Another One Bites the Dust

Here we are, at the end of another story, and another satire no less. I haven't read through everyone's posts yet and I'm pretty sure someone else wrote on this, but if they have, it deserves being said again.

We as humans have become desensitized to war, death, destruction, mayhem, and everything else related to violence. I used to watch NCIS a lot, and often times I would find myself saying at the beginning of the show "...and queue the dead body," whenever some random person would find the dead body of some victim on the show. I never realized that I was totally insensitive to the fact that someone had died. (I know NCIS is fiction but the effect is essentially the same: someone was brutally murdered, it happens in real life) I began to realize this when we talked the other day in class about Voltaire's emotionally unattached desription of the battle:

"Never was anything so gallant, so well accoutred, so brilliant, and so finely disposed as the two armies. The trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made such harmony as never was heard in Hell itself. The entertainment began by a discharge of cannon, which, in the twinkling of an eye, laid flat about 6,000 men on each side. The musket bullets swept away, out of the best of all possible worlds, nine or ten thousand scoundrels that infested its surface. The bayonet was next the sufficient reason of the deaths of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide trembled like a philosopher, and concealed himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery."

At first, I was appalled by the fact that Voltaire could write so cynically about a battle where thirty thousand people died, but the other day, I caught myself laughing at the kills I made while playing a war game online. It made me sick. Here was I. the guy who cried for 3 hours when he accidentally broke his brother's nose, (I don't have the time to explain it, if you want to know, ask me after class or some other time) laughing about jumping out of a building and emptying a magazine in some other guy. Needless to say, I began to cry again, at what I had become. What's it going to take for the rest of America to realize this?

~Cody Martin

Commented on Amanda Gaster's Post

God must have read my last post, I found a magazine today that's all cars, no models.

P.S. Having Posting Errors