Dead Cities

Wild Bird
Originally uploaded by Polluxg.

I've just spent a couple of days away from Bogotá, in a quaint little place called La Cuncia (a degenerated form from La Concepción "The Conception"), and now that I'm back in the city I've found myself thinking that it's dead. Whereas in La Cuncia I could see tens of birds bathing on the automatic sprinklers used in the garden, or hear the concert of frogs, toads and many other night animals, and even got to see an Armadillo; I've realized that cities lack life, aside from humans that is.

Even the cities that have big extensions of land devoted to parks, such as Bogotá, have lost a lot of the life that once thrived in its place; the wildlife left to the cities is the kind that tried to hide as far from human eyes as possible.

I fear living in a city is turning us into these homo-centric beings, who have forgotten the beauty and joy that comes from the symphony of hundreds of birds singing, to the rhythm of a river's gentle flowing, or even the raging sound of a waterfall. We have lost those accents to life, and replaced them to the blaring of horns and emergency sirens, or car alarms. And the worst part of it all is that we can no longer go back to nature; we've become trapped in the cities, enthralled by their destructive appeal, by that single mindedness of purpose: To gather human beings in a single entity.

"Sacrifice Life And Limb" but for what?

Recently I've had some very troubling thoughts. If these guys are willing to sacrifice life and limb for the ideals of their society, for a common belief that we call a nation, then why are they mistrusted, and in some cases even despised?

I know the fact that they carry weapons is a factor, and another part is that some of them believe that because of that sacrifice they're willing to make they are above the rest of us; but despite these rotten apples, have you said thank you to a soldier on the street lately, and if you don't see soldiers close to you, have you at least thought about them lately? or are they just something you'd rather forget?

The only problem is when you think about enemy soldiers. Then you feel the right to hate, despise, loathe and many other things. But aren't they fighting for the same reason as ours? to defend their ideals? their notion of right and wrong? (and bear in mind that this applies to soldiers, not to criminals who use car bombs and murder tens or hundreds of civilians just for the media spectacle of it) they are just like our soldiers, and I say ours without distinction, because in the end it doesn't matter to which country they belong to, they are out there fighting and dying so someone, probably you and me, can live the way we do, and if not us, then someone on the other side.

Maybe what we should do is simply abolish every single army in the world, or better yet, combine all of them into a giant security core, dedicated to maintaining the peace between mankind. The only problem is that before something as Utopian as that to happen, we all have to learn a basic truth that most religions and governments on this side of the world have forgotten: "No One Man Has The Universal Truth". Not about God, nor about how to rule a country; we are all as right or as wrong as the next persons point of view.