And After All the Game-Playing, There Are the Children...

[Seanachai]

Well, as we know, there's No Politics Here. Feck that. Buggered, Banned, Removed, Sent Elsehwere. Gone.

No, we're all about that intense moment of analysis. That moment when it all comes into focus. That moment when we can leave guilt behind, and leave behind every dead child.

But, you know, they're always there. Small vacant eyes staring up at the stars, dead.

So, I'd like to start up this weirdest of all threads. I'd like to start up the 'Dead Child' thread.

I'd like to make it the point of everyone who posts here to post something about the children who've died. It's not so hard, eh? They're there ever day.

And while we are busy about equipment, and war, and fighting, and politics, and fighting, and gaming...

Every day children die.

So

I give you this space. A space where children die. They die every day.

If you have to compete about right and wrong, you can compete here. About children dying.

Oh, man. The whole political forum was banned long ago. Thank the gods.

But you know...

Everyone who posts here...

Sometimes, children die...

[Homo ferricus]

light a candle to the children who never had it coming, but got it anyway.

The unlucky kids who catch a stray bullet, fragments from a bomb, or detonate an old unused landmine while happily prancing along somewhere.

they had no say in their fates, and they perished. Hundreds of thousands of dreams unfulfilled, families not raised, joys not had, relationships not made.

For the kids who died for the phrase "Semper Fidelis"

i ask that we all get over the cheesiness and clicheness of such comments to really take a moment and think about whats going on with the children of Earth.

[Dave H]

How can anyone think in terms of "right and wrong" when it comes to the deaths of children? Can we really be that cold-blooded?

Warfare's end product is always dead children. That's the single permanent result. Rulers and forms of government and economic status and national boundaries change. Only the dead stay the same forever.

I'm sure this is a subject wargamers are not going to flock to - it might spoil the <font size=6>FUN</font size> factor of the games.

[Michael Dorosh]

Holy MF-ing dog****. Bad enough all my close friends are dropping like flies from mental illness, spiraling out of control beyond my ability to help, but now my internet touchshtones are apparently equally incapacitated (or just really, really drunk.) I've got people divorcing their spouses for career gains across the continent, weighing university vs. career and coming up with "both" for the answer, turning their basements into swimming pools, trading companionship for well organized bookshelves, and hell, even my mom is bragging about having her leg sawn off and reattached with bionic parts. I'm scared to go over there lest she hit me with her crutches. Again.

When the cutie at the bookstore starts flirting with me and complimenting on my hair, I know the world has gone mad. And she has. And she shouldn't. So it obviously did. Has. Whatever.

Mental disease? Supposed to affect 1 in 4 of us. I think I finally got the percentages running that way. But I'm holding out hope it is only Spring Fever.

Dr. Dorosh's prescription is simple...GET OUT AND TAKE A WALK, YOU FRIGGING TIT!

Some recent pics of one of mine in the last couple of weeks.

Look at the beauty in the little robin red breast. And if that doesn't turn your crank,

Then think about this neatly kept little Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Look at the chromey sleekness of this vintage toaster oven. I bet it was made in an age where Mexicans had no heavy industry - and slave labour wages for partially skilled assembly line workers were tastefully all-American.

I see a display like this, of lovingly arranged garbage cans, and think that perhaps mental illness is all relative.

The magpie is beautiful, for a critter that eats **** out of the gutter. Salsa, anyone?

A little truck porn for Abbott; in Alberta, if you don't have a truck to drive your truck around in, you're a nobody.

As sad as this sign is, the fact that it was discarded so cavalierly has me thinking - hoping - that perhaps salvation was found more suddenly than one might have hoped.

And of course, the wildlife...sweet wildlife.

Good lord, you simpering, sawed off little Michigan Hemingway. How often do you think you can assault us with this pure unadulterated ****e? I have enough genuinely sick people to worry about in real life; soon enough it will be me if you idiots keep at me like this.

So put your clodhoppers on, put your best windbreaker on - the one with the malt liquor stains and the "made in China" tags discretely cut out - and go get some air on your face. I am sure you'll find those dead children's eyes are really just the glosettes you dropped in one of your biweekly alcoholic hazes.

Drop by the bookstore; heartily recommended. The girls are smart enough to read but still not smart enough to find employment someplace that would put them out of your league. I got complimented on the grey patch of hair on my forelock - what you might be complimented on I haven't a clue, but for all that's Holy, don't try and do it with the "dead children" poetry, eh?

[Michael Dorosh]

And what the hell is THIS all about? :mad: You think you have time on your hands, Seanachai, for pissing out your bile all over us once a month and then futile attempts at redeeming yourself with talk of love and beauty and Small Emmas and whatever nonsense else you spout off like Vesuvius after a plate of aging clams? Whomever the twisted cretins are that sullied up the rolling stock of Canadian Pacific Railway so heinously, I'd say they took their time about it.

You spell nice, though, I'll give you that.

Don't be scared of approaching the wildlife, either. I know what you're thinking; a year away - maybe a month, maybe a week - from being one of those "colourful" old men in the neighbourhood park, stumbling along with three days of whiskers and the smell of pasta sauce coming from your raincoat, pockets stuffed full of candy and party favours on the off-chance that some specimen of humanity so young, so innocent, so empty of any knowledge or life experience that they might, given an accident of time and space, be disposed to break stride momentarily to ask you if you have the time. You practice your response - the proferring of gifts, the perfect accent to apply to the response, the best way to pronounce every permutation. "Eight-sixteen...Eight-seventeen...Eight-eighteen..." But the mere act of saying it aloud has condemned you to becoming that aging denizen; and so you're trapped in a self-fulfilling prophesy, and you while the time until the day you can don the raincoat in good conscience by imagining dead children, and looking at the world and demanding to know why we don't see them, too.

We have Hope, my friend. I was mistaken when I described you as a kindred spirit. Your spirit is obviously broken. My raincoat sits in the back of the closet, but were it not for two solid legs, a greying forelock and the inability to see dead children where there are none - I might be right behind you.

Off you go, then - hit the road while there is still time. And the next time you write for us, to describe your experiences, less on the dead baby side, more on the "I can't believe you can fit all that in a halter top with anything less than a Masters Degree in Physics", shall we?

[Patch]

If everyone could see the children there would be no wars.

[unsobill]

time is the best doctor or was it nicodine ?

[Moon]

Not sure what this is about, but I don't like it anyway.

Martin