Memorial: Learning from our mistakes

It’s the memorial day of 9/11. I mourn for the loss of anyone during any war. It is a greater tragedy when it is civilians who were no part of the decisions that led to the violence. 

What saddens me most, however, is that we learned nothing from it. The many people who see the whole thing as a crazy unprovked attack because the Taliban “hate’s freedom’ is part of what prevents us from preventing the whole thing from happening again.

We can not prevent these things by turning the country into a police state, subjecting women and men to cavity searches just to board a plane, and outlawing mouthwash. We can not prevent it with rhetoric, posturing and chest beating. And we certainly don't prevent it by ignoring the issues that generated it.  The first step in preventing terrorist attacks of this type is to look at what happened and why it happened.

We need to  recognize that the attacks were a direct retaliation for our interference, arming, training and support of violence and war in Afghanistan. It was exacerbated by our depletion of all financial aid and resources at once when Russia ended the war.  A country in chaos, torn apart by years of bombings, flooded with weapons which America freely sold to whoever would buy them, is very likely not to take well to us walking away at the worst possible moment and saying “sorry not our business” as their country crashes down around them.

We must  realize that the key to stopping this sort of hatred, is to put firmer better control over our weapon sales, and attack interventions.  We helped to create chaos, rule by guerrilla states, and an unprecedented hatred of American foreign policy.  

We must hold our officials accountable, and demand firmer stricter rules be placed on our distribution of weapons to terrorists and governments. We must approach with more diplomacy, and not intervene in wars where we are helping to repress and terrorize local populace.

Do not get me wrong, the attacks on a civilian population were NOT an appropriate or reasonable response to our mishandled foreign policies. However, it didn't happen in a vacuum, and now that those we hold responsible have been removed from power, we need to work to prevent creating new terrorist groups that will continue to hate us, and use diplomacy and other approaches to become the good guys again. A country people looked to for moral guidance, instead of one people hated and feared.

That’s how we honor those who died in these terrible attacks. 

Giving up a piece of self

I was 16 when I discovered gaming. I really can’t express to you how much it’s been a part of my life over the years. To say that it was the entirety of my social life for the greater portion of my adulthood, would be an exaggeration, but it would still FEEL like an understatement. I’m not really sure how I got there, but at parties, I’d wait until the party broke into some kind of game. I went to rpg’s at one point 4-5 nights a week. The other nights we’d play board games.

I went to conventions to game for days and days. I ran convention game rooms, locally and otherwise. And even to this day, I met nearly all my friends, even my non- gaming friends, through gaming. It’s how I met people, how I interacted with people, who I dealt with recreation, and it was my art. I sold board games for a small company for a while, did some freelance work for Chessex, and the Larp, oh the Larp was so pervasive in my life, that I literally had to make rules that people couldn’t talk about it around me unless it was prearranged, so I’d have some social time that wasn’t Larp related. It was everything. And I loved it.

And now for some apparently unrelated history. When I was in high school I met someone who was passionate about the calliope. He was the youngest professional calliope player in the US, and everything he did had to do with steamboats. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, his career and his art. He had one thing that overran everything else. I admired him greatly, and for many years, he was my best and dearest friend. His passion and love for steamboats music, and that painful yet beautiful loud music, were just a few of the things I loved about him.

Over the years, as these things go we did lose touch, and I have recently seen him online and learned that he kept that passion. I envy that. It seems so easy. It may not be true, he may have had doubts, but he always seemed to know he wanted to be a part of steamboats and callipopes. In some ways that part of his life seemed mapped out to me.

Despite what I say about gaming, I never totally felt that way about it. Even though I tried,  I never found a way to make it a carreer, and  I didn’t totally want to make it my life. It just became my life. I also wanted to take part in political activism, writing, comic collecting, making movies, film reviews, internet communities, polyamory activism, and participate in Unitarian Universalist conventions and committees. I did all of that, but gaming was always there, somewhere in the background. I’m 48 years old, and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.

And I’m bored with gaming. Thing is, I’ve been bored with it for a long time. I’m not sure how long. I know my rpg campaigns that I’ve run have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. It takes less and less time for to get bored with a character or a story. And for the first time, I find myself cancelling board games night to go hear music or visit art shows.  It’s holding less and less interest for me, and in some ways, that scares me.

It makes me feel great that I’m expanding my horizons. I feel like maybe now I can be a whole person. But now that I step away from it, I also recognize the obsession, and maybe I miss it. I don’t miss gaming exactly. I miss being obsessed with gaming. I miss the clarity of knowing how I wanted to spend my time. I’m more conflicted now, even more than before. I’m just not sure I want to spend all my time in rpgs and board games.

So last week I decided to stop running any rpg campaigns for at least a year, and it’s scary. Do I have a social life without gaming? Am I me?

I took a break not to long ago for a few weeks, knowing it wouldn’t last. Knowing I’d miss gaming before to long, and before that longing could completely take hold, I leaped back in. I wasn’t ready really. Maybe I needed more time. Maybe I’ll never be into it again. It’s almost like a part of me has died.

But it’s also very reassuring that there may be someone in there that’s been hiding in fantasy for over 30 years. I will still be doing some rpg, playing a character, but even that I’m drifting from.  Plus, I've always run the games, so this is a drastic new shift for me. I’ve barely taken weeks off in the last 30 years, and now I’m taking at least a year hiatus. Change is scary.