It Never Changes

Have you ever taken a photo, written, drawn, or made something and once completed thought, wow...that says something? That's what happened when I took this. In my previous post, I was talking about searching for a story in a photo and having one shoved in your face. Well, that happened again. I wasn't looking for anything particular, I was meandering around until something made me stop. I took a photo of a big room, but at first couldn't see what had caught my eye. Something made me stop though, something.

I shrugged it off and thought that I would find something when I was editing all of these. And boy did I. The first thing is, this wasn't easy to catch. The light is flickering on and off, and getting all three letters to be evenly lit is quite the measure. I know what you're thinking.."Jaz, why dont you just set your exposure, hold down the continuous shutter button and clickclickclickclickclick away?"

Well, you're right. Thats what I did.

In any case, this photo spoke to me. It spoke to me almost exactly like the openings of every Fallout game:

"War. War never changes.The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.But war never changes."

Imagine that spoken with a grizzly and graveled man's (like Ron Perlman, here) voice and that's exactly what I heard when I saw this.

In any case, back to the topic at hand.

Many people believe that with the technological advancement of our civilization, it will eventually yield to a utopian society. Unfortunately, while the technology changes, humankind remains essentially the same. The 'sophisticated' problems we deal with today are the same basic obstacles humans have dealt with for ages. The platform, the props, the characters, and the deities have all been updated..but the same rudimentary plot remains.

These problems, I believe, are buried deep within the human tendencies. The obvious one is the ultimate need for power. It's not just plain ambition, no..it's insatiable, tragically. Time and time again history has repeated itself over and over and over..its almost as if we have never learned a thing.

War never changes.

It's always about the same thing, greed. That deep-seated want of money...or to inevitably be supreme ruler..to own the entire universe. We all fight for it, all of us at one point or another. To have a 'perfect' society we would need humans to drop these traits and adopt newer, refreshing ones. Superhuman trait's even. For more on that I suggest you read about Nietzsche's Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Now, where was I going with this? Nevermind....something something war is a chess match. Here's another photo taken from inside the same building: