Syria

This is a silly blog. I rant, and sometimes I try to say something deep, but all in all I try to be witty and smart. We all do that on the internet, it is our window, and a good deal of us (I suppose "us bloggers") are too narcissistic to take a step back and try not to sound so damn smart every time we post.

This is, mostly, why I have been so silent on this blog. It is a fun thing to do, its purpose to let the words amuse (me, you, whoever) or just come out and relax me in the process. I cannot find the energy to do that right now, not with what I read in the news.

I have always felt a connection to what happens in Palestine, for example. The Gaza siege put a dampener in my enthusiasm and my will to blog, but did not kill it entirely. I was going to post something, at some point, what with all the travelling I have done, but lack of time and other priorities prevented me form doing it.

Now there is a deeper reason. Much deeper. It is Syria. It is a hot hot hot debate, but to me the core of the matter is as simple as its outer layers are complex. Those are meat and mead of analysts, fuel for (interesting) geopolitical debates. They have a merit, I suppose, as they illustrate the conflict to us, crassly clueless European, framing in context what happens just next door.

What matters to me is that for the last 2 years people have been suffering, fearing and dying over there. Normal people, ordinary people. People I could relate to. The death of an illiterate shepherd on the Tora Bora hills is not less dramatic, his life just as valuable, but I have to acknowledge to myself that there are other levels to relate to people, beyond that of just "being a human like me". I go through the gory, unsettling, disgusting images that the internet is flooded with. Before-and-after pictures of places that used to be beautiful, peaceful, or just "normal". Places where people of all ages had their trade, their everyday dramas, their jobs, their exams, their hopeless crushes on that girl/guy. When destruction hits people I can relate to, with similar dreams and aspirations, it all gets a lot scarier. To know that those people are no more, wiped away but the tug of war between their government and a bunch of thugs, to know that their existence has been shredded to pieces by the war-game of far way nations, is simply too disgusting to ignore.

But I can go deeper than that. I will. Syria, in a way, is family to me. It makes bleed the hearts of the people I love most, the ones who mean the most to me. I am not Buddha, I am not an enlightened soul. Certain wars will mean more to me than others. Certain events will tip the scale in favor of at least trying to say something, to articulate a thought.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/01/2013115135151522535.html

This is just the last in a long line of brutalities. This one robbed us of 87 (as of now) people and shattered the lives of those who knew them. It hit them where it hurts, where they thought it could not, would not happen. Because the parties are their own government, or a militia that allegedly, supposedly, theoretically took arms to overturn a corrupt police-state.

All I can do now is pose myself, and those around me, a simple question. Is it worth it? No. It is not. It cannot be. Do not come to me ever saying that this is a "necessary price", that "transitions are always bloody", that there are "lesser" or "necessary evils". There are not. We screwed up, big time, all of us. The dictator refuses to budge, refuses to bend, refuses to reform, cracks down on his own people, and what do we do? Do we help the citizens find a voice? Do we pressure said government to pull its head out of its ass? No, we do not. We flood the country with weapons, we arm militia groups. Ignorant, bloodthirsty thugs who love their sects more than they love their country. People who are prepared to die, yes, but also people who will do so no matter how many more they drag down with them. We bless these groups, and even anoint them with legitimacy, while what happens (legally speaking), is a Head of State who is refusing to go simply because "well...because Ben Ali and Ali Abdallah Saleh did". Is the government power hungry? Sure. Is it corrupt? I don't think anyone can object to that. Were there no alternatives to all of this? Of course there were.

But pitting Shi'ites against Sunni, crippling an enemy for good, forcing new markets to (eventually) open up to western goods, pulling all sorts of strings and stacking up all sorts of credit (to be exacted, no doubt,  at usury rates) seemed and seems more important than asking Syrians if they did not prefer to go through a political battle, rather than being engulfed in a full-on war, fought by a bunch of barbarians, in their streets and in their houses, with a dreadfully cold winter upon them, with no international help, and very little recognition, no information, surrounded by states that are at best paying lip-service to their plight, when they are not downright hostile to them or trying to exploit them as a negotiation tool (see the case of refugees).

But most importantly, and I don't give a flying shit if it sounds egoistic, it robs my loved ones of sleep, it makes them dread the future, it makes them worry sick, and I cannot just look the other way and keep to myself. If it is only to say that I am infuriated and disgusted, I will use this web space to do so.

The Sol star makes one wonder...

Hail to You, o people of the internet.

It´s been a while since the last post. I started the blog with the best intentions, then life happened and here we are, a solid month and a half from our first acquaintance. Now that you are all rant-starved it is time for a new dose, although a mild one.

I am not that moody today, for some reason. It could be the massive viral infection that got me back to bed on Friday, just after I thought I had recovered from a cold. Bad season for health, I guess, which fits nicely in what you will read below, come to think of it.

Thoughts on the Sun and paganism

This place got me thinking. I know this might come as a surprise to those of you that have known me for a while, but it is exactly what happened. I have been recovering from a damn virus all week, and I am still feeling weak and mushy. This, and the weather outside, have turned into a sick joke which is not funny anymore. Not a hint of the sun, if not for the occasional flash that darts through the low clouds ceiling. Wait, why the plural? It is not clouds we are talking here. It "A" cloud. It is one, and it seamlessly stretches over the whole town. A huge blanket, several kilometers wide, low and heavy. It must be quite a sight from the upper atmosphere, this one cloud over Berlin, a tiny blotch of grey water hovering just a few inches off the surface (more like a thousand meters, but if you look at it from afar, it really is just a skin tight film of moisture, snowflakes and thunders....).

However, occasionally the sun showed us his face again (or her face, if you are a hard-core Tolkien fan) over the last week and a half. Now, when you live in a place kissed by the sun most of the year, you almost welcome a bit of shade. Winters become but a short intermission, when you can reflect, kick back a little bit, stay at home if you wish, enjoy the comfort of a warm house and the presence of the loved ones, snug up in blankets and all the cozy stuff that an average CocaCola commercial will throw at you between November and February (also, I believe I am going to gag just by re-reading the line above).

If it snows a bit, like it happened in Porto Torres last week after 24 years of no snow, it becomes in fact the stuff of wonders, with people rushing out to take shots of the snow capped shore and the crisp blue sky just before the snow melts without annoying anyone. A quick visit, to pay her respects to a long lost friend, and she is gone. So, all in all, you never really lose hope, that spring may come and bring the sun again, and eventually summer. In a place like the Mediterranean, eventually, you give some thought to what the sun can actually be.

Well, after 2500 years of calculations, philosophy and the occasional nose dives into barbarity (ironically coinciding with when the Roman Catholic church held sway over Europe) we have all come to the agreement that the following is the truth, at least until disproved, and only on the material side of things.

Big Numbers?

Awesome though the figures might sound, the sun is a ball (well, sort of, kinda flat at the top, a bit like a clay vase on a lathe) made of Hydrogen and a splash of Helium, with smidgens of a bunch of other elements (though in the sun's 0,0030 % Iron there is probably enough ore to coat the whole Earth in full plates, ten meters thick). Yes, it is big, but only relatively. It takes about 1.3 million Earths to fill it. Puny, compared to other stars. Hot? 15 million Kelvin... I am sure there is hotter stuff out there. You put the sun into proportion, and it becomes just a star, one of the billions of stars that shed light, give off heat and radiation, projects a gravity well and stuff. It was born, when the a cloud of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity some 4,5 billion years ago, sparking a fusion reaction that still kicks it, and it will eventually die, in just about the same time, becoming a cold shapeless rock in the immensity of vacuum.

However...

...if you happen to be so lucky as to spend the winter in Berlin, you might see things under a different light. All your science, and all your numbers are always there, one wiki away, to comfort you, but they can go only so far against what your senses tell you when you look out of the window or when you leave your flat. It is not just a matter of cold. It is a matter of light. In other places it gets just as cold as here, but you do get the crisp blue skies. It is in fact even colder, because the lack of clouds makes what little heat there is happily leave the ground, so it is all right in direct sunlight but deadly freezing in the shade. But the sun is there, up in the sky, yellow and bright, bringing up the happiness chemicals through your very skin.

So it is no wonder that so many people imagined the end of the world to happen at the end of a long, enchanted, bewitched winter. Fimbulwiter, they called it, and it would last the length of three years, at the end of which Ragnarok, the Gotterdamerung, the Twilight of the Gods would happen, and everything would have to be trashed and incinerated before starting over with a new cycle.

I am trying to stretch my imagination back in time, and as I am feeling increasingly happy about the return of the sun, I remember distinctly how its lack was gradually turning my soul into a dull shade of gray. Now, what must have been before all the numbers and all the science, before the compasses and the telescopes and the algebra and the understanding that came with time, for those who faced winter here? Who would assure them that sun would eventually return? Would you feel lucky and take chances, or would you go out of your way, doing everything you could think of, to increase the chances of seeing spring again? Back then, with no safety net whatsoever, when everything depended on a timely cycle of winter and spring, a week´s delay could mark the difference between life and death by starvation. There would be no sick leave, or HR department to tell you that according to law XYZ you can excuse yourself from ploughing the land, fever or not. No heating in the apartment, no surplus food.

Now, in the secularized XXI century, I found myself asking "when will it end?". I found myself craving for the light, for the radiation, for the feeling of warmed skin, for the blue of the sky, for a glimpse of waters that flow unhindered by ice. Well past the stage of "nature is resting before it can blossom again", I just wanted it all to end, and end soon.

I wonder what it must have been to see the light again, to wait for hope and relief from beyond that vast cloud, come March, after endless weeks of uncertainty. I wonder how could one not greet the returning Sun as a full blown Deity, mercifully bathing the lands of men with its healing light, the heat fending off for a few months the demons of Winter.

Now, as I am recovering from the flu and other nasty ailments, I peek out of the window and see that on February 20, 2010, the sky is blue again. Just a few arc-seconds off the skyline, I cannot help but asking myself "should I offer a sacrifice to that"?

Well, never mind that, I am just glad it´s finally over...