From: bodyjackal@aol.com (Bodyjackal)
Subject: The Wall
Date: Tue Mar 07 01:57:55 MET 1995

The Wall

     Come to the wall, my children, my children's children.
     Come and admire the smooth cool marble, feel the chiseled
inscriptions in the glossy surface. Run your fingers over the
names, countless names stretching across the face of each slab
that sits imbedded in the green grassy earth, rich with the smell
of spring. Each name was a person, each name a life cut short.
These names are special, have power all their own, the love and
the meaning that only those who cherished the living could impart
to the recently dead. The delicately carved letters are a tribute
to sorrow, to memory, to love.
     But they are also the supreme monument to futility.
     Why futility? Because it never had to happen, only came
about through stupidity and ignorance of all common sense. They
never had to die, but they did, because humans are too selfish
and shortsighted, and don't care enough to protect the innocents
from the consequences of other's guilt.
     You'll never know what it was like, in the days that these
names were living people, who walked and breathed and loved just
as you or I. I pray that you will never see such days, that no
one will ever have to do such things as we were forced to do.
Some horrors should be laid to rest forever, in a place where
man's stupidity and selfishness will never again bring them to
light. We suffered enough, so that no one else would have to
suffer.
     Even now you do not understand why those who answered to
these names had to fall quiet, had to take their place in silent
graves. Your parents were not yet born when the foundations all
came down, would not be for another decade. Back then things were
different, back then death was so much closer. All of us knew
him, felt his cold touch in some way as we walked through the
ever-narrowing corridors of our days. Even though he was so
close, we thought we were immortal, young and invulnerable.
     Oh, we knew everything there was to know, heard endless
speeches and read endless reports about how we could die too.
It's different, though, to hear a thing, than it is to feel it.
You don't know what death is until you look it in the face and
know that it will always win, because sometimes there's no other
way.
     It took a long time for us to come to know death. For some
the encounter was faster than others, as they watched loved ones
leave and never come back, watched them struggle for breath and
find none, or as they lay and the grim specter leaned down out of
the cold and took them away from everything living and warm and
loving. In the end there was no way to hide, for it was just too
close to home. No longer could we pretend it was some other
world, so far removed from our day to day lives. No longer could
we ignore the pain and the knowledge that it would only continue,
could only get worse.
     The reasons why the decision was made will never be clear to
those that weren't there, weren't watching the ever-rising body
counts and subject to the constant media bombardment. It wasn't
just the high-minded rhetoric about human rights or any one of
the thousands of liberal ideas carved from the bleeding heart of
a nation too wrapped up in the details to remember that every
hard choice that has to be made exacts a price. It wasn't just
the fear, that irrational gut-twisting paranoia that grew despite
all the rationalization, all the intellectualism or education. It
was merely the realization that it had to end sometime, while we
still possessed the means to douse the flames before they became
an inferno that consumed the whole world.
     The dead lay numberless in the dust, lined up in rows of
black body bags, waiting to be committed to the gaping maws of
violated earth that were the mass graves dug by sweating men in
the summer heat. The dead can wait forever, but living cannot
afford to. I'll never forget that grisly labor, the endless
flickering string of days and nights that all ran together, faces
that all merged into one. They portray it now as a painless
thing, death coming in the quiet solitude of introspection. I'll
be the first one to tell you that it's a lie. Most of the poor
damned souls never knew what hit them, but it wasn't an easy
death. Their tortured bodies bore mute witness to the agony of
the last few hours, silent cries for aid that we could not heed,
only bury where we could not hear them.
     And when it was all over there was no more emotion left to
spend in grief, only hollow empty memories and endless bitter
questions. The questions twisted with each new answer, became
debates, became witch-hunts, everyone looking for someone else to
blame, someone to pay for what had happened.
     All the fruitless searching came to nothing. They never
knew, really, why it had happened. It took them years to even
discover what had happened, to find the records that were never
meant to be made public. The truth was so monstrous, so brutal,
that many couldn't deal with it. It all almost came apart, then,
all that we had suffered falling meaningless because there was an
answer that no one wanted to hear.
     It took a long time to put things back together again, pull
them away from the brink and go on with lives that everyone had
to pretend were just the same. It wasn't until the next
generation came along that they erected this wall, the marker for
all those dead, the final symbol of all the old wounds that at
last had to heal because they couldn't bleed forever.
     Look to the wall, though, and see each name, know that every
last one means nothing compared to the greater scope. The tragedy
lies not in how many died, but why they had to die. You'll never
see the names of those that suffered but went on, the ones that
weren't the victims but were nevertheless victimized, the ones
that had to pick up the pieces that the dead left behind when at
last someone realized the way to end it all.
     And you'll never see the name of the man that brought this
all about, the one who made the hardest choice of all, the choice
for everyone else. He was the one that brought this terrible
chapter of human history to a close, the one who released the
tailored bioagent that sought out and killed every last man,
woman, and child that had the virus. Every last one died, each
one that carried within them the seed of mankind's destruction,
as the toxins slowly built up within their bodies, over days,
over weeks. It was a faster death than they would have known, but
in the end they all would have known death.
     He was the one that stood and accepted the burden of all the
deaths, all the tears, all the guilt as his terrible creation
swept indiscriminate death through every host in order that the
enemy would be exist no more, threaten no one else with the
shadow of a vague and future death.
     How they hated him, burned him in effigy in a thousand
thousand towns and cities. How they cursed him, even as they dug
the graves, even as the hour of their freedom was upon them. For
he had made them face the truth while at the same time saving
them from their own folly. Every carrier was a walking dead man,
and he just helped the process along.
     He didn't do it to ease the suffering, nor because he
thought they had some nonsensical "right to die". It was because
he knew that the virus would someday mutate, even as it had done
a hundred times already. He knew someday, one of those mutations
would one day be able to survive outside a living host, and on
that day humanity would fall over the brink into the long dark
abyss we had balanced above so long. There were those who said it
would never happen, that there would be a cure; or said that the
mutation would prove beneficial, for the virus that kills its
host is maladapted, in the end jeopardizing itself. But he
wouldn't allow that gamble, betting on an unintelligent virus to
realize what homo sapiens could not. The stakes were just too
high.
     So in return for the gift of their lives, of humanity's
collective life, they arranged trials of his crimes, the crime of
not being a miracle worker, unable to bring the dead back from
the grasp of the dead, but only capable of saving the living.
Perhaps he deserved the sentence they passed upon him, the
justice they demanded. Or was it merely vengeance, for making
them suffer the actions of others?  I don't know, and there is
not one man today that could tell me.
     For you see, no matter what the verdict, no matter what the
punishment, it meant nothing. He died along with all the others.
Of all those whose names are upon this wall, only he went to his
grave because he would not allow anyone else to suffer the same
fate, the same future. That is why only he could have done this
thing, for he was one of them.
     Come to the wall, my children.
     Come and touch the pale crimson stone. A good man died, so
many died, so that you could be here today, looking upon this
wall as the sun sets over a horizon that holds no threats carried
in the blood of strangers, in the embrace of friends.
     Don't forget the price paid to build this wall, separating
the past and the future forever, sealed away beneath mounds of
dirt capped by unchanging rock.


Copyright 12 Dec 1994 Joshua D. Work
Lit.Free: Open distribution without alterations or compensation

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Don't think this can't happen. There is already a water-borne variant
infecting certain whale species. How much longer before airborne vectors
become viable?


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