On War

A tree.
It's up there on a hill, under the sky, the Moon, the Sun, and the stars occasionally.
Next to it is another tree, beneath the same things.
The trees hate each other, very much.
They fight, they push, they shove.
Without mercy they wage a nearly endless war for sunlight--which, I feel, is one of the few things worth fighting for.
It's never been a question of morality, this war, for the trees.
In fact, there's no question of it at all.
Simply, it's a matter of survival.
And, though be it a war, it is not a Six Day War.
It's an astonishingly slow one.
Waged over the course of centuries, ceasless--begun in seedlinghood.
It knows no holiday, and though we don't notice it, each tree bears scars to its horror, memories to its violence.
It outlives Man, it extends over the years, across the decades;
all the while, the products of their loss are passed to us.
They cast off a gas that we need to live.
"We need the trees much more than they need us."
And there's not a day that goes by, when the trees hope for peace.
But they know that peace will only come when either of them passes,
passes from fighting, from pushing, from shoving.
Because these trees hate each other very much.
Yet, upon that hill, under the sky, the Moon, the Sun, and the stars occasionally, there--in the end--can remain only a tree.
A tree.