Uncharacteristic

I don't usually blog about anything political here. Those are the kind of thoughts I like to keep to myself, partially because I don't find many people who agree with my political beliefs (I'm very much a moderate; I'm only an extremist when it comes to criminal punishment, and even then, only jestingly), and I don't like starting unnecessary arguments; political debates, in my experience, accomplish relatively little. You're either talking to a receptive person, or you're up against a brick wall, and the latter is more likely than the former. The converse is also true; few people go into a political conversation willing to be swayed.

Hearing that Saddam Hussein had been captured made for a curious moment, however. At first, I didn't believe it. I figured they were never going to catch him, just like they haven't managed to capture Bin Laden. Did the news make me happy? I suppose on some level it did. You'll excuse me for not weeping when his sons were slain, and for feeling no sympathy when their bullet and shrapnel-punctured corpses were shaved and displayed on TV. A bad end for bad people. May their souls dance over hot coals for all time.

But ultimately, this war, this capture, these deaths - I'm not certain that the administration's war on terror will really bring terror to an end. I don't think terror will *ever* end, so long as people hate each other, and I'm too cynical to believe that there will ever be a day that humans stop hating each other. We're like ants; our nature is to hoard material possessions and to slay one another in covetous fits of jealousy. Smeagol and Deagol fighting over the One Ring. One of us dies, and the other gets turned into a wretched thing cursed to forever hoard its corrupting treasure. Excuse me for saying this, but the only thing that's going to get human beings to stop hating each other is something ridiculous in the extreme, say, an alien invasion a la Independence Day, whereupon we can all agree that we hate someone else even more than we hate each other.

Out here in Berkeley, I get rather tired of hearing about the constant tensions between Israeli and Palestinian sympathizers having trouble being heard, and watching the issue dance like a hot potato between student groups and law school functions on campus. Their hatred for each other is intense, with missiles being fired in one direction and suicide bombs running toward discoes on the other; the American interference is unwelcome. "Butt out of our business and let us go on hating each other. Your super-powered meddling will not change how we feel about one another." I've lost track of the number of cease-fires those people have had over the past decade, and I remember a time earlier this year when a CNN poll reported the American public's jaded reaction to yet another peace accord in the Holy Land: 70% believed that the ceasefire wouldn't even last the month. One student at Berkeley, a staunch Palestinian supporter, tried to convert me to his side of the debate over lunch. I asked him if he would be willing to hand his family home over, forevermore with no strings attached, to whichever Native American tribe once ranged over the soil on which it was built. He didn't see the parallel.

Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein... they and people like them will rise to power and lead themselves and others to ruin in the name of their own hypocritical causes. Even if the administration manages to oust one from power, another will rise in the future, so long as anyone has any reason to resent any other person. None of this is surprising; the only tragic thing is that so many of the foot soldiers who die on either side of these conflicts often do so believing that they're doing the right thing.

I don't think everything's relative. There are clearly good people and bad people, and however you might want to dance around the fuzzy lines and the gray areas, I will never back down from the belief that the people who act on simple desires of selfishness and self-gratification at the great expense of others are the ones who are the most evil. Those are the people who contribute nothing to the world around them, only taking and never giving. They survive only at everyone else's sufferance, for without meek or unknowing victims, they would never find sustenance.

And as hopeless a picture as I may be painting on this blog entry, on this day of all days, it's exactly the reason why I think it's important never to give in to forces like that. The struggle may be an endless and inevitable one. But there are people who, despite their other flaws are still motivated by compassion and the will to defend the helpless from harm. If they give up the will to fight for themselves and to protect other people, the fight will be all over, and the cynics will have been proven right again.

They caught him, and that's good news. If nothing else, it's good news for Bush's election prospects (of which the less I have to say, the better). But the war on terror, necessary or unnecessary as it may be (for I do not truly know the answer to that), is just another escalation in the endless struggle between colonies of red and black ants. The answer to this kind of struggle seems to lie beyond the wisdom and ability of the people who hold all the power in this world. It certainly lies beyond mine.

M. Mellow was off the grid

I'm convalescing at home at the moment. That's overly dramatic, of course, but this second year of law school has been very busy, such that I've been writing and studying about 14 hours per day for the past two months, weekends included, and I had no energy left for blogging. Given my limited readership, I'm sure my absence has hardly meant anything but to a few people. (To those of you who it meant something to, you have my simultaneous thanks and apologies. I'm still alive, that's all I dare say for the moment.)

The semester started off unhappily enough, with loneliness and job-hunting taking their toll. As a coddled native Californian, I'm spoiled when it comes to the weather and thus don't transplant well to other climes; I didn't insist on finding an internship in the Bay Area, but that's the way the interview process turned out. The interviews themselves weren't horribly grueling... I've been through job interviews before, and a 20-minute interview, though it has its attendant difficulties, is nothing like a 6-hour technical interview replete with enough programming questions to suffice for an undergraduate computer science final. Nothing like a difficult economic climate to make for stressful job hunting. When the economy got sucked down the whirlpool at the end of shit creek, a lot of us engineering types just happened to be lashed to the bowsprit on the Nantucket Sleigh Ride to hell.

No bitterness in the end, though - the job search came and went, and I have an internship for the next summer. The first half of the semester - at least as far as mid-October, anyway - was defined mostly by having to put classwork to the side for the sake of the upcoming summer, and by running around for a couple of weeks on end jumping in and out of business suits for interviews and civvies for study. It was necessary, ultimately successful, and not a whole lot of fun. Plus, hearing about half of my friends announce wedding engagements wasn't doing anything for my mood. I'm not a selfish person, and I feel happy for all said friends, but when I'm handling 18-hour days at school wallowing in solitude and unappreciation, hearing about everyone else's happy relationships rubs a little unintentional salt into the wound. (Well, one friend broke up with her boyfriend and that was quite sad... she took it well enough, but it seems to be further proof of how hard law school can be on relationships. People either get married and stick it through, or break up. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground.) Well, no matter. Like I said - it was the first half of the semester, and it wasn't fun... but when that was over, I more or less dropped off the face of the earth in a struggle to get all my papers written. If I were any less a compulsive student, it would have been flat-out impossible for me.

I made a bunch of new friends in the second half of the semester, though (Mostly outside the law school), and felt like I had managed to reclaim some sort of life - and youth - for myself in the month and a half preceding finals. Those two months seemed about as long as an entire year, which scarcely surprises me given the raw number of hours I had to stay awake and working. But it was a fun year. I watched a lot of movies and listened to a lot of cantopop and jpop. I did a lot of writing, ate a lot of warm porridge, and drank a lot of tea. By the time finals rolled around, I was on top of my work and happier than I'd been in years. Someone had once asked me what it was like having Berkeley as an alma mater, and the best analogy I could come up with was that it was like having a horrible ex-girlfriend that you still loved anyway (not that I could speak from personal experience). It's nice to come back here, as a graduate student, and feel like I had found the home that I never found here as an undergraduate.

I've found a home. Things aren't so bad... no, not by a long shot :)