We Can Only Cope

When one decides to kill oneself in the name of honor, to willingly take one's life, is it considered an incredible strength? Or an incredible weakness? Does it not take a certain kind of strong personality to muster enough courage to engineer one's own death, with one's own hands? Or is it not a complete waste of life, a total disrespect for a creation that one has no right to destroy?

War movies like Letters From Iwo Jima make me painfully aware of how fragile a person's life is, how much value it carries. In war (movies), they always somehow imply that it is not a personal vendetta against one particular individual, that it is merely a job, that the soldiers are merely taking orders from their superiors.

But what is more personal to an individual than his very own life? Of course it is personal.

I ponder this, fighting for honor, for a cause bigger than oneself. When it hurts other people, how does it remain honorable?

I wouldn't say the film was a truly different experience, because it really isn't that much different to the emotions and thoughts that past movies (Schindler's List, The Pianist) have provoked in audiences. I might even go so far as to say it's a little bit... cliché. Maybe people need to be force-fed the fact that all those deaths were not in vain, that somehow, there was some triumph.

I don't think so.

***

It's always hard to see friends breaking-up, especially when both parties are very good friends of everyone's. It's like a very messy divorce; which friend goes to whom? Even though my friends were never the type, there is still that unspoken question: "Whose side are you on?"

On the upside, it is always nice to spend time with friends who share the same interests, the same sub-culture, the same humor, and the same other-friends, if only for a short amount of time. People are back in Jeddah for the holidays, and slowly they will be going back to their temporary lives abroad, and it won't be another six months till we all get together again.

How little we know of each other.