In the end they got to him. Chewed him up, broke his spirit, he never looked the same. I didn’t leave him because of the way he looked, if that’s what you were thinking. He left me; he couldn’t remember who I was after they got to him.
I was born before the war. 1986 these American citizens hadn’t heard a thing about Al Qaida. It was a time of Madonna, perms, side pony tales and much other of the liking. The economy was on the rise and I was being purchased through a third party known as Catholic Charities Adoption Agency. As a result I got a lot of questions as a kid.
“Do you hate your real parents for leaving you?”
“Do you tell your parents they aren’t your real family?” and so on.
I guess my life was some sort of fiction to them.
For some reason adoption gets an interesting wrap. Most children feel that in order to be a real family you need to be blood related. Most adults, although they learn appropriate lingo to discuss adoption, feel the exact same way. Each year families spend countless amounts of money on In Vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology in order to insure that they will be raising their “own” children. Any price is worth the avoidance of adoption it seems. In the meanwhile, children are growing up in foster homes and orphanages world wide.
I never understood why people thought it was so strange I was bought. After all, people are bought everyday for some reason or other. By the time I was an adult Rupert Murdoch owned most of the world. He spent his time buying up companies and people. But nobody questioned him. Nobody cared.
I was born during the war. 1986 The Chadian-Libyan-conflict. It had been going on since the 1970s not that anyone knew. It passed under the radar like much of African affairs. The bombs we dropped in Somalia two summers ago were mentioned on page 10 in the newspaper. We were supposed to be at war with Iraq – and we were dropping bombs in Africa. All a matter of a page-ten issue. Who cared.
It was hard to care on a daily basis. When I did not care – I felt dead. And when I did care – I was swept into the political undercurrent – I was being killed. The summer of the Somalian bombings I became engulfed in newspapers, history books, and on-line news websites. I don’t seem to be able to do things lightly. I’m either in a draught or a flood; so I can see why most people remained apathetic. I am not even sure you can categorize their minds as in a state of apathy; it was a state of absence.
I met a boy that year who was as crazy about politics as I was. Discussions of countries and policies filled our dinner plates. He was studying Arabic and I was studying Japanese. A mess of symbols no one understood – not even ourselves some days. And the symbols got me down. The implications of Kevin J. Martin’s decisions became burdening my head and all that Scooter Libby mess. Slowly and slowly I became worn. I wanted to get out of the political water. I was drowning in it. And the boy – he could see me wearing away. As it wore away my political passion we split. I vowed off newspapers for a while after that. Not because the boy, but because I stopped living.
I was born after the war. 1986 Vietnam was long over. A slew of promises never to get mixed up like that again. Promises?! Who were we kidding. Look at the record: Over 100s of wars recorded before the year 1000, over 550 between 1000 – 1899, and over 250 from 1900 to present. That’s more than 2 wars per year every year since 1900. War was always on the rise. A steadily increasing graph; if human existence could be expanded until infinity it would probably resemble a log curve. It was never a matter of learning not to get mixed up in wars or even certain types of wars. We learned instead that wars were profitable and even the communist were capitalizing on them.
The dearth of natural resources was probably the reason we kept having wars. But not for the reason most people think. Because war was possibly the one thing we could produce as humans that we wouldn’t run out of. It seems to me humans like control. We build cities and governments to create the illusion of structure . We make language so we can catorgize things – define what is real. War – just another structure to define reality. Who cares.
Tags: adoption, family, FCC, global war, global warming, in vitro, Iraq, Kevin J. Martin, language, list of wars, natural resouces, news, peace, political, politics, resources, Rupert Murdoch, Scooter Libby, semiotics, structure, Vietnam, war, writing
