The Great Nothing

I’ve been reading so much War Literature lately, which I used to hate, that I’m starting to compare this world with theirs, because it really does seem like a completely different dimension. Most of the writers say that the world would never be the same, after that. And it wasn’t, of course, but I think they meant it in a different way (it would never heal, we would never forget). After all that, all that killing, all that horror, all those people with shell-shock, all those people who mourned, all those people who watched and feared and felt it and here I am, in my house, so complacent and safe, reading about it as if it were some fictional event that didn’t ruin people.
I mean, there is a war going on right now, but it’s not like the Great War, though it seems ridiculous to scale and judge wars, really...
But, despite that, the people I encounter every day, it’s like war doesn’t exist to us. All these teenagers complaining, it’s so...so pathetic. Am I being too harsh? I don’t really know a lot, I’m young, and in my world most of the time, but bloody hell...it’s like today is the generation of nothingness. Like we’re caught in limbo. The incredible advancement in technology, with the invention of internet and TVs and DVDs seems to just have passed. We’re not quite in the bulk of the environmental bettering, only at the edge of realising that we have to do something fast. Even our stupid war seems to be fighting for nothing at all. It’s so mocked, so ridiculous looking, with Bush’s face plastered as its icon. No revolutions, no great records, the majority of people idolising bulimics and drug-addicts and scandals. We are a generation of cowards, hiding behind computer screens and blog-spots instead of conversations.
When I read about the war it’s like they, as horrible as it was, realised what they were. The war stripped them of everything; every froth-corrupted lung, every uncut wire, every piece of shell shock bared them open until they discovered what they were, the animal before human. I guess that’s what’s bothering me. The people back in 1918 were so in pain because they had been stripped bare, because the wounds were left on a surface that could not heal. And us, we have so many layers we don’t know which ones are ours and which ones aren’t. We don’t know what lies beneath. Too much make-up, too many things we dare to say on the web and not out loud, too many times when we are too socially aware to do what we think is right until I wonder if we can truly know what we are, in this world we have created of artificial colouring, preservatives, synthetics, fake materials, pseudo pills and temporary jobs. Do we have any real principles?
I’m not promoting war, at all. Obviously. It’s not that I want a war to teach us who we are. What they found at the end of those layers wasn’t beautiful or great at all. I’m just saying that we don’t, we don’t know. I just don’t know how we can all be so accepting of this falseness when it makes me so sick.

And though the sunset is orange and pink and red, red, red, the light that filters through the window is white and transparent and normal, as if telling of a war that couldn’t touch us.
Somehow, that didn’t make me feel better at all.