Missionaries

Men are weak. Don't ask if they're good or bad. We're all sinful. Ask if they're better or worse than the times they lived in.

The great democratic public relies on the intrepid veracity of the free press to cut past the political rhetoric with hard-hitting fact so they can make informed decisions.

Instead of love or resources or friends, we have duty. It's an iron dutry, a duty that doesn't beckon us to glory or to public adulation, a duty whose voice is sometimes so faint, a calling from some other sphere, that we listen to it like the mystics do to the supposed voice of God. A calling only we know, a calling that steels us, that drives us.

Everything is uncertain. Friends become enemies, health becomes sickness, wealth becomes ruin. But we two, we will create one small space of order in the chaos. I will rest on you, you on me, and we will not break. And in that small space, we will have room for human feelings, maybe cruel, maybe tender, full of arguments or never-ending kindnesses, but more important than the nature of the love is the space we create for it to exist.

Life," he says, grinning at his joke. "It's a terrible condition. It's got a one-hundred-percent mortality rate.

You can see a person's soul in the eyes, they say, but you can also see them in the hands.

fear became something in the background, like the heat of summer, something you acknowledge and sometimes even complain about but which you do not expect to change.

to exist is not to live, and bone and meat and blood alone is not a person. A person is what happens when there is a family, and a town, a place where you are known.

So many things had to happen for these men to arrive at their deaths. Start with the invention of the internal combustion engine. Follow with the development of Europe and the Americas and the rest of the world creating a ravenous appetite for oil, which created oil rigs and refineries and massive wealth for desert princes. Then global supply chains, trade agreements, secure shipping routes, and the law of the sea. Negotiated arms sales, too. Add in the vast edifice of Western science. Computing and radio technology. The space race and the microchip. Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex. And other, subtler developments. American-pioneered methods of high-value targeting. The post-9/11 explosion of private military contractors. It took all of the massively complex, interconnected modern world to bring these men their deaths. It was a shame they were incapable of appreciating it.