Kaybelle Shantir
Minmatar
Black Wave Corp
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Posted - 2007.11.19 05:01:00 -
[1]
Ushra'Khan,
Please do not count me ungrateful. I have not your strength to withstand such persecution. But I do understand. I do see what you see.
To have, to possess, is to risk loss. That which is gained can always be taken away. My family and I have worked hard for our home in Pator, a safe place where each of us belongs. But I know its walls can be burned. The house is not the home.
You, Ushra'Khan, you have no house. But I know this makes you freer than I. He who has nothing has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Do not count me ungrateful, but what I do have, I am afraid to lose. Inside the walls I have carved out for my family in the Republic, I have more control over how the next generation is raised. My cousin's children will learn from their elders that surround them. They will know the closest approximation I can make to the time before that Day. Those lives are ones I wish to watch in motion.
I do not wish to see Minmatar lives that are not Minmatar lives, but diminished ones. Ones superimposed by pain and false identities. So the focus I choose is on the free. This is where our choices differ, for you have always chosen to focus on those of us without freedom. Yes, those of us, for it is a crime to forget those who share our blood, our history. But I know that they would want some of us to have what they cannot. They would not want me to take the joys in my life for granted, too obsessed with their plight to taste the freedom that is denied to them. To take it for granted would be to dishonor them.
To all who have, and any who would willingly join with the crews aboard Ushra'Khan vessels, I say this: we are not truly different, but the same. We are sun and moon, different points on the same wheel, and we hold each other in balance for all our people. We are one, and as one, we must both strive to be together, but also love Minmatar life, simultaneously.
The power of the capsuleer class is one to be reckoned with, and cannot be ignored. Members of all races are escalating in strength, the likes of which none of us have ever seen before. Those of us with the ability to survive the pod-pilot interface are faced with the same choice as any other, excepting that the scale is larger by magnitudes. The power, and therefore the responsibility, is so much greater.
CONCORD and the security fleets from all empires protect me as I go about my relatively peaceful life, building comforting walls for my kin who are fortunate enough to dwell within secure space. I acknowledge that I am not putting the full range of my power to use. While important, interstellar shipping is not much improved by pod technology over the more traditional, bridge-run vessels. But it is my choice, one I am grateful to be free to make.
But I remember why that choice exists. It exists only because of another choice: the choice to fight. Yes, my choice not to fight exists only because others have chosen the opposite.
People call the Ushra'Khan many things: Terrorist, pirate, heathen, dissident, criminal. But yours is the choice of Drupar Maak, of Mutana, of our culture's heroes. Muritor's choice was the same. Being the same, I must say, you are Drupar Maak, and I am grateful.
But I am not a hero. That is not my place on the wheel, and though at times I wish I had the strength to choose otherwise, I am not ashamed of loving my life. But, I will never denounce you, or any who would fly with you for making the opposite choice any more than I would berate my left hand for not being my right.
Ushra'Khan,
Do not count me ungrateful,
For very grateful I am,
For your bloody right hand,
Which leaves mine clean
To be all I shall be.
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