Writing assignment

I’m choosing to share the two passages I wrote in class the other day during the creative writing assignment.

The Things I carried:

                I carried the proverbial world on my shoulders.

                I carried the weight of a country. Its gratitude and its hatred. It was a hell of a weight keeping up with the expectations of both. I carried the responsibility for eight human lives and the families they left behind; wives, children, and parents. I carried the knowledge that my best years were behind me and they weren’t coming back. Mostly I carried the weight of knowing that nobody cared about the weight I carried.

                These things I couldn’t help but carry.

The end is not what you expect:

                People who travel for fun and people who travel for war.

People who travel for fun stay at youth hostels, wait in lines to see landmarks, drink in local bars, and pretend to be local. They seek to be someone who they are not. They learn what they think they should know, they come away with a sense of foreign culture and feel good about it. People who travel for fun feel the need to have conversations with other travelers. They want to know the smallest, most intimate details of a place, yet rarely find it.

                Those who travel for war actually find it. They see the inside of houses, the private places, the markets in the slums, the gutter, the filth, the trash, the palaces, and the countryside. Not only do they see the sights of a place but they see the insides of friends, the ugly parts of humankind, the unfairness of life. They see what people who have never met will do to each other. They know what burning flesh smells like. They know what innocence looks like. They know the sneer of two faced hatred. At the end of the day they either accept it or go nuts.

                The goodtime travelers...they’re scared of the places they want to see the most. So, they do what they do best and ask the hard time traveler...if they meet them.

                The hard time traveler indulges them, to a point. They don't want to relive it or care to think about it. So what happens? He says it sucks, smells like shit, and spouts some racist nonsense he may or may not actually believe. He leaves it at that. The good time traveler never asks again, they're embarrassed they ever met the brute.

                Who’s really the asshole?