Mayhem

Today is September 14th of 2011. It is important to know that in order to set the stage  for the  emotions and thought that have gone into writing this section.  Most of us have spent the last week  reliving that horrific day ten years ago when three aircraft were deliberately crashed into  landmarks that represented  our country  to us and to the world. The tears I cried, the sadness  I felt  and the awe  of how heroic we can be when disaster strikes  are just as fresh today as they were on that morning ten years ago when  a friend called and told me to turn on the TV.

15 minutes later I witnessed  the second plane  smash into the trade center like so many millions of other people.  The third plane we did not  witness live as it slammed into the Pentagon and it was hours before we saw the crater the 4th plane made in the ground away from any population center  thanks to a group of people who were doing far more than trying to save their own lives.  There is no doubt their first thought  was protecting others as they stormed that cockpit and they did come close to saving their own lives. They did not die as victims. There is no dishonor in being a victim.  A victim is anyone who finds themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We become heroes when we try and do something about it and  we succeed or fail.  Most heroes failed on 911 as they died right alongside the  victims in horrific ways  that are hard to imagine. The heroes continue to die to this day  due to the carcinogens they were exposed to on 911 and more will die in the days to come.

As I watched  the reporters  replay  their coverage from ten years ago and comment   on that day and all the  events that were scheduled, I kept hearing one word over and over again and it was the wrong word in so many ways. They talked of the chaos of 911. 911 was not the result of chaos, 911 was the result of mayhem. This was no act of nature, this was the act of men, human beings. members of our own species who took it upon themselves to be judge, jury and executioner in what they saw as an effort to change the world to their liking. It was senseless and  it never needed to happen. The metal in the twin towers was not the only thing that failed that day, all of humanity failed because mayhem is something we could end tomorrow if we all put our minds to it.

One day we will have the technology and science to control the weather and even the ground beneath our feet but when they fail, it is chaos. A meteorite on course to strike this planet is chaos. Chaos took out the dinosaurs. Chaos snuffed out  20 thousand lives in Japan in March of this year as a tsunami wave inundated coastal villages. It was mayhem that  ended the lives of 2,996 people on September 11 of 2001.

Why do we  even hear the word chaos in reference to  that day? is there  some sort of guilt underneath  it all that  compels us to call the acts of that day what they are not?  There is no ambiguity in the definitions of both words.  Mankind owns mayhem. No other species willfully destroys itself for any reason. All species do defend themselves when attacked  and we will always have courts of law  in order to separate mayhem from self defense; There are moments in history when our legal systems have failed and the courts justify genocide but  the world recognizes the atrocities for what they are  and the perpetrators are ultimately judged for their actions. Mayhem is  blatantly obvious even when it is legalized. Self defense comes from mayhem, It was how this country was born.

I believe it is time for mankind to take a vow. We all need to step forward and commit ourselves to never using the word chaos for mayhem again. We need to own our failure as a species because the tendency will always to be to ignore it or excuse it until we do. Using the word chaos for acts of mayhem  relieves us from  the responsibility. We all know there  is very little or nothing any of us can do about chaos and many pray regularly for God's assistance in dealing with it.  If there is a God, God knows the difference between mayhem and chaos. It is time we made the distinction. If you do not believe in God then let common sense be your guide.

In a perfect world we could all go to bed tonight and vow to never  commit or  sanction an act of mayhem for the rest of our lives. That would be it. Starting tomorrow there would be no more mayhem. It is that simple and we all need to carry that thought with us for the rest of our lives. Of course we don't live in a perfect world but that is no excuse not to try. Social networking is making  the day we end mayhem  more possible. I believe that day will come. We will ultimately recognize mental illness early enough to get a handle on it. We will ultimately find a way to settle our differences. Pretty obvious that failing to find a way to solve them isn't working well for any of us. My question is why in hell put that day off when we don't have to? I know, we don't live in a perfect world but we could live in a better one people, we could.    

There are challenges. Separating mayhem from self defense is not always easy but there are rules. We won the cold war because of those rules. We committed ourselves to never launching a first strike and  we so firmly committed to it that  our potential adversaries  believed us. We also built enough firepower to annihilate anyone  who perpetrated a first strike on us  and we won the cold war with minimal skirmishes with the exception of the Cuban missile  crisis which came close to ending the world in  one horrendous  act of mayhem. In spite of all the doomsday scenarios enough of our species  would have survived it to start over but who knows what civilization would look like today. We are not out of the woods yet but the odds are remote today.

I bring up first strike because  it is all that separates mayhem from self defense in World War 2 . On December 7th , 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on the US  naval fleet and  military bases  on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The targets were mostly military and it was a first strike. 2390 people died on that day, mostly military personnel. Some stipulate this was an act of self defense by the  Japanese  as the United States  was an ally of China and the use of the American military against Japan was imminent. Still it was a first strike, an act  we later vowed to never commit in an act of war.

On August 6th, 1945 The United States dropped the world's first nuclear weapon used in an act of war on the city of Hiroshima in Japan with the reason being ending the war by forcing Japan to surrender without having to invade their country.  Japan failed to capitulate and the second and last nuclear bomb was dropped in an act of war on August 9th, 1945 on the city of Nagasaki Japan. Japan did surrender after that attack  though  some historians say it was Russia declaring war on Japan that brought an end to the conflict not  the two nuclear weapons. That argument continues to this day. The death toll from the two bombs was approximately 200,000 with many dying days or months later due to burns and radiation sickness. The death toll was hard to determine because whole families and all the records were destroyed in the blasts and there were no bodies in the immediate blast zones. Some were counted by their image that was burned into a wall or the street.  Most of those who died were civilians. Was this self defense or was it mayhem?  I know what I want it to be but that brings  me back to that underlying guilt I believe we all have when it comes to mayhem.

I think we all all ponder existence at sometime in our life. What is this all about? It is why we have faiths.  Those who do not believe in evolution, arrive at that belief because  it simply contradicts their faith to believe in it.  It took forever for a lot of people to stop believing in a flat earth for the same reason. Some still say its flat but that are considered kooks as well they should be. I think we all know they do it for publicity. If you do not believe in evolution please follow what I have to say because the message  it says is far more important than whether evolution happened and is happening. 

Dinosaurs were an evolutionary mistake. Must experts on the Jurassic age will tell you they were doomed to extinction even if there had been no asteroid that formed the Gulf of Mexico. The flora of their era, as prolific as it was, could not keep up with the voracious appetites they possessed. The biggest eating machines had gotten so big they were  impervious to predators and disease. Their food source was sanitized by nature and their hides and sheer mass protected them from the environment. If one got to close to the edge of a cliff the resulting fall produced enough protein to keep the predators and meat eaters going for months. They are not the only mistake evolution has made, There have been many. It is how evolution works. 

What about our species? It doesn't matter if we evolved  from lesser life forms, were placed here by an alien race or the hand of God, we are still a species. and there have been evolutionary changes in our species since we first appeared on this planet. We are bigger, faster, more coordinated, astronomically more intelligent, live longer and have a far greater impact on our environment than any other species has had. The evidence  continues to mount that we  are still evolving and  the rate of change is accelerating. That is all scientific fact and can be proven. That in itself is our salvation.

We are still evolving,  because if we weren't, our species would be no different than the dinosaur. We would simply be a mistake in evolution.  Why? Because for all the talk of God and creation and a divine purpose, we are the only species on this planet that is capable of mayhem. Is the goal of evolution to make  the  most intelligent life form to date one that  is continually causing havoc  and destruction  in its own environment?  I think not.

So be grateful we continue to evolve whether it happens as a result of natural selection or by divine guidance, it really doesn't matter. If we stop  evolving and nothing  changes in how we  interact with one another and our environment, we do have one tool that no other species has. We can see we are a mistake and we can vow to stop procreating and let evolution  continue its quest for a species that gets it before we destroy the environment so nothing can live in it.

Not a day goes by we don't hear. see or read about acts of mayhem. It directly touches many of our lives and we ignore or excuse it among family members and friends  as it continues to escalate until it ends in tragedy.  Then we cringe in horror when that same mayhem results in terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Is there a connection? That is for each of us to determine. That determination will be made easier if we all vow to never again  refer to an act of mayhem as chaos. We could all go to bed tonight and vow to never  support or commit another act of mayhem  for the rest of our life.  We could, we won't  but we can start the ball rolling by simply using the right word  for the wrong action.