The lesson of Machupicchu

When we believe in something, when we value one thing above all others so much that we are willing to die for it, we pound our chests and wave our flags, we decal our cars and play inspiring songs, we decry our enemies and elevate our fallen hero’s all for the sake of the premise called freedom. The protestant God demands such sacrifice. The patriotic human mind cannot accept the alternative… defeat, humiliation, and the lost opportunity to plant the seeds for revenge if all else fails.

The Inca’s went a step further and carried the sadness of futility on their shoulders. They left the holiest of all their cities, the monument of who and what they where to preserve that which was greater then themselves, the mother earth who gave them life and the gods that showed them the way to flourish.

In the face of futility knowing that they could never stop the Spanish from destroying their monument of appreciation for that life, the Inca’s made the ultimate sacrifice. They walked away and never looked back. Death was the easy way out. Staying and fighting would have resulted in the destruction and assimilation of all they had left. They chose as a race to fade away so the monument could stand, their legacy held intact thumbing their noses at the invader’s superior weapons and God. I find nothing cowardly about this. In fact, it is one of the noblest acts I have ever heard of.

The Spanish never found Machupicchu. The priests never destroyed the temples and monuments. Earthquakes could not crumble it. Only the earth that gave it life can take it away and erosion is doing just that. Yet the symbol still is evident in the passions of the descendents of the ancients and they are reconnecting with that heritage. You can hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes. The Spanish only won the battles, not the war.

Hitting walls for the sake of hitting them is basically wasted energy. That doesn’t mean fortitude and competitive desire are relinquished for the sake of convenience. It just means it might be better to take what the defense gives you, collectively or individually and look at the real big picture.

So the next time we go running off to war to protect our pride in the guise of freedom by sacrificing our young and killing the innocent, the next time we forget we are part of the earth and desecrate it for the sake of profit, or the next time we sacrifice our people for ideology over common good, we might want to take a step back and see what legacy we are leaving in our wake. When the jungles are peeled back and the dust blown away, what will our descendents think of us, and how we handled our futilities.