defies those words. There is no umbrage that is too long, no pain that the human spirit cannot learn to endure. Afghan will lurch on into an uncertain future. The empires of past and present swirl around it, like vultures, flies even, caught in the irresistible twin gravities that are torment and opportunity.

The air is chilly, and the sun is setting, faint laughter is heard as a family gathers.

Three suspected intelligence agents were caught sneaking into Iran and were captured, their cover story: hiking.

If America had normal relations with Iran, spies could come and go via the airport quite freely and hikers could traipse all over the landscape without suspicious and most likely tipped off troops encircling them.