No Kings or Queens

I wonder what can we do? What does caring improve? How much can action move? When people don’t even believe in evolution. When people don’t even believe in climate change. When people believe in an Adam & Eve. Two sentient beings put on Earth in Eden. Naming animals like they were the chosen. And they were born into a right to eat all of them. The apple and the serpent. All of the world a buffet. I wonder what we can do.

How do we cause real action? Real change? When the leaders who can make it happen, working on the hill. A thousand lights of hope to kill, any country that does not bow before us. Cause a war without any country’s backing. Not caring how the international world will deplore us. Remembering the two countries we blew up in the sand before us. Before any civil war inside Israel’s neighbor.

I think of chemical weapons. I think of the twitching and the pain that it must cause. I imagine them like seizures that my brain starts. The pain that the nervous system can take to heart, when it malfunctions. Sparks. Flames. The burning. Bursts of the same. Repeat. Until medication or death. I imagine how it must feel. I can only understand the real through watching the internet.

But I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a limb blown off. To see a comrade lose a life. I don’t know what it’s like for a bomb to drop. Destroying concrete walls. Incendiary bombs burning flesh and all. Bodies once there, leaving only shoes. Leaving the memory that you viewed as a playground turned to ash burned into your mind.

As I ask, “Why should it make a difference?” It is not nuclear. It is not wiping away an entire city or two that we fear. Because we are the only country who has dropped the bomb. Knows what calculations it takes to choose to kill hundreds of thousands of innocents from choosing peace.

We never had any moral high ground. We never could police the world. We cannot drop bombs anymore. If so, the world is done for. For we will forever be seen as a war monger. An empire with an insatiable hunger, for absolute power. Not able to dismiss ego from an imaginary red line drawn.

To be a pawn in the global world at dawn. No kings or queens. No checkmate seen. Only stalemates and futures of wars in the sand foreseen. As the world’s pawns ready to convene, we seek a new lease. We seek to be released from any promises made behind our backs. For we do not wish to be policed. We do not wish to be imprisoned by terror. We reach for the simplest of things. What do our religions preach? When will we follow the prophets we seek? To turn the other cheek. To seek love and peace. To forgive. To be the change we wish to see.