Death is Negative Space

Death is negative space.
In art negative space is the empty, blank, unused space, the boundaries of which establish form and line. It is essential to the image.
Without death, we would have no illumination of life. Without our imminent mortality we would have no sense of our own aliveness.
Those close with death, are close with life.

Death in the Tall Grass

Cresting the hill, big Dodge engine running like a hound, a heart drum of blown muffler hurrying me onward when I see the sign. At the artilleryman’s crest, just before you can see over the hill, is the marker: Yellow and square, turned onto a corner, “Accident Ahead”.
I slow making the crest and rolling the wheel into the declining turn, and see the glut of disorder that marks an accident scene. Emergency response vehicles strewn across the road at cubist abstract angles, uniforms and bunker gear hurtling around masking the people inside them. A black uniform yells at yellow bunker gear, and we all get directed onto the shoulder. Parked, waiting.
It is in this stillness that I really see it, the maroon van off the shoulder of the road, down the slight slope and through the barbed wire fence. It sits on all four wheels, perfectly inline with the fence, someone could have parked it there except for the obvious. All the glass is gone, save the windshield which is shattered, a crystalline spiderweb narrowing in focus to the solid white knot of a million sand-grain fractures where the drivers head hit. The drivers side of the van is crushed inwards, the surface metal twisted into figures and forms challenging the imagination. The drivers door is covered with a yellow plastic and foam emergency blanket, held on by duct-tape. The blanket moves gently in the breeze, dancing with the tall grasses surrounding the van, its bright color highlighting more than hiding the nature below.
It is quiet as I stare at the van. It sits alone, ten yards from any police or emergency vehicle, ten yards from any living humanity, perfectly lined up with the fence and pointed up the hill. There is no illusion that it might start moving again though, its stillness and quietude are of something much older, much more final, something that is now part of the earth and grasses.
The uniform and bunker-gear shatter the stillness, waving us on and ordering us to stay on the shoulder. Further down the hill, further into the curve, other uniforms are picking up pieces, measuring distances, and speaking loudly and irreverently of the materiel of the dead. Beyond them, just off the shoulder, is another vehicle. Small, black, a pickup before the top of the cab was crushed down into the seats, and folded back into the bed. It is surrounded by activity, and we’re rolling now, hitting the road again – Chaos rarely sees itself in the maelstrom.
As I drive, picking up speed, passing the van ahead of me as it struggles to regain sixty-five, my thoughts return to stillness and death, the order of it all. How natural it seems, death in the tall whispering grasses. And, isn’t it?

Assbag

http://www.newshounds.us/2006/10/10/father_of_flight_93_hero_shamelessly_uses_his_sons_death_to_mislead_americans.php

The son is a hero.
The father is a pathetic waste of amino acids.

A Warrior Falls

Like every day before, the officer wasn't late for duty. He sat in the Squad room, paying attention when he needed to, joking with his fellows when he didn't. He climbed into the seat of the car, and settled in for the morning patrol.
Sometime after breakfast, (coffee and a McMuffin for his partner, just a McMuffin for him,) and before lunch (he will wonder, later and only once, if it might have been good), the call comes in. Man with a gun, wife and children in the house. His partner flips an otherwise illegal U-turn he calls flipping a bitch, and puts the V8 Interceptor to work.
The scene is the chaos that finds its home in the heart of every warrior, its meaning and pattern apparent only in his mind. Shots are fired out the window. Tear gas is fired back in. The wife and kids come out. The gunman doesn't. The officer wonders how people can be so cruel to one another at times, doing that to their women, and their little ones. He thinks maybe he'd like to have a pup or two of his own someday, but doesn't have time for deeper contemplation. They're lining up, going in, he's got to go - All thoughts are on the door, the monster behind it, the monster with the gun.
They put flash-bangs through the windows as the great big man in-front slams the backdoor into a thousand splinters, a million motes of dust - Each one lit up for an instant by the flash of the 'bangs.
They're in, dust and smoke clouding the already hazy unlit room. The gunfire comes from within that haze, muzzle flashes - A cheap nine-millimeter, something that any other time might not have even fired. Call it fate, call it irony, call it tragedy, call it life. Gunfire in response, the solider, more reliable, fire of forty-five's and five-point-five-sixes, all well made, well maintained, as ready for action as he. But he's not acting anymore, he doesn't hear the return gunfire - One round, just the wrong side of the edge on his vest, has torn through flesh and bone and gone deep inside.
The Earth trembles when he falls.
He hurts when he breathes, but knows he must keep trying. He doesn't know where his partner is. Where the bad man is. He fights - To breath, to be loyal, to serve. It hurts, deep inside where it hasn't hurt since his heart broke once, when he was young, the last time he saw his mother.
His partner is there then, looking down at him, saying soft, soothing things, calling him "buddy". He likes it when his partner does that. The bad man is there too, but he's not standing up, or fighting. The officer relaxes a little now, but its still so hard to breathe and he has to breathe to make sure there are no more badmen.
His vision falters, he's going to sleep. Somewhere out in the growing blackness what might be a green field, and old friends, are visible. He blinks. The dust is settling in the room, but its all light and shadow.
They take his vest off, he feels them placing something over the wound. A needle sticks him between the ribs. Its easier to breathe now, but he's still so tired. He cant fight sleep anymore. He hears his friends calling him into the soft grass of the field.

I see him as they bring him out of the ambulance. One paramedic just picks him up off the gurney, and steps out into the harsh midday light. His blood runs down the front of the 'medics white uniform shirt, but that's okay. He's one of them, a compatriot, a force against the destruction they all feel chasing them - Chasing the world - a brother, a Warrior.
The other paramedic is holding the door open. Right of the door there is wall of his fellow warriors folding in behind the one carrying him as they go through the door. Tears are in their eyes. I can feel the reverberations in the Earth now, as I see them disappear within, and the Veterinary clinic doors close behind them.

Sweat and Dust

She was a silhouette at first, black jeans and tank top. Surrounded by sawdust. The golden light realized then, into sun-bronzed skin and straw colored hair. Sweat glistened on her muscles, hiding in shadow then rising as she worked.
The sander ate at the top of the sign, shaving splintered pine and throwing it up into the air around her. Sawdust stuck to her sweat.
Strong shoulders bunching and extending, push, pull, coil, uncoil, Braced, legs apart, pushing into the sander from the knees, up rigid thighs, through firm shapely hips.
Sweat sticking black fabric to her firm and narrowed middle, half up in the back. Sweat glistening in the hollow of her spine. It runs off her shoulders and collar bones too, like sap. Liquid amber of the sun itself, reflecting light off her yellow hair as it descends into shadowed hollows beneath the neck line, a vain attempt at carrying the sunsets dying idolatry into another glorious resting.

Winning Hearts and Minds: What We Need to Learn from Hezbollah

In the wake of the most recent Israeli invasion, bombings and blockade of Lebanon some 18,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Hezbollah has come forward in response to this destruction (and the resulting dislocation of families) and, ahead of the Lebanese government, begun reconstruction. They have provided as much as $12,000 (U.S. Dollars) to each family whose home was damaged and brought in their own workers and equipment to begin clearing rubble and rebuilding homes. In many areas Hezbollah stepped up to the plate well ahead of the local authorities, and in others they simply (and quietly, but not so quietly as to be unrecognized) provided money to local authorities for clean-up and reconstruction projects to begin.
Israel had one success in this war - They made Hezbollah stronger by giving them the opportunity to develop even solider foundations within Lebanon and with the Lebanese people. Hezbollah, in an obvious show of un-diminished strength after Israel’s attempt to defeat them, has stepped up as being not only better able to take care of the people than the government, but more willing to do so. 18,000 homes, 18,000 families the members of which may have been completely politically uninvolved previously, and in one fell swoop Hezbollah can win them over.
This is a fantastic success at winning hearts and minds.
(Source 1, Source 2 )

This is where the bar has been set – and set by, effectively, our enemy. This is the challenge that the United States and pro-Western governments, have to meet in the Middle East to be successful. We have to be better for the people of the countries we are operating in than those we are trying to defeat.
Military might only goes so far. It destroys our enemies alright, but it also destroys portions of the lives of those to whom we are trying to bring stability and democracy and we will never have stability or democracy anyplace where there are blast holes in walls, over-crowded hospitals with poor levels of care, burnt out grocery stores and destroyed schools.
People may lament what little they have, but when that little bit they have is destroyed during military actions, and then never rebuilt by those there to make things better whose side looks more appealing? The "oppressor" or the "free’er"? When what little you have is threatened by civil war because your entire country is destabilized by these failures enough for radical elements of opposing religions to become entrenched in a newly disenfranchised portion of the populace? How would you feel? And how would your children, as they grow and come of age during these events, feel?
Create a generation in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) that has been provided with the very best (to Western standards) in secular education, while their parents are working steady jobs (no matter their religious affiliation) and always able to put food on the table, and Iraq (and Afghanistan) will be new nations.

The greatest ally the forces of Radical Wahabiist Islam have is Ignorance. Their greatest strength is that from a position of ignorance the people of the nations afflicted with their blight see the forces of Radical Islam as being positive forces, a better alternative than Western forces and ideals.
We must erase ignorance. We must replace it with education and a living standard of affluence. If we cannot do that, the current generation will follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and their younger brothers will follow them, and these children’s own children will then follow them and we will continue to fight these wars we have been fighting for the last thousand years.

It is well and good to meet the enemy on the field of battle, and to slay him. But we have an enemy that is not an army, not an element of a nation state, but an element of the people among whom he lives. You cannot win over a people, you cannot stabilize a region of people, by killing their neighbor and telling them it was good for them. You have to make it good for them.
When you kill their neighbor, you give them schools, and food, and clothes, and the necessary talismans of affluence. Use his crops to feed their children. Build a school or a hospital upon his lands. Employ them in the construction of the schools and hospitals.
When another of their neighbors then tries to destroy these things that you have not only given them, but involved them in creating for themselves? They will welcome you to destroy him – and they will want to join you in it.
It is not good enough to kill the enemy – Every acre of land we soak with blood, must be tilled into crops, or used to build schools and hospitals for the people of the area. And every threat to those efforts should be met and dealt with the utmost cruelty and brutality.

If we are right (and in the face of Radical Islam I truly believe we are) then we must act it, and not be afraid to wage war without equivocation, to deliver violence swiftly, rapidly, and unmercifully to those who stand against us.
But we must also be unafraid (and willing to spend the money) to give the children of our enemy, and the children of his neighbors, an education we would give our own children with the courage to provide it ourselves if necessary to keep it secular and free of the ills and evils of the regions past. If we are right, we must employ the men and women who do not stand against us, and we must help them to rebuild their homes, lives and families.
Our goal should not only be to defeat our enemy in the conventional sense, but to replace him in his own house and do far better than he ever did at keeping it. Give his neighbors something to lose, and let him show himself for being the one who wants to take all that away from them. Our primary goal, our focus, should not be the wholesale slaughter of their warriors, but the fulfilling of the basic needs of the people we desire to save in order to make our enemy and their ideology irrelevant. The force necessary to do that, to protect the good works we establish in the wake of our first-line offensives, the violence and the extent of that violence, should be enough to slake anyone’s desire for retribution or war, if for no other reason than not leaving alive any of the enemy who would wish to continue.

I fear however that we do not have the constitution, the resolve, or the power within our own government to stand together, free of partisanship political jockeying and games playing for increased revenues, to do that. The current state of our government, our nation and our military, is so poor that our hope of success seems quite dim. I truly (and regretfully) believe we wasted our opportunity for this kind of massive action, and now several years down the line are too spent, too worn, too divided amongst ourselves (and those divisions too set into their own trenches) to ever achieve this kind of success.
We’re going to be at this a very, very, long time.

The Philosopher in the Neuroscientist

Another golden nugget from Seed Magazine (If you are at all interested in science, do yourself a favor and go to www.seedmagazine.com and subscribe! Seed Media Group is also behind Science Blogs, see link @ right), the following is the following taken from the segment on Neuroscientist Sam Harris in the article "Year in Science: Icons":

"While there is interesting work to be done in the philosophy of mind, philosophers are now very much beholden to the work of neuroscientists.” Sam Harris

Fantastic thing to say.
(The entire segment on Harris begins here: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/12/year_in_science_icons.php?page=11 at the very bottom).