Pacific Tides

Now go outside and look at the sky.

Faces of the Fallen

Wars have been a human blight for as long as we have roamed this planet. I'm not sure if they will ever completely disappear, but nowadays, with global travel, instant information flow, mountains of laws and international agreements, I think we should be able to take them out of the mainstream, sometimes maybe still happening on the frazzled edges of a modern world, but steadily pushed back, revealed as the pasttime of cave men.

And for a while it actually looked pretty good. The 90s were heady with new promises of peace. Borders were falling, arch enemies worked together to actually destroy their weapons. Amazing times.

But some of the cave men are back. Complete idiots in power again. The same characters that gave us several world wars and a cold war just in the last century. They came back with exactly the same airheaded arguments for war that have been used for thousands of years to plunge peaceful and complacent societies into unjust and unwinnable wars.

Open any history book on any page and you will find deja-vu-like scenarios that are right now being played out on the evening news.

And the vicitms haven't changed either. There are the unsung dead in the civil population that you never hear about if you are not actually part of that very group of people that currently gets the shit bombed out of them.

And the soldiers. Also victims for the most part. The potential mass-murderers always quickly move up the chain to become generals, their psychopathic tendencies way too useful to be wasted on guarding a weapons depot. Dead and wounded soldiers usually are the harmless, young, innocent ones. The ones that search for land mines, hold unholdable positions and do every dirty job known to man.

Here are their faces.

© 1998 - 2020 Thomas Sturm