You're right, actually. I am pretty- I'm, I'm pretty troubled and I'm, I'm pretty confused. But I. . .and I'm afraid. Really, really afraid. Really afraid. But I... I . . . I think you're the fucking Antichrist.

That movie was pretty great.
So, the world.

I went to a couple of student engineering club meetings tonight. At the first we divided up and were tasked with a fun science game: configure a sheet of paper such that it can hold as many books as possible. The group with the tallest stack of books wins. There weren't any bookshelves in the room, so we all had to chip in our massive engineering textbooks for the competition. And other books as well. My copy of The World on Fire toppled two great towers of books (including mine). Papa Toasty says ideas are the mightiest weapons. Amy Chua makes battering rams that bring the mightiest walls low.

At a different club meeting I managed to not say anything to a certain person. That was probably best the best course of action, because the person happened to be the sister of one of the club organizers, who will by some cruel twist of fate read the long, embarrassing, unproofed rant I wrote on my crappy internet blog about her sibling's speech and promptly decide to kick me off her project group.

Oh well. Here I go anyway.

A woman gave the most bizarre speech at my Engineers Without Frontiers meeting tonight. The content itself wasn't too bad: a gripping treatment of eleven years of surreal civil war and how it has left Sierra Leone the worst place to live on the planet. Much of it I had heard already, though the health angle--she was there for ten months studying infant malnutrition!!!--was a bit new. I didn't know there were so many different ways to die of malnutition; for instance, the children with the distended stomachs that appear in so many photo editorials are afflicted with kwashkiorkor, a condition in which their bodies have decayed to the point where for lack of vital plasma proteins, their blood vessels cannot retain blood. The blood tends to pool in the stomach area, apparently, until the lining of the heart fails and the afflicted dies.

This sort of topic tends to be a nonstarter at dinner parties, so I'll move on.

What struck me about the speaker was that she was so... happy. Everyy time she demonstrated her knowledge, she glowed a little. The face-lines around her eyes perked up as she quizzed the audience on statistics she did not understand. This young woman, nine months out of college and already witness to such madness, was positively bouncing on the balls of her feet as she explained how fighters in the war would try to hack civilians' arms off at the shoulder if they could, but that they would often give up halfway through, cleave through the elbow, and move on. She scared the fucking daylights out of me.

I tried to understand the speaker's glibness. At first I thought, "What valor, to put such a brave face on her work for us potential new recruits, smiling boldly even as she grimaces inwardly!" But that motive was not what her body was conveying. She had ventured forth into the bush--"that's the jungle"--to build a water tower and a church for these people, and that... wasn't exactly what she, personally, had done. Okay. But when she finally said, near the end, that "they are just like you and me, just under different circumstances," my ignorance shattered. Of course "they" are just like "us". It is either an implicit belief or something one says to look modest while wearing dreadful visions of the blood of innocents as cruel, shiny badges of honor.

So there is a profile of one foot soldier in the war against war: either a flaky missionary saving the infidels or, perhaps, a good and caring person who cracked after ten months of mopping up a genocide and gave up on people. She has my earnest respect either way, both for using her great scientific knowledge for good instead of evil and for venturing into such dangerous territory in the service of others. These are deeds that cannot be diminished.

I, not having put my life on the line to feed the destitute and not knowing much of anything, had wondered about the mettle of one who would volunteer for a desperate attempt to hold together a nation of total fucking strangers using only spit, shoestrings, and a UN nutrition study. Call the evening a lesson on human nature. I wonder what I had been expecting to learn.

New morality: it's the goddamned ends. Saints are saints, no matter what their politics.