I don’t like guns. Not because they’re weapons. People need weapons. They always have. But guns make it too easy to kill. A gun depersonalizes a kill, cheapens it. Taking a life is a sacred act, a sacrament to be performed by the Warrior.
A gun is a machine, an atrocity of artifice having nothing to do with the wholly organic act of bringing death upon another’s head. Disassemble a gun. Reduce it to its individual parts. Each of those parts is created on an assembly line – by a machine. No human touch goes into the creation of a gun, and no human touch exists between its wielder and its victim. Most people couldn’t tell you what the majority of those parts do, let alone how they act in conjunction. It’s a tragically appropriate weapon for our times. Our leaders, those who determine who is to be killed, are not warriors. They have diminished warfare to little more than terroristic destruction. They have made the men and women who follow them into battle complicit, forcing them to abandon heroism, reducing their bravery to a shadow dying as clouds blanket the sun. Honor is alien. They have transformed our fighting forces from armies of warriors to debits and credits. The nobility of a kill can’t be measured by an equation: n/t = E; n is the number killed, t, is the time elapsed, and E equals efficiency. A good kill has no business being counted in a ledger.
How ironic that our leaders have reduced life to an unmotivated commodity while you crow louder than ever of its immeasurable value. Criminally gross inflation. Why does all life come to an end if it’s sacred? Life is finite. It’s also limiting, disempowering. The Natural Order shackles us to immutable laws. It poses us questions with perpetually elusive answers. But Death is the great unknown. It possesses infinite potential. Beyond existence is a horizon with no end. While life is a brief spark that flickers and fades into ether, Death is an inferno that burns forever. If what some have speculated is true – that what lies beyond is determined by how we meet our end – then how better to greet Death than in a blaze of glory?
This is a disgraceful culture. People skitter about like vermin in the dark, oblivious to the plague they carry and leave behind like a trail of slime. But the plague they spread is no carbon-based organism, no microscopic parasite. It is fear. Countless ciphers, faceless throngs without substance or purpose, flailing every which way like a football bouncing around the turf, in a futile attempt to flee from the inescapable. Why should a natural, the only genuine inevitable in the world, inspire such dread? Because its nature is a mystery? You’re never more alive than when facing the source of horror; muscles tensed, teeth gritted, all extraneous thought exorcised, every superfluous feeling numbed. All is void but the need, the desire, the unquenchable thirst to vanquish your enemy. It’s as blinding a charge as grabbing a wire alive with electricity. To grasp that wire, to let the electrical charge course through you, to embrace the danger of it burning your insides, makes you a warrior.
A man who kills with a gun is no warrior. The Warrior does not allow a machine to snuff out his enemy’s life. He does it with his own hand. He accepts the responsibility of ushering his nemesis to his fate. He exerts himself to near collapse, where every muscle is about to snap in twain. His vision is clouded by tears of exhaustion. His blade has grown fat on blood and sweat. The Warrior can barely lift it. His legs threaten to give like dead leaves in a gale. He raises his head high one last time and looks into the soul of his foe, the one who would consign him to eternity. Their eyes lock. They are more intimately entwined than lovers. Between them arcs a crackling bolt of respect, admiration, and pity. The Warrior cleaves the air with his blade and buries it in the thick flesh of his foe. The sharpened steel drinks the blood. The kinetic force of impact rushes through the spine of the weapon, into the Warrior’s clenched hands, and envelops his being in a wave of vampiric chi. A scream of anguish and release explodes from his enemy’s throat and shatters the space between the two combatants. The enemy falls silent, then falls to the ground. There is no sound in the world comparable to a body; a lifeless husk, all energy expended, soul and will scattered to the winds like ashes; crumbling to the ground. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, the Warrior towers over the fallen cadaver. He faintly notices a scent on the air. It is the wafting sweat of the universe at work, creation and destruction commingling in their swirling fractal of cosmic order. The Warrior breathes it in and looks at his hands bathed in red.
The Warrior understands: you can only grasp your full potential with blood on your hands.
