Chickens,
Eggs
People learn over time.
Certainly,
those volumes and volumes of history, technical and science books --- and these days, add
the gigabytes and terabytes of digital information lurking all over cyberspace, just
waiting to gobble you up --- must have increased and improved man's knowledge about his
world.
This century
alone, a lot of lessons were learned. The USA is still stinging from the Vietnam War of
the 1960s. NATO learned the folly of non-intervention in the Bosnian war of the
early1990s. Even the Germans learned their lessons well from WW2. Thus, in 1999, you have
the USA refusing to send in ground troops to Kosovo. At least not yet as of this writing.
You have NATO finally intervening in an ethnic cleansing that, in 1991, was considered of
no strategic or national security interests by NATO countries. You even have the Germans
playing the role of peacemakers this time.
But the
killing goes on: in Kosovo, in Algeria, in Mindanao, in Kashmir, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in
Eritrea, in Indonesia, even in the high schools of America.
Which only
shows that people, also, do not learn.
So what good
did all that knowledge and all that learning amounted to?
A lot of
good, of course. But not enough to break the cycle.
Chickens will
continue to breed eggs and eggs will continue to hatch into chickens. In the meantime,
mankind, like the Lilliputian people of Gulliver's Travel, will group and re-group around
the egg as either Little-Enders or Big-Enders, and spend their time fighting each other
without exactly knowing why.
This page
will feature commentaries of the times, from Y2K to the Phantom Menace, from family
quality time to the culture of violence, from bayanihan to ethnic cleansing,
anything under the sun and above the sea that cycles through like chickens and eggs.
Said
Sadain
25 May 1999
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