In Defense of the Fire-Bomber

“Sometimes, the only way to deal with a house fire is to help it burn, so that it consumes itself before setting the whole town alight.”

-Unknown

 We’re in a world of weapons: the newscaster and the songwriter, guns with no serial numbers, the bible and the people who twist it. If you’re not hunting someone you’re being hunted, dog eat dog is what they tell us on TV, and we believe it. We have the whole planet’s fire inside our chest, rainforest smoke in our lungs, heartbeats in sync with foreign bombings, pumping hatred for the other straight to our brains. We explode in every direction, pulled apart by all the million bad that we are not fixing all at once; do we not care about the babies left orphaned or the kids in shot up schools? It’s ceaseless, and we give up trying to put out the inferno with ballots and fliers calling for action; nobody’s ever put out a fire with paper. Why bother, when the same hands that itch to make a difference can make explosives instead. Let the fire burn hot. Let it burn it all, incinerate ten million today to save ten billion tomorrow, a generation of burning fuses finally brought to peace by bringing it all to pieces.

Owen Harries

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