Some Things Never Change
I wrote this about six weeks ago. Just been sitting on it until today.
I've been enjoying a show on Netflix called Reign. It's a historical drama about the royal French court in the middle ages. I don't know how much of it is accurate and how much is made up. It's certainly dramatized to be fun, but it's loosely based on real people and events. I'd describe as being like Game of Thrones mixed with a soap opera. It's kinda silly and melodramatic, but it's fun. I like it.
But there's something that repeatedly jumps out at me as I watch the show, and that's just what an absolutely brutal world it was. Again, I know the show probably isn't very historically accurate, but I also know that the world definitely was absolutely brutal in those days. It was hell. It was absolute carnage. People are killed right and left on that show for no reason at all. At any minute of any day or night, a posse from an opposing faith could ride into your village and burn it to the ground, or the king's guard could ride into your village and do the exact same thing on the king's orders. People are assassinated right and left, people are imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and killed for talking back to the king, people are killed for believing in the wrong god, or for believing in the right god but not in the exact way as their neighbor, and people are sent off to die in needless, pointless wars of aggression. There was even a scene where a ship of 200 people was blown up in a completely preventable accident, all for basically a publicity stunt, and no one really batted an eye. I mean, they were outraged at first, but by the next day it was more or less forgotten and back to business as usual.
I just regularly find myself thinking--how on Earth did anybody live like that?! How did they live amidst such constant, brutal carnage?? How were they okay with that? How did they let it go on for so long? It's just mind-boggling, right? Then I loaded a youtube page and saw the endless videos on the recent Uvalde, Texas school shooting, and the Russia-Ukraine war, and I went, "Oh."
Yeah, I was setting up that punch line, in case you couldn't tell. The fact is that we're living in the world of Reign, but with bullets and smartphones instead of swords and parchments. Absolutely nothing has changed except for the technology. We've increased firepower and connected the world with the internet, but we haven't grown up. Nothing has changed. Absolutely f*cking nothing. We're still killing each other for no reason, we're still waging senseless, needless wars of aggression, we're still murdering each other for having a little too much melanin, or for loving someone who others don't think we should love, and we're still slaughtering each other for not worshiping exactly the right god in exactly the right way, but instead of riding into a village on horseback with swords and torches, we're using guns, bombs, and jumbo jets. I often feel like the only thing that's been accomplished in the history of human civilization is that we've just created better, faster, and more efficient ways to kill each other.
Will it ever be enough? Will anything ever change? Will it ever get better? I fear not. It seems that this is just what humans are. We can't be any better. We're just murderous, savage beasts, and it fills me so utterly with despair that sometimes I just sit and stare for hours, or lay in my bed and pretend that I'm dead because I can't bear the weight of the world. Why? Why does it have to be like this?
This was an extremely depressing, pessimistic entry, and I hope I don't get in trouble for flirting with controversial topics. I'm not debating religion, politics, or guns. I'm not taking sides or arguing any controversial viewpoints, and I'll thank you to do the same. I'm simply wondering why the world has to be an endless blood bath, and if there's anything we can ever do about it.
Edited by Justin_Case001
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