Meta-article: Nigerians Recount...

I see: An article recounting the mass murder of 500 Christian Nigerians by Muslim tribesmen. You can e-mail, send to phone, print, reprint, and share this article with family, friends, and acquaintances. 10 men sit on the ground of the picture, two framed pictures in the background portray two angles of the same child- a girl in a puffy white dress. More pictures hang pinned onto panels on the wall. A few of them stare at you, most stare off to the side. Many of them appear to be military. There is a possibility that it is one or a handful of men represented in the pictures. Many wear military uniforms, from pins to berets with indeterminate insignias. If the world were reflected by what is seen on these pictures, the phrase “it’s a man’s world” wouldn’t be far from the truth. The oxymoronic essence is not apparent: the military- symbols of restrained, constrained, destroyed childhoods repressed by uniforms and strict thoughts: the child below, unaware of a world where there is need for military, free in the little white dress barely discovering the world around her.
The men on the floor, detained as guilty, offer different faces for the camera. To think they were once children… Yet, to see and report was is seen is not to assume pasts or presume futures. The truth: Two men, two women, one stick, one short knife resulting in three dead one living, a crime.
I often think the dead don’t worry, the dead don’t judge, the dead don’t suffer. The living do.
I see: A web-ad to ‘PACQUIAO-CLOTTEY: THE EVENT’. The sport: BOXING. Here, in an article about 500 killings, is included an ad to a boxing match. Pacquiao and Clottey both stare at you with the same grim, intense look as some of the men in the picture below. Our souls deep inside wonder what have we done to create a world where faces must thus look at you.
The other ad, showing a dirty Caucasian man with a look of anguish on his face appeals you to click on the box to play a snippet from HBO’s ‘The Pacific.’ The Subject: War. More precisely: WWII. And what did we do, as readers, to ask to be furthered directed towards death?! Isn’t war about death? Some would say war is more about ideals. Are we better because of it? Some would say yes. However, I must not indulge in speculation, rather speak of what I further see.
I see an ad that simply says CYRUS, July 9. It holds no appeal. Good luck getting my accidental click. Slightly down, off to the right, an actress from “The Miracle Worker” also carries an anguished, insane look on her face: the shivering lips, the disheveled curls of the hair, the square chin, the exposed lobe…
Focus back on the article, you read about the weapons confiscated- “14 machetes, 26 bows, arrows, 3 axes, 4 spears, and 44 guns.” (Play chess for chrissakes!)To think that these had often been used as tools rather than weapons; as tools for hunting, tools for clearing the ground for agriculture, tools. But I forget, tribal was is as old as sand. Tribes have been dispersed and urbanized only fairly recently in history. Tribes still persist in some areas, i.e. Afghanistan. Tribes, once romanticized by their sense of communal support, by their long folkloric traditions, by their unique languages and habits, now struggle to remain as tribes in the face of global urbanization (globalization), at the hand of a new world order- yes, I said new world order, meaning not the apocalyptic, deliberately conceived rule of one central world government, but rather a gradual loss of specific cultures developed by isolation exchanged for a modern, interconnected eclectic culture blending in the most prevalent languages and cultural habits (Nihau where hello stood, forks were chopsticks stood, soy where barley stood), or the Darwinian rule applied to cultural survival as tied to political powers and economics.
Like a thief in the night they stole into cots and shot and cut without mercy.
Like the Trojan horse they waited till nightfall to turns dreams into nightmares.
Will it be eye for eye? We will see.