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Volume 10, Number 11
16 December 2003






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“INTENTIONAL GARBAGE”

The oracle of the Matrix repeatedly insists that ‘everything that has a beginning has an end’, and this sentence has already became a cult proverb. Since nothing can exist without beginning to exist, except the religious definition of God’s being-, this is equal to claiming that everything has an end. However, I’m not sure if this is recognized by everyone, I mean the fact that everything you take for granted around you is not going to last, since you may not last in the first place. The point of this is not to make you feel down, or to advise you to stop studying or something, but to be aware that none of us are special in terms of being involved in the cycle of nature, or are immune, especially against the effects of man.
Yes, everything has a beginning, and some things may begin even earlier than expected, just like our unpleasant entrance to the Bayram Holidays a few weeks ago. And, yes, everything does have an end, and again, some things may end earlier than expected, just like the lives of thirty-two citizens in the pre-holiday bombings of the HSBC and the British Consulate in Istanbul. What terror does is to quicken the process of beginning and ending, except that its implementers have nothing more on their minds than to do anything they can to kill innocents, and equally true, the innocent people’s hate towards terror can never end, as long as this world survives.
‘I want to be the right thing in the wrong place; and the wrong thing in the right’ says Andy Warhol, the famous pop-art innovator, and as we try to imagine the last seconds of a terror victims’ live, (if we can), it is seen that they were actually the wrong thing in the wrong place. They were the wrong thing, for innocent people's lives are not what to take, in order to send any political message. They were in the wrong place, indeed, because they lived in a world where metropolitan downtowns are almost as dangerous as battlefields. Thinking otherwise, the victims were in the right place and were going on with their lives, but someone else had a terrible perception of what is right, and what is wrong.
Remember the Nokia N-gage advertisement. Imagine locations that are crucially important to your life, and were projected on to a screen: a corner of the campus that is special for you, the car you first drove, the hospital room where your little sister was born, or the park you sat alone under the rain… I don’t think you would want the last caption to be the inside of an unexpectedly exploded and demolished building, with other dead bodies around you.
This is what terror is about. Like anything else having a beginning, this writing has an end, too; but the problems discussed seem to have a longer lifetime.

Efe Peker (POLS/IV)



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