The Game of Thrones and Humanity

Doesn't that sound like an ominous statement? 

Let me fill in some blanks.  

I completed all 5 of the current volumes of The Song Fire and Ice series by George RR Martin.  It is quite a long and engrossing read.  I found it perfect for my current underemployment state.  :)  I had the time and mental prowess to tackle such a massive series.  I was determined to get through it, so I read each 700+ page volume within weeks of each other.  (Something I don't recommend.  I recommend you take your time, savor the culture, the life these people live and the world Mr. Martin is creating. 

Each book is an epic journey and as I got to the middle of the 5th book I realized that there had to be more coming, this was not tying anything of the separate stories together, there were all sorts of dangling journeys scattered about, it left more characters 'out on a limb' so to speak, or 'just having been beaten, stabbed, hit on the head with an axe, trampled on by wild boars, or all sorts of dangerous accidents.  Was I to assume they were dead?  My favorite characters voices were silent and some of the least favorite were still in power, still causing damage, still up to no good.  (Kinda just like life, huh?)

I had been telling my husband that this book is about the land, that it's not about the characters. 
So many of them get beheaded, thrown of cliffs, tortured, murdered, poisoned, shipped off to unknown lands, raped, or just plane old die, you need to let go of your favorite people to see a bigger picture.  Maybe that picture is about the land itself, not the individual people that live, breathe and die in it, but what it takes to bring stability to a country or region. 

When you look at the taming of a land,  or to 'civilize' an area, a different perspective comes across.  When I began to look at the book from that point of view, I saw that we really haven't progressed on the inside in 1000 years.  And, if I want to see how we behaved as humans I could just go into a 'third world country' and see the behavior of people there to understand that the hold we have on this world is tenuous at best.  That anything that rocks the boat too hard, such as an economic collapse, which isn't too far off the reality scale, and we are back to behaving as the characters in this book.  We don't have the luxury of magic, dragons and spells.  We do have spies, cunning, subterfuge, back stabbing, gossipy, murderous behavior at our fingertips.  That's what I saw in the middle of the book. 

We pretend to be civilized, but it's a thin and fine line.  Peter Drucker has said, "When you squeeze oranges you get orange juice, when you squeeze lemons you get lemon juice,  when you squeeze human beings you get what is inside, the good and the bad".

This book was a great eye opener in raising my awareness for humanity, for being honest about the design of life and my piece within it.