The Incompatible Colors

The Incompatible Colors



“WHAT!” My eyes opened wide as though they were going to bounce out of their sockets. My mouth was frozen after blasting the word. The silence shrouded in between me and my computer screen with a little square on it showing a moving picture of my friend’s face.

“ Are you unconsciously kidding me?” A puzzled frown appeared on my face.

“Are you out of mind? Do you need a doctor?” I kept asking her the questions and starring on the screen like I have never seen this person before. ‘What was she talking about?’ The question came up in my mind.



“Ding-dong ding-dong ding-dong” An electronic bell embedded in an online instant messaging program was ringing to awake me from my absent-minded condition.

“Listen, I’m not kidding you. The red people burnt down many big buildings and one of them just collapsed like five minutes ago. Go check out the news and you’ll see” She insisted.

“Hahaha, no one would fly a plane to crash the building, girl. We don’t have World Trade here,” I replied.

“Didn’t you see what’s going on in the Facebook?,” my friend asked.

“Huh?” I minimized the window that I was talking to and opened another window of a web browser. After typing ‘Facebook.com’ on the address bar of the browser ,in a second, the blue and white interface of the famous social network appeared. I swiftly scrolled a wheel of my computer’s mouse  back and forth. My two eyeballs were rolling endlessly from left to right and  top to bottom to skim and catch up on what was happening on the Facebook’s wall. I could not believe that this was true and my friend did not even lie  a word.  (put after the next paragraph)



          A number of people were writing down curses and offensive words on their posts. Anger, temper, and rage were shown in those messages as if there was someone trying to kill their parents. Some messages seemed very emotional like there were tons of middle fingers emerging from the screen mocking you. Among those furious feelings, there were also mournful expressions here. If Facebook could be alive, it would cry with a thousand liters of tears. I still did not know where those frustrated people come from and what really happened. I could not wait anymore. I needed to know everything because it has been a year since I left my country for study here in the U.S. and had not caught up on any news from my country. 



          A new tab of the web browser was opened with an online newspaper’s website that I usually visit. Finally, I found the causes of all tragedies that made everyone mad. On the web page, I could only see two vivid colors, red and yellow. Can you believe that these two colors can cause such a horrible chaos to people? Can you believe that such a peaceful country once called the land of smile can be torn apart by these two colors? Are you wondering what they really are? Are they just the color or what? And why are they so powerful that can make the whole country break apart? These two colors are nothing, but the group of hungry people who have a political conflict to each other. This was not the first incident. The conflict between the red and the yellow people had happened before.



            Two years ago, the whole nation was once covered by two colors. I could see nothing other than red and yellow shirts in almost every single square kilometer in my country. Every channel on television and radio, I could see and hear nothing besides red and yellow people walking and sitting on the road protesting and calling for rights they wanted from the government. From being in a cradle until 18-year-old age, I have never seen or been an eyewitness with such moment before. It is true that almost every country has memories of bad history that they did not expect it would happen. I did not expect to see this thing too, the war between the red and the yellow. They still got into my head even though I did not want it.



In the past, I had never had any ideas to put myself into something like politics and I never want to put those kinds of things inside my mind. So asking me about politics would be pointless because I feel nothing about it. Nevertheless, since the media kept reporting this story all the time like I have watched the same movie five times in a row, this incident became one of top of the town and a part of my life inevitably. It seemed to completely got me in the end. Why would this have such a huge impact on me?



My feeling started to change after the big clash between the red and yellow, the big internal war that really shocked me when I checked out the news to prove what my friend said. I visited the biggest center of video clips from all over the world, Youtube.com, because I knew that it was the only place that I can find the visible truth, not the distorted information from the government. Suddenly, I became too stunned by what I had seen to say a word. I saw the first horrible picture that still stuck into my head. It was a picture of a man who was trying to escape from the riot between the red and the yellow people. I would have ignored him normally when chaos happened in the town and everyone tried to run as fast as they could to save their lives, but I had to stop to look at him when the video was zoomed in.



On the video, I saw he was trying to craw on the gritty cracked concrete ground. A painful expression appeared on his face. Crying and screaming for help seemed hopeless. Along the path he went, it was marked with his blood spouting from his thighs. He could not walk and not anymore for his entire life. Only blood-soaked thighs,  the wounded upper body, and tears were left with him at that time. The sadder thing, there was no one to help him.  A number of crowd was running pass him like he was just an animal coming out at the wrong time blocking people’s way. Among the crowd, I saw young children, adults, and elders were running breathlessly to hide from tear gases. The fight lasted on for hours before it was ended for real. After that, a procession of big white cars with red sirens were on the scene within a minute. A moan of pain from the injured spread over the area. Male nurses swiftly carried stretchers in and out of the ambulance during such intense time. Looking around at the place, remnants of mirror and wood from many restaurants and houses scatter over the road. The bent and distorted chairs and tables lay on the floor irreparably. The wall of buildings around the place were covered with burn marks.  On the bottom of the video, there was a little message line running to announce  that some schools had to close temporarily because it was dangerous for students to leave home. Moreover, on the next day after the fight, I heard the news reporting that lots of buildings in the capital were burnt down. Some of them collapsed and hurt people being around there. There were many unexpected events that surprised me.....

         

         This incident, which arose from different political views between two sides, made me have to rethink again how could human destroy each other and did such a cruel thing in the modern world that I expected I never to see. If people in the same nation started killing each other, then what would happen next in the future if we still try to solve problems with hatred? I could not imagine how bad it would be if my country was broken apart. Even though I did not get hurt and participate in the fight alongside those people, I felt disheartened. I believed other people would have the same feeling as me, even the protester themselves. A lot of tears were flowing because of the diabolical destruction of the fight. The whole nation was crying. I could only hope these would be the last tears -- calming all the upheaval and bad things in my country.



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          I closed all the web browsers, except for the instant messaging program, because I could not stand it.

“Hey dude, you did not lie me” I mumbled.

“See? I told you that I didn’t” she replied.

“But..I hope you did,”  the sentence that my friend did not hear, but echoed in my ears over and over.

            I shut down my computer and went to bed. I wished all of what I just saw and heard would be gone like a bad dream after I woke up.