Gaming with Madrid

So I got onto the website watercoolergames.org and decided that I was going to play MADRID.
The instructions were simple: click on the candles make them shine brighter.

There were "persons" holding up the candles, who were also wearing T-Shirts emblazoned, presumably, with the names of their respective cities. I was curious about the choice of cities and wondered what narrative they held that tied them together. On further examination, I noticed that all these cities are those that have been affected by acts of terror. They include in no particular order: Oklahoma, NYC, Madrid, Baghdad, Beirut, Tokyo, and some other city I couldn't quite make out. Although I couldn't quite recall a time when Tokyo came under terrorist attack--I corrected myself with the help of history: the atomic bomb!

The game, like the instructions is simple enough: to keep the candles shining brighter. But there is nothing simple about that task. For starters, although the candles are not that many, by the time you do the rounds, the ones you lit-up first are fading and it's a frantic effort to move from one to the other while keeping them not just ablaze but bright/er.

At the bottom of the screen frame is a brightness-o-meter that indicates how you are doing with keeping the candles bright. Mine was pretty bad; I couldn't get it to the middle let alone keep it in one place for a while. In the end I quit when I began to see that I was not getting far in my efforts and that I couldn't possibly keep this up much longer. I don't know what I missed in quitting but there were no signs of winning.

What I know is that this game is not for amusement. It is a serious game that makes the case for keeping the fire burning; keeping that candle burning bright on behalf of victims of terror. How true! We get smitten with a disaster right after it occurs. And we vow never to forget. But then as time goes on and as the pressures of life make demands on our attention; we move on. And we forget. That is until another disaster comes bearing down on us. Then we take up our arms again.
Sad but true.

This game can certainly affect the way we honor the memory of those who are gone before us; particularly those whose lives were cut short, either through man-made or natural disaster. At the height of the cold war, leaders toyed with the idea of the atomic bomb, and even now, we have countries out there wanting to own one as the ultimate defense. They obviously do not remember what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And all those people been on inflicting terror, London, NYC, Madrid, Oklahoma...those were precious lives that were lost. Katrina may have been a natural disaster but it could have been prevented.

Let us value humanity from Rwanda to Bosnia to Lebanon....all human beings.

We must never forget!