Way back in 1995 or so (you know about a million years ago) we were attending (I was part of a we back then) Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. We were staying in one of the attached hotels and headed back to our room. It was late in the evening around 10 or 11. We noticed off to the side a darkened room with a pulsating light. "Oh cool. A movie."

We took a look inside, and the movie was Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind". Anime. We had never seen it. I'm not sure we had even heard of it. We sat down and were amazed.

21 years later I sat down tonight to watch it one more time. I spent a few hours at GenCon today in Indianapolis, and thought it might be nice to put in Nausicaa for nostalgic purposes.

I'm still amazed by this movie. It morally compels us to rethink our lives and to cast away these evil  trappings of material possession, money, greed and power. What good are these things if we are destroyed? What on Earth shall it profit a man, right?

It is certainly not a new notion that "money is the root of all evil", but really it is not simply money, but things themselves. It is the love of things - the pursuit of things - rather than the pursuit of moral, ethical and spiritual completeness, that is the source of nearly all evils that we know. It sickens us. It corrupts us. It kills us.

The worldwide pollution, the universal toxicity, the ravenous consumption, and the deranged self-absorption are all by-products of a worship of things.

The things that we really, truly need do not need batteries. The things we truly need are not things at all.