The Rollercoaster we call Life

A great Chinese man once said, “May you live in interesting times.”

Little did he know how close to the truth he charted his course.

I used to think this saying meant we would be so lucky to have the chance to get to live through interesting times. But again, back then, I was young and… inexperienced.

Nowadays, after having done a little bit of living myself, I can say that once you sail past a certain age, you begin to see how life stops giving you things, and starts taking them away instead, that’s when his prophetic sage words take an ominous turn.

And that’s because they are meant to convey that life is more of a curse than a blessing.

But I assume you are not here for Chinese Hobbesian ramblings.

Let us focus on what I’ve seen so far…

In my 45 years on God’s green Earth, I have witnessed the Romanian 1989 Bloody Revolution. I have heard and seen automatic gunfire, cannon fire, buildings burning hot red in the dead of night, a tyrant’s helicopter overflying my home, and the blood-soaked Transition of a People and a Country to a Free and Open Society that was supposed to make us all rich.

Later, I saw how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait whose chief aim was to rob its neighbor blind of its oil, was met by the world with a larger invasion of Iraq. A lot of people died then, and in the intervening two decades. As if two monumental wrongs can make a right.

I saw how the USSR came apart at the seams and how wars flared up between people who have been living side by side for 50 years in relative peace. I saw Armenians and Azeris serving one another killing blows. I saw Moldova being torn apart by Gagauz (Turkish) separatists backed by Moscow. I saw Russia in the midst of a KGB-instigated Communist coup.

In the early and mid 90s, I saw Yugoslavia breaking up, with the assent of the United States of America, and active aid of Germany. I saw people visiting incredible crimes on one another. And while sipping my supper lemon tea in our comfortably safe living room in Bucharest, Romania, I saw on TV images of people behind concentration camps’ barbed wire, being starved to death by Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. I saw the bloody siege of an entire modern city that only eight years prior had been at the center of the winter 1984 Olympics.

I gazed upon Serbian soldiers celebrating Christmas above Sarajevo, by adorning trees with festive hand grenades. How peculiar, eh! How un-Christ like and how morally wrong!

In 1999, I watched NATO bombs go off in Nis, in Belgrade, from the safe distance of the northern bank of the Danube. I also saw people filling up their cars with cheap gas and Diesel and haul it to the southern bank, to help our Serbian neighbors, and also make some deutsche marks in the process, like good capitalists.

I also watched on TV, from a distance and retrospectively perhaps, how a Chinese man stopped a tank with a stare. I saw how a crowd of East Germans mad for freedom, undid a legacy of terror, and took down a dark pervading regime of informants, collectivism, & its grey symbol, the Wall.

And then, after all these horrors, which have marked my formative years, one fall day, as I strolled up and down the busiest square in the middle of downtown Bucharest, I watched in horror three planes bring down upon two skyscrapers and the Pentagon. I watched it all on a bunch of huge TV screens that stopped us all in our tracks.

I knew then and there that the world, my world, would never be the same.

I saw the Chechen wars: the First and the Last. And to the people thinking that Russia is going down in defeat, I say this.

I saw Russian soldiers’ heads being consumed whole by feral pigs inside their cities, when the poor blokes returned home in body bags, only to be discarded carelessly outside their morgues by uncaring undertakers.

I saw those images and so did the whole world, including Russians. And still they came back from the defeat of the 1st Chechen War and got Dudayev with a rocket while the man was making a phone call in the middle of a field.

I realized that Russians always but always start their wars by losing but finish strong. That’s their tradition. That’s their thing since times immemorial.

When I was but a wee kid, in the 80s, I remember seeing the horrible war propaganda images displayed by both the Iranian and Iraqi embassies on their compounds’ walls, showcasing each other’s disregard for the laws of war and humanity. I saw what chemical warfare does to civilians caught outside in the open without a mask.

Later on, I found out how much money the West and the East made, by sending such weapons of war to monsters who used their own civilians as cannon fodder.

I saw the Intifadas building up into an orgy of mutual murder, and reciprocated hatred in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper.

So, yeah, I lived in motherfucking interesting times. And a whole lot of good it did me!

To live through such times is not a blessing, my friends. It is a curse. Because why? Because if you live long enough you see peaceful places, safe-havens, beautiful locales featuring wonderful, civilized people turn to dust, its inhabitants bent on taking revenge for real or imagined crimes, all hellbent on murdering one another.

And yeah, the more you live, the more you witness War, Pestilence, Mayhem, and Chaos engulf your world, your very own little vantage point, and you realize that it’s all for naught.

By the time your time is up, you come to understand the futility of your existence amidst all these unending trials and tribulations. And you start wishing for it to end. You cease wanting to live, to exist a moment longer, to take another breath on this majestic yet pestilent planet. Because frustration becomes the central theme, the core motif of your existence. You see how each generation of degenerates repeats the errors, the myriad errors of their imbecilic ancestors, and you want it all to stop.

But that’s just me. I am pretty sure, y’all enjoy yourselves without a moment’s thought at all this hubbub. And that’s good. That’s perfect. Because the world needs its denizens to feel good about themselves. After all, what’s the point of changing the way we behave, we do business, or go about our lives?

There is no point, right?!

In the end, what I think is worth less than nothing.

Actions, ladies and gentlemen is what separates good people from animals.

Animals survive. People thrive.

And forget me for saying this, but I don’t see a lot of thriving around the globe.