Conflict, and so on.

I’m learning how much of a mess it is trudging through media representations to find the truth of anything. It’s like walking through molasses-thick mud dragging behind a great carriage harnessed to your waist – often enough, simply no progress is made.

I have something of a knack for odd discernment, though that may be the incorrect word. I’m like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, capable of finding the nugget of good in a dark knight; though this monster may have murdered many of my friends, and may try to destroy me as well, there is good in him. I don’t shy away from the negative, but when people are hurting, bothersome, anxious, annoying, angry, disturbed, stressed, or uncomfortable, I usually find myself slipping into their shoes and walking with their heart cradled in my arms. It isn’t difficult, I think most people just don’t bother.

People are hurt and angry over some slight, but there is often a burr behind an incessant itch, or a poison. I’m good at making excuses for other people’s distresses, pains, and petulance, and better at imagining how much worse I’d be given their situation. But the more obfuscated the topic, the more convoluted the webs of relationships and pains, the less I’m able to grapple and pull back to earth, and the less I understand.

When it comes to larger conflict, I’m swimming through a muddy sea, trying to find a smoky pearl that has sunk far beneath my flailing feet. It’s as silly and foolish as politics, with every side lying, betraying, and claiming self-righteousness. Governments are large, affluent, powerful children with violence in their palms, and the sufferers often have little to say about the decisions over their lives, homes, families, and victimization. A wounded child is a media marvel more than a face for each opposing side, and personhood is suffocated in grotesquerie.

Both sides are wrong, don’t you know? And both sides cling to a vestigial truth and a spark of quality that they brandish before every naysaying malcontent. And who is fooled but the jester? Only those hungry for what they already crave to hear. If you offer an alcohol addict a free round, why wouldn’t they snatch at that opportunity?

A thousand tiny hands are scraping up through the earth beneath a funereal bed of shrapnel, and “how much worse it might have been” they say. A hundred thousand cannot sleep at night for fear of loud noises, anxiety, ulcers, trauma, and one and a half million have no reliable food, water, resting place, or electricity. Who do I support, and who is to blame? Perhaps the question isn’t who, but what do I support? Is there any reasonable solution? How quintessentially masculine of me, skipping straight into seeking a solution, but I’m grasping at straws, and I think everyone wishes an easy solution was present.