To support my fellow comrade Hyperion, and to my fellow Rubi-kans, be they one creed or another:
I have served you. Some may not even understand or know how I have, some may not even be aware of my name or face. If you ask around, some already know my name, and if you dig deep enough, you will hear tales of the burden that I have wrestled with for so many years. Rest assured I have fought, bled, died, compromised, and had countless interactions with every day folk, young and old. Some call me a father, husband, brother, counselor, boss, criminal, hero, politician, and any other label they deemed worth to fit on me that suited them. For those that like to commerce in labels, you would definitely seem to have the pick of the lot.
I won't come to you under any of those pretenses, but simply as a man who lives and breathes and works with his own two hands and whatever fate may have blessed me with to do what it is that I do. I can't say I have any particular vision of peace that will appeal to everyone, and I have no real pressing need to prove my worth over another. If however, you have commerce with seeing a job to its completion, then you...even at weapons end, then I may as well call you family.
It's harsh to live in our world. That's the simple truth of it. Everyday we live with our own fears and doubts and hatred, each individually customized to fit our own personal neuroses. But, there will always come times.. as hard as they are, that we will be called upon to show our merit. The best thing in life, is to bare the burden of service to our fellow people. Above and beyond any differences we may have, we are in this together. The only boundries we truly have, are those we have placed upon ourselves. Useful, however tragic they may be, its necessary to step outside that box and realize that hatreds are petty, and nearly useless. On a long enough time line, finding focus and motivation through resolve of will, wisdom, and temperance, are far better for the whole, and less taxing on others. Anyone who has reached a level of position can agree.
I'm not saying we need to fill the streets and dance and hug one another, living on an idea or a dream. However, that being said: We always have choices. No one can take that from you. We are born into this world armed to the teeth with the arsenal of words, strong emotions, and physical and spiritual capability. If there is one thing that is true throughout our history, is that we place a high value on how strong we are in how we master our abilities.
We constantly build bigger, nastier, and more powerful arsenals based upon our chosen paths all the time. It has been this way since the first primitive picked up a club and struck another primitive. Another found a stone to be much more deadly than the stick. Come tens of centuries later, we collectively have the means to destroy whole worlds. We level our weapons at our enemies constantly. But the saddest tragedy of this is that we save the biggest and the worst to fight each other with.
Is this the way it needs to be? Can we, as people, afford to allow this to continue? Forget the lines that divide us, and come to the most common of elements and realize that skin colour, eye colour, political outlook, size, religious creed, racial, or any other difference.. real or imagined.. is this anything but a lack of mastery of ourselves? I invite anyone, using common sense or otherwise, to prove to me that force of arms is anything but an ultimate tool of imposition. Given no real path to understanding, it is always our final choice. That force of arms wins in either side, and we loose something more valuable in the process: Each other.
Believe me when I say, people power is greater than anything. Without people, we have no way. Our planet is a useless spec of dirt in a cosmic torrent of matter and energy, all twisting in ways that even our deepest understandings of nanotechnology can delve.
Is it tragedy that if we cant fix something, we just simply destroy it?
And if we simply destroy, do we not save all our most powerful weapons for each other?
An ancient philosopher once said to the effect of: No empire on our Earth has ever truly gained anything by the utter destruction of that which was intended to be ruled.
Is this our fate? Are we the masters of worlds? How can we master worlds when we can't even master ourselves! Conceptually, we admire our strengths and detest our weaknesses. But the truest hope of peace likes in supporting our strengths and our weaknesses. Support means service. My vision isn't of supporting any one idea or notion, but all of them that make sense to me. My loyalty isn't to any one concept over another, because it places favouritism over something. I might be clan, but only because my clan life allows me to place my choices of focus over the widest array of issues. This is the path for me. It need not be the path for everyone, nor would I tell you to join me based upon this. Our individual destinies are our own to decide how they develope. If there is to be a line between us, whom has the most to gain for this?
And by everything we hold dear, we can turn it all against our common enemies. It is known to us, by far and large, that the Kyr'Ozch are wanting to exterminate us. Their strength does not lie in their weaponry or their mass destruction by the way we design ours. Their strength lies in their unity and numbers. A strength we also possess. It is logical to assume that it is fruitless to point our largest and most powerful weapons of mass destruction at ourselves, when a great enemy lies at our very gates, smashing it down without care nor consolation of our people.
Ladies and gentleman, we may celebrate our own differences. But, in the light of a common enemy, that knows no observable similarities or parallels, we must adapt to strike back. We have developed for time immemorial, the evolution how to kill each other, but the force that would kill us all, we have yet to liberate ourselves from.
People of Rubi-ka, despite all this, I am proud to be one of you. So in my compassion for my fellow man, woman, and child, let our focus not be on each other, but to our most common of enemies. No one in this entire universe can know what we are going through nearly as much as we do. Entire tracts of land, sectors, and yes.. even in our VERY HOMES they tread into, looking to destroy us as some sort of surface nuisance to be exterminated.
They could be seen as a force of nature, but then again... so can we!
We are the masters of all that we survey, and this means we are the storms of the sand, the rage of the winds and waters, the most daunting of mountains, and the most dreadful of lava cauldrons and volcanoes. Our minority conquered barriers since the very dawn we picked up rocks and sticks and beat back the shadows to their respective corners. We are the most fiercest denizen this world has ever known. We have, with our very hands and lives, forged ourselves this planet as it is known today. Rubi-ka is wonderous and fantastic, with stockpiles and armouries and the history of OUR ENTIRE RACE to back up our claim that we are indeed its masters.
Let us throw ALL that at them! Let them see OUR resolve, OUR service, and OUR unified front against them. Let THEM see that we too can fight without fear, for all of our minority WE ARE LEGION!
Above this all, know beyond the edge of a doubt, that WE are strong: WE are the PAST, and WE ARE THE FUTURE! Stand strong in your resolve, and WE will have victory over the darkness once more! It is no easy task, but then again, nothing worth doing well, is. But here I stand, convinced that we can. Forget the lies and the manipulations that hold us back. If one must, simply set it down for now, and pick up former issues at another time. After all, what good is the state of one's face.. if our head is to come free of our shoulders?
It is by very definition that division holds us back.
Let us now show, that we are of one mind, one action, and one resolve. We are stronger than they. We can do this. And I won't lie to you people, as we have so much to loose. But, on the same token, we have everything to gain.
