Living Minesweeper.

One of my favorite time-killers back at home was Minesweeper.  You know, the game on your PC that has the little guy with the happy face and the gray grid, and you click on squares and try not to kill the happy face.  I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.

 

Before leaving Osijek, our
contacts Winnie and Aaron warned us not to pitch tents in random
fields. They might be unmarked minefields. Apparently, much like in
the States, people in Croatia like to steal warning signs. So that
nice-looking patch of grass just outside town may very well be a
death trap.

 

We walked past one of those
random unmarked fields on our way to the grocery store on Monday
night.

 

I can’t imagine growing up
in a war zone.  You can see the toll of the conflict in the people.  No one really walks with purpose.  No one really has high aspirations for their life, or any aspirations, for that matter.  People are sucked into the world of materialism and appearance, and try to satisfy themselves with more clothing, more beer, more cigarettes, more sex, et cetera.  Even the school kids depressed me.

 

 

I don’t know a lot about the
conflict in Yugoslavia back in the 90’s (mostly because I spent most
of my time being concerned with the newest shipment of Beanie
Babies), but I cannot imagine living through bombs exploding in
downtown Pittsburgh. I have no frame of reference for what the
Serbians and Croatians went through during those years. I learned
about the conflicts in Bosnia in elementary school, of course, but
learning about something half a world away is completely different
than going to sleep with the sounds of land mines resonating in your
ears.

 

If I had grown up in
Yugoslavia, I would have been living in a war zone from preschool
through ninth grade. Bombs would have been exploding outside my
schoolyard. Government buildings would have been burning around me.
I might go to school one day to discover that three of my classmates
had lost their fathers and brothers.

 

The last time war hit
American soil was December 7, 1941. And that was in Hawaii. There
hasn’t been war in the lower forty-eight since the Civil War, and
that was our own doing.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever been struck by such a quiet need.  I can almost hear their insides screaming.