The Great War of the Worlds

The Tragedy of Humanity

They were the last years of the 19th century, and humanity was experiencing a high point in its history. The human species had managed to set foot on every piece of land that covered the world's oceans. The Earth, populated by the largest bipedal species that had ever existed, was in a time of change and remodeling. Human activity had already managed to change the face of the planet's surface with its structures and cities, but the moment that marked a radical change occurred in the nineteenth century of the human calendar.

Humanity has always had a sense of community, which has led it to develop ideas and thoughts. These communities have often had to face clashes with other human groups and peoples, groups that, for the most part, have always had their own ideas. Unfortunately, humanity has never been characterized as a species that is, in principle, understandable with respect to other visions of the world, which has always led to... disagreements.

Much more than we would like to admit, violence and war have been the daily bread on which men have fed their people, women and children. A bread, twisted, that has led to the progress of the human race, in an unethical and shameful way, but progress nonetheless. Throughout history, humanity has evolved cognitively, developing a broader understanding of reality, an understanding that has often helped to enhance people's happiness and lives, as well as destruction and death.

The character of the individual has endowed these "bipedal apes" with a sense of self-preservation and self-importance incomparable to any other species -those above Earth probably thought-. Life seeks not only the relationship with its environment or nutrition; what it longs for is subsistence, to live at the cost of any sacrifice. Life seeks to expand, avoiding an end that, in human eyes, is always tragic. This is one of the pillars on which the psyche of every human being who has lived and who has inevitably died has been supported. The desire for eternity, to avoid the fear of death, has pushed the human species to the fastest social and technological development that has ever been experienced on Earth. A development that hid a desire, that of knowing if at some point we would understand the world enough to avoid the tragic end that awaits all living beings. A desire that has always sought to feed ambition and individual well-being, desires for greatness that have often culminated in horrendous, but human tragedies.

The result of the search and realization of desire has always concluded in the use of power. A power that would allow one to prevail over others, to live happily and better compared to other mortals, without minimally considering what was wanted to be hidden with person overvaluation or the contempt and undervaluation of others. And no matter how much you try to deny or hide, unfortunately, history is full of massacres and destruction, which show the inappropriate use of power and the fact that man is never prepared to assume a responsibility beyond himself. All conflicts are staged by the ambition and refusal of each other to understand other visions of the world.

And it doesn't finish there: the continuous use of advances, all redirected to sentence millions of innocent people to death because of opinion, thought or the way of life which many, many times involving children and the elderly in a conflict foreign to their reality. The most striking example of this is the aggressive imperialism and colonialism with which European nations have subjugated the peoples of the world without even the slightest consideration whether those peoples wanted such a drastic change. An imperialism whose only desire was to magnify the nation, exploiting the subjugated. There are few examples of European nations that, even resorting to violence in their territorial expansion, ended up leading civilization on their conquered lands.

But not only conflicts make up the eternal cancer installed within our collective consciousness. The unique ability of the human being to despise his own kind is incomparable; differences in birth, whether due to parents, place, time or a difference due to the skin tone or sex of the newcomer to the world, can be freely criticized. That subtlety has been enough to delimit walls and borders that mark the value of people, a value that has never done justice to true personal relevance.

And all for what? What has been achieved in the end with that? Have any ambitions or ideologies achieved everything they wanted?

Now, there is nothing on Earth that can remove original sin, our cancer, from the Being, from Homo, since whether one wants to believe in the visions of one or another, it is perfectly related that, after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: - "...behold, the man is like one of us, knowing good and evil...", and as history shows, in the end; - "the wickedness of men was great on Earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually."               

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Be that as it may, there is one thing we must remember. In the intrinsic reality of the Cosmos, few things are absolute, and the few things that are neither err nor die. Therefore, although the reality of human nature has often been drove by instincts, enhanced by the awareness of fear and debauchery, that "awareness" has also given rise to a new and recreational attitude once it is compared with existence.

The human being is not a white picture, but neither it is black, tehe truth is gray, sometimes light gray, someothers dark gray, very dark. Despite it, people have been able to show that "kind" and compassionate side everyone can develop. It seems that only we as "rational beings" have managed to develop and enhance this characteristic. Like the many examples of death and destruction, the history of human beings has also shown its kindest face, with help, love and peaceful struggle for goodness and respect.

Man has gone through a process of intellectual and ethical evolution that has allowed us to perceive a sense of morality, knowledge that allows us to show the best and the worst of individuals. The human mind and heart have defined every step our civilization has taken: every caress from a mother to her child, every act of altruism for others, every sacrifice made to protect others and... every mockery and contempt, every blow and abuse, every trip and trap...; Every effort and work, every ego and ambition, every act of justice, every act of empathy, every death and murder, every life desired and every massacre committed, every act of brotherhood and every act of suffering, everything and more make up the human being.

When it is understood the greatness of creation it is when we can observe and understand the eternal cycle of human being in which he stumbles, again and again, the eternal stone that crosses on the path of humanity. A depressing reflection, if you take into account what we had to live through, because at that time, we could not imagine that someone more powerful than our soldiers, than our spirit and our conviction, would come to our world, to our lands and homes, with the same objective as all expansionist nations. And even then, we had troubles to take away all our differences to face the enemy together. We couldn't concieve the image of beings equal to or superior to us, aware of reality but alien to our daily lives. Sounds familiar?

What we had to live after 1914 was the return of all our hatred and desire, we received again the suffering generated, as a punishment. One intended to reprimand us for our actions against others, a punishment undoubtedly of divine proportions—the apocalypse—with the only subtlety that the punishment did not come from God, although it did come from heaven.

It was 1914, the year in which our penance began, the tragic year.