The Picture on the Wall

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There was a drawing once, I remember seeing it hanging in my room. It was a still life. Let me tell you about it.

The sky was blue, the grass was green, there were "M" birds floating unnaturally in the air. There was a tree with a sturdy brown trunk and orange things with enormous stems on them. A beautiful rainbow arced across the perfect, cloudless sky. There were two people in the picture, I remember these the best. Stick figures that were waving at the outside world, enormous grins on their faces. One had long hair, the other was bald – a girl and boy! There was this round thing with four sticks and a tail, I guess it was a dog or a cat. They had a brown car that was shaped like an "L" with two sturdy looking black tires. There was a house with a door in the front and two windows with four panes apiece. The chimney merrily puffed smoke even though it was obviously the middle of summer, or more likely spring. Spring is far more pleasant after all. And there were little flowers in the little garden, they had smiley faces too...

Let me tell you about some other pictures I have seen.

One is a picture of a smiling little boy, maybe eleven or so. A caption says he was born in 1983. Underneath it reads that he was killed by a drunk driver. Hit and run, cops picked him up for weaving later.

There's another, one of my favorites. A US soldier holds a handgun up to a suspected Viet-Cong, summarily executing him without trial in the streets of some village. There's another from the same place, a naked girl running down the street with napalm burns covering over eighty percent of her tiny body. She cares about communism versus democracy doesn't she? Somebody asked her before they bombed her village, right?

I've got this picture of a rock star with blonde hair and lonely blue eyes. He killed himself in 1994.

I've seen this film, there were these cops beating up a black man. I guess he really did something terrible.

I've seen starving children's faces, mounds of bodies piled in mass graves, images of our biggest landfills.

I read about a woman being raped. I read about the three month sentence the guy received after parole because they needed room for some drunks.

I've witnessed bruised children with angry parents. I've read about spousal abuse, I've read about murders within the family. I watched my nation drop bombs on Iraq, then I watched on CNN when they showed the grief-stricken faces of the families who hate my nation because I killed their children with my tax dollars. It was a just war, wasn't it? I mean, we'd do the same thing if a small nation in Africa was invaded by some dictatorial neighbor, right?

I saw children killed in Colorado based solely on race and religion, by two kids who for some reason hated their world more than even I can imagine. I saw a compound burned down that contained many women and children, tear gas had nothing to do with it they say. I saw an innocent man, working hard to support his family, gunned down by police because he looked a little like a serial rapist.

I've seen text files freely available for download on how to make bombs. I've seen pornography advertisements that degrade both the sexes and make love a trivial matter of lust for flesh. A third of the electrons travelling through the ether contain images depicting sex or graphic nudity -- men, women, children.

I've seen billboards from the concrete river of cars in Atlanta, advertising a divorce for only $300. Marriage is such a trivial thing after all. When the going gets tough, people get going. Half of all the eternal vows in this great nation lie shattered in some lawyer's office.

I read an email when the six billionth human being was born.

The world of humanity is delivered to me in all of its sickening glory. One people, one race, one God. I wish I could lose myself in the bottle, I wish I could inhale something that would take all my cares away...damned conscience.

...I tore that picture off of the wall years ago. I will not believe that I was ever ignorant enough to draw it. If I did it again it would be an atomic mushroom cloud with a smiling, relieved Earth.

I live in the information age. Welcome to the future.

Peace.
Andrew W. 11/99

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