I’ve been thinking about war a lot lately. There’s the Occupy [fill in city or street here] campaigns happening. Technology is going crazy but mostly it’s this class I’m taking. It’s called the History of War and it’s a history/international relations course. The premise is that war is not foreign it is within us. It amazes what people are capable of in both positive and negative ways but I wonder what within me is capable of war because there is no question, as a human being, I am capable. I may crack, in fact I believe I would, but I am capable. I love dart gun fighting and video games. My favorite games growing up were Rayman and Spyro a game based on punching everyone between you and your goal and setting fire to or bashing into those who block your path. You are relentless, your goal is the one true cause and you have to follow it. We keep talking in this course about the psychological effects of the gore. I couldn’t eat my lunch today because I was reading about Waterloo and the wounded and the horrible horrible stories that come from the lecture on Napoleons invasion of Russia. Why do we do it? I mean according to the logic of this course it is part of what we are. I believe that, I have felt a crowd mentality and I have felt strongly for a cause. I just hate the idea that we are all capable of killing in the right circumstances with the right cause. That shouldn’t seem so bad, really, I mean we are animals and it is ignorant to deny it. The very reason we have families is based on the protection of young. Don’t soldiers go into battle for posterity’s sake? But to kill, to apply a force to another body with the intent of ending a life. I can’t even do trust falls and put my body weight on others. That’s why the gun is so scary; it would let someone like me become able to kill. I am not half-bad with a dart gun if I do say so myself. Last year I turned the back of the door to my room into a target practice with scotch tape circles of varying sizes to aim for.
I guess the video games thing counts for more than I realize. People are always asking if they make kids more violent I wonder now if they don’t just highlight how violent we already are. Our existence is based on the idea that we are special. We have large brains but look how we apply them. My professor pointed out in his first lecture where he brought so many these ideas I’m grappling with that if war were not part of humanity why have we fought so many of them? I can’t answer him. It is the same reason that after my intro to quantum mechanics I am waiting for someone to prove a solid, rather than probable, universe to me. It’s not that I want to believe something but in the waiting time for new research I have to be content with skepticism rather than solid acceptance. I love video games but I don’t want Spyro to be violent. I mean he’s just a kid dragon and he goes on a massacre every game.
I believe in the usefulness of college in a very romanticized way. I believe it is for self-development. It is time set aside for a scholar to solidify their own philosophy and identity. I don’t believe in taking a course for the sake of taking a course. If your goal is to enter the workforce rather than self-development then that should be a separate track. I know I attend college because I don’t know who I am or where I am in the world and I want to discover that. I take each course as a lesson plan for self-development. I was dealing with some pretty bad depression last year and was enrolled in a course based on the classics. I didn’t go into the class with the view that I was about to read what a bunch of dead white guys said and didn’t apply anymore. A classic is a classic because somebody said something in a way that nobody has figured out how to say better. If someone can describe heaven and hell better than Dante we’ll stop reading his Comedy. I wanted to know what the men who said it best had to say about happiness and the meaning of life. We started off with the Aristotles Nichomachean Eithics which is all about what it is to be happy. I am taking a course load this semester which is teaching me why not to be happy. I am learning about war and technology. I am learning about why the North and South decided that killing each other was the best course of action. I am learning about how to teach students by learning how to analyze myself and my life. I want to be a better person. I guess I’m just scared that that phrase is an oxymoron.
The only person we live with all of our lives is ourselves and a rejection of self is a rejection of life. Not rejection of self in the eastern sense. I live in this body; I must maintain and care for this body. I have this self and I must prune my tree of attributes to make myself into the best I can possibly be. If I live my life in the belief that what I am is evil and wrong than what is the point? When I get into conversations about what we’re all aiming for and what we are capable of that is beautiful, I wonder if everyone before us thought the same way and then maybe didn’t succeed? I am a historian and I know that my personal philosophy is that those who came before us were like us. I think if you study history with the belief that people who came before us might as well be aliens and we can’t understand them without viewing them as foreign then the true detriment is to yourself. It is not just that you will not be able to understand past peoples on a more human level it is that the similarities you will find between yourself and those past peoples will cause you to alienate parts of you. Again a rejection of self is not justifiable in this way because you are only asking to never feel happy. Joy cannot last if the foundation, you, is not open to joy. Anyways if people before me thought of crazy schemes to get everyone to get along and be happy and we don’t all get along and aren’t all happy then who’s to say I won’t fail? This isn’t a reason not to act. Like rejection of self, rejection of action can only lead to a fruitless life. But is there such a thing as ensuring success if the very idea of succeeding doesn’t seem possible? It seems to me that the world spins a certain way and we’re all on it for a very brief time. It doesn’t matter how you spin it, our time is limited [earth spinning pun intended] I guess the meaning of my blog title has changed a little since getting back to school. I love legos and my life in bricks is important to me but what I’m really trying to do and what makes this blog so hard to write and so easy to write is that my life is in bricks and I’m trying to figure out how to build it. There are no directions I can do what I want and build whatever I can imagine but the bricks have much heavier implications than just building a tardis.
