Gen Z realizing one of the biggest shocks after college is that life no longer happens around you.
In school, friends, events, relationships, and opportunities are built into your environment.
As an adult, if you don't actively create a social life, weeks can turn into months surprisingly fast.
This paragraph by Haruki Murakami hits very hard:
“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
The more you study Alaric, the harder it gets to call him the villain.
His sack of Rome in 410 AD starts to look less like savagery and more like a bill coming due.
A look at his key motives, and why it still is so relevant today.
🔹Picture a boy on the wrong bank of the Danube around 370 AD, watching the Huns burn everything behind him. Alaric grew up with the river at his back and Rome refusing to let his people cross.
🔹When Rome finally allowed them within their territory, it was no rescue. Roman officials sold dog meat to starving Goths at the price of a child sold into slavery. Alaric was small enough to remember the hunger and old enough to remember who profited from it.
🔹He was a boy when his people turned that hunger into a sword at Adrianople in 378 because Rome admitted desperate refugees, starved and abused them, tried to murder their leaders, and then sent an overconfident emperor to crush the rebellion that treatment created. He found out Rome could be beaten.
🔹laric did not grow up dreaming of revenge. He fought for Rome, leading Gothic federates under its eagles, and wanted nothing more than the rank and the place at the table that service should have earned him. He deeply cared about his people.
🔹But at the battle of the river Frigidus in 394 they put his men in the front rank and let them soak up the first charge. He watched roughly 10,000 of his own die winning a Roman civil war he had no stake in.
🔹He came off that field expecting the command he had bled for. Rome gave it to someone else and sent him home with empty hands.
🔹So his warriors lifted him on a shield and called him king. From that day the empire could no longer look ignore him.
🔹Listen to what he actually asked for and it is heartbreakingly small. Land his people could plough. Grain so the children would not starve again. A rank that matched the blood he had already spent.
🔹For fifteen years he chased that promise through the marble corridors of Ravenna. They signed, smiled, and tore it up the moment his back was turned.
🔹One Roman understood him. The general Stilicho beat Alaric in battle, then kept finding ways to bring him back in, soldier to soldier, because he saw the man was worth more alive and loyal.
🔹In 408 the court had Stilicho beheaded on a lie. Somewhere in his camp, Alaric learned that the only Roman who ever kept faith with him was dead.
🔹Then the screaming started in the Roman towns. Soldiers went house to house and killed the Gothic wives and children living among them while their husbands served in the army. It was a panic-driven purge that followed Stilicho's execution in 408, fueled by anti-Gothic hatred that had been building for years.
🔹Around 30,000 of those men buried what was left of their families and rode to Alaric. He had not built this army, Rome had handed it to him on a silver platter, grieving and ready.
🔹He brought it to the gates of the city itself and squeezed. Rome, mistress of the world, emptied her treasuries to buy him off with gold, silver, silk and three thousand pounds of pepper.
🔹He took the ransom and still asked for peace. The same small request, land and a title. From behind the safe marshes of Ravenna, the emperor Honorius said no one more time.
🔹Alaric even raised up his own emperor in Rome to force a deal, anything to end it without ruin. Honorius would not move. Every door he tried, the empire shut in his face.
🔹On 24 August 410 AD a gate opened in the night from the inside and the Goths walked into Rome. For the first time in 800 years a foreign army stood in the streets of the eternal city.
🔹Watch what he did with that power. The churches stayed standing on his order, and any Roman who ran to them lived. A man who had every reason to burn it all chose where to stop.
🔹For three days they took the city apart. The Goths stripped the mansions of the senators, emptied the temples and imperial mausoleums, and carried off so much gold and silver that the wealth of centuries left Rome on the backs of mules.
Fires caught in the grand houses and along the Forum. The Goths dragged the emperor's own sister, Galla Placidia, away as a hostage. Then, on the fourth day, they simply walked out and turned south.
🔹The world still shook. In a cell in Bethlehem the old scholar Jerome put down his pen and wept that the city which once took the world had itself been taken.
🔹Sadly, months later the fever took him. His men turned a river from its bed near Cosenza, laid their king in the dry channel, let the water back over him.
Take from that story what you will, but I hope you understand the sentiment.
I want to leave you with the following question: when an empire breaks every promise it makes to you, what exactly do you owe it back?
I hate to admit this but Trump was right.
He said that if I vote for Kamala Harris gas prices, groceries prices and my utility bills will go through the roof.
I voted for Harris and my gas, groceries and utility bills have gone through the roof.
Kingdom Come Deliverance'ta latince okumayı öğrendik. İlk okuduğum latince kitaptaki cümle şuymuş:
''Nullsu est liber tam malus, ut non aliqua parte prosit. Libri muti magistri sunt. Optimus orator est, qui paucis verbis plurima dicit''
''Hiçbir kitap o kadar kötü değildir ki bir yönüyle fayda sağlamasın. Kitaplar sessiz öğretmenlerdir. En iyi hatip, az sözle çok şey söyleyendir.''