3-1 + Cynicism

First day of March. Rain and wind wakes me up at 5 o'clock and precedes to rain like I have seen few times before. It is significantly cooler as I sit with the open wondow at my back with cool breeze entering in. The breeze is always welcome but this one comes without the humid air which often surrounds it, and with much less heat.

Reading the morning paper:
"AFRC Loses Appeal"
Alex Brima, Brima Kamara, Santigie Kanu, all convicted of mass murder, gang rape, child sioldiering, difigurement, and raiding villages. "The victims were babies, young children and mena and women of all ages." Sentence? 50, 45, and 50 years consecutively between them. Kidding me? Not even life sentences for some of the worst crimes in human history.

"Saving the Gongkoma forest from AK-47 Rifles"
At a village so isolated that it has seen its first automobile as the conservationists arrived has had problems with a specific tree being cut dowen for the production of AK-47 rifles. The forest had been untouched for a century and now good-for-nothing 20th and 21st century weapons are decimating it. War and the land can never co-exist, one is there at the cost of the other. People who have never seen a car before have regularly seen the most mass-made and brutal weapons. Yes, the world is growing smaller, but sometimes I am sorry that it is.

And then, the midst of a small West African newspaper are recorded the progress reports of the U.S. primaries in OH and TX. I feel so exasperated when the bias leans toward one egocentric nation. How can we stop thinking about our own small North American world if the rest of the world is so hell-bent on talking about us? Record holding events such as one of the first democratic elections in Sierra Leone ever are covered up with reports about a single car bomb in Iraq or new, daily, incessant reports about which Democratic candidate will the Democratic candidate. I feel like America is sleepwalking off a cliff of narcissism.

Forgive my negativity, it really was a good morning, one that I spent relaxing and writing. It just seems that some things always cut through anything good.