It was in March of 2003, I was playing Everquest, barely in my teens. I was bounding around some guild raid as a Troll Shaman and doing a remarkably bad job of it. My role was more that of the kid sidekick to a bunch of EQ lifers than an active participant if we are being honest. So my attention kept being stolen by the tv just over in the corner playing the opening acts of the war in Iraq.  I posted something of my anxieties in the guild chat. Nothing profound, nothing illuminating, just a kid at a computer in the Arkansas Ozarks typing out “I don’t know about this.” I’d say I was reprimanded for this, but given my age, scolded would be the better verb. It was time for America to unite against its enemies I was informed. I sheepishly agreed even if I wondered to myself, what enemies.

America sought for revenge so deeply that it wasn’t all that concerned who they got revenge on. If my online life was composed of those who owned a solemn confidence that this war was a necessity, then my offline life was composed by those who had a perverse hunger for it. Many of my classmates were eager to dismantle the enemies of America. People they’d never met in places they’d never heard of, people that they’d excitedly fantasize about killing. They didn’t bother laundering these opinions into something more polite or socially acceptable. And why should they have? It was an American History class where the teacher gathered us around a chunky windows desktop to show us footage of Iraqi soldiers evaporated into clouds by the awesome might of the American machine. Many of my classmates were cheering with more passion than they’d ever shown at any homecoming pep rally. Maybe if our hearts were better and our priorities straight those classmates would have won the homecoming game instead of going to war like their teachers told them to. I thought a lot about this every time the television would tell me video games or some movie was responsible for the nihilist rot forming around the edges of my generation.

I used to think of these as distant memories.  Instead it feels like the best vantage point of the future. There was always some imagined enemy that we’d use to stoke the fires.  We even got quite good at outsourcing American revenge. America’s foreign policy has been about burning down far away houses for so long that there is an almost poetic inevitability that we’d start looking at our own block with pyromaniac eyes. Don’t gotta scroll for too long on southern social media to find the same kinda people that cheered in my American History class cheering that their neighbors with different accents might vanish. I can find them braying and laughing as other neighbors lose their careers. They sit on their block watching the houses on fire thinking they’ve burned down their enemies. I doubt the realization ever comes that it’s just the preheating oven for a country of cannibals. It’s a shame. They would have been happier if they’d won a homecoming game instead.

I wondered somewhere in the world of Norrath in 2003, what enemy? My answer in 2025 is just a repeat of Walt Kelly from his incomparable comic, Pogo. One intended to point at our own ecological self inflicted wounds, but one I find fitting all the same.