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The Confounding of the Owls
“It´s over” The elder grey owl leaned away from the telescope.
“What happened?” The young white owl stopped what he was doing.
The room was filled with glass and metal objects. Colorful crystals and golden artifacts scattered around big ornamental tables. Books and parchments covered the walls. A huge telescope poked out of a window facing to a dark emptiness.
“I never thought this is how it would end” The elder grey owl stared at his clock. “Four point five billion years of grace… Destroyed in only a handful” He wrote something down in his notebook. He wasn´t sad. He was confused.
“What happened?” The young white owl repeated his question. He was also confused. “Who destroyed everything? Was it the birds?”
“No. They always flew with grace.” – Said the elder grey owl.
“Was it the fish?” – Asked the young white owl.
“No. They always swam with grace.”
“Was it the new ones? The weird ones that wore clothes?”
“Yeah. Those. “Humans”, is what they called each other”
“But what did they do? They just arrived a few million years ago! How could they damage everything so quickly?”
“At the beginning, they were all beautiful. I guess they always were… But they stopped seeing that.”
“But why? Weren´t they the ones that danced and sang with grace?”
“They did. But then they became diseased. And it spread like wildfire.”
“Disease? Didn´t those always had a cure?”
“All of them did. They just didn´t found this one.”
“Was it painful? Was it the one that was spread by rodents?”
“No. Only humans could have this one… Painful? Very. But only to some.”
“Why? What did it do to them?”
“Well, at the beginning it made them create lines on the ground. They called them borders. Sometimes they would fight for them and kill for them.”
“That doesn´t make sense. Didn´t they realize that the whole planet was for everyone? Birds and fish realized that, and they weren´t as smart.”
“I guess they stopped seeing that.” Said the elder grey owl.
The young white owl looked through the telescope for the first time.
“It´s very blue!” He said surprised. “I don´t see the bordars.”
“Borders. With an “e”. And they are imaginary, sometimes they built walls to prove they were there. But they were always imaginary.”
“I can´t believe those lines destroyed it all.”
“Well that was just the beginning.” The elder grey owl sighed. “They started to dislike each other for the color of their skin. If they didn´t believe in the same things. If they spoke other tongues. If they were different genders. If they liked different genders. If they were born on the other side of the imaginary lines. Just to name a few.”
The young white owl was perplexed. He couldn´t believe the type of things humans fought over. He couldn´t understand how they thought those things were worth destroying everything for.
“How didn´t they realize that love was the answer to it all?” He asked.
“They did sometimes. I guess they stopped seeing that.”
The elder grey owl looked once again through the telescope at the devastated world he had created. He wondered if it was worth giving it another try.
And that was the way the world ended, not with a bang but with a disease.
A disease called hatred.
