The Curse of Emptiness

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!

from Peace by Rupert Brooke

We live in a time of relative peace, or at least in a country which is fortunate enough to be located in a region with peace-loving neighbours. Our generation has no direct experience of war.

My parents lived through the World War II and the Japanese occupation of Malaya. WW2 defined and shaped their generation. We can only imagine the horrors of war through Hollywood movies and history lessons. But they seem so distant and remote. It is no wonder that every generation has to learn the lessons of war anew.

European countries welcome the onset of World War I in August 1914 in a mass exhibition of misguided patriotism. It felt like the right thing to do--a war to end all wars and one that would finally give a worthy cause for a restless generation to prove their worth. How wrong they were. A generation of young men was sacrificed because of it. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Do we possess the wisdom and foresight to avert future wars? Far from it, I'm afraid. For the simple reason that a human lifetime is short. Lessons from history books only enlighten the privileged few who bother to learn. Invariably, we are driven by our selfish instincts, not only to survive and procreate, but to possess and to dominate. Hence, we continue learning the lessons of history the hard way--through war and suffering.

For we humans are not creatures of pure reason. What defines our humanity are our passions. And passions get easily inflamed by rhetoric and beliefs. We are but suckers for the romance of ideologies and religion, without which we feel empty and restless.

Every new generation is blessed with energy and cursed with emptiness. Emptiness is merely directionless energy. Harness them wisely and channel them towards progress and creation. The alternative is simply war and destruction.