An end to all wars. Maybe.

It’s the little things…

Whatever an aeon is, people have been wondering why there are so many wars for lots of them (aeons, that is). It’s a topic that has been discussed to within an inch (2,4 cm for my contimental readers) of its life (and death). In pubs, schools, jungles, emporia, toilets, canoes – and anywhere else more than one person can fit.

Of course, no one really expects there to be an answer, much less an answer as to how the answer can be addressed.

Many reasons have been chewed over: greed, desperation, power, land-grabbing, avarice (which is just greed with mostly different letters), religiousness, ultra-racism… but none of them really nail it.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a sneeking suspicion that I had the answer – and the older I get, and the more people I see, the more I am convinced that I’m right.

And the answer is in this picture.

This is the changing room at my health club. You could say it’s the most exclusive health club in Brussels, but that’s only because it’s the only health club in Brussels. Its membership numbers many executive types, some corporate, some EU and plenty of what are known in the EU community as ‘trailing spouses’. That’s me, by the way.

It’s quite a nice place, with gyms (yeugh), pool (yay) and a restaurant. The staff are lovely, including the housekeepers who make it all clean and tidy. The members for the most part are affable, civilised, educated and generally nice peeps. Except…

Some of them think it’s OK to drop their wet, stinky towels on the floor when they leave, even though there are a number of drop bins in the changing rooms. Even worse, they leave them on the floor in the shower rooms. These fine, upstanding people also think it’s perfectly OK to leave their locker doors open, making it a pain to walk around the place.

It’s these bastards who start wars, keep wars going and generally stir things up war-wise. It’s these bastards who bump into you on the street, talk next to you in a cinema, leave shit stains in a public toilet bowl, text while walking, drive Audis (or Renault Clios in France), jump the queue in supermarkets, drop litter and fart quietly in crowded lifts. It’s these bastards who do not give a toss about the rest of humanity and treat the world as their private play-thing.

At the top of the food chain you’ll find them as politicians, media moguls, bankers, generals and despots of all kinds. But snuffling around at the bottom of the chain are the same-but-poorer, who don’t give a toss about anyone else, thus allowing the towel-droppers to mess it up for the rest of us.

Now if we can only get them to clear up their crap, while making them understand why they need to do it, we can make the world a better place.

Bastards.

(Question to self: why don’t war mongers have proper shops, like fish mongers?)