Apparently I'm a Warrior

The person preaching in the subway station said so. Not to me in particular, but to everyone who woke up in the morning and brushed their teeth and washed themselves and went to work. This happened at one in the afternoon, so the amount of warriors passing the preacher may not have been as numerous as it would have been between eight and nine, but I for one was awake before noon and relatively clean and heading to work to fight the good fight of paying for part of my rent once the paychecks are finally processed some time in the future. Hopefully next week before rent is due. If it doesn't, and I was a different sort of person , I would have to resort to warlike activities to pay the landlord.

Robbery is a warlike activity. The main difference that in one case the decision is made by people with legal authority within the political structure that they inhabit and one is not. And one is done on a much greater scale than the other. The purpose of war is usually to take something from one group of people so that someone else, usually the taker, can have it. The character of Robin Hood may have had good intentions, but he was still a robber. If Sherwood Forest was a country, then Little John would have been a war hero. War is government-sanctioned robbery in which the intended victim fights back, and if I intended to make someone a victim that person would fights back and win because I'm not that kind of warrior. A career blue common criminal is a warrior because they ignore risks on a regular basis to do what they think they should be doing. Is being a warrior necessarily a good thing?

Last night I played a game of poker on facebook. I came in fourth and lost 5000 points which has a monetary worth of nothing, but that's not why I'm mentioning it. There were several people of Arab descent living in Western countries playing in the game, and two of them were siblings. Brother and sister. One of the other players made a relatively innocuous comment about the sister's facebook picture, and the brother got mad about it. Really mad. And the original commenter certainly could have used more tact, but the dialogue got disturbingly violent. There were threats (probably, hopefully empty) of finding the person who made the comment about the sister and blowing up his family all over some comments that were deemed offensive. Because that's what warriors do. Not make threats, but act on them.

I think the world could use a lot less warrying and a little more worrying, but it shouldn't be dominated by either.