The basis of every story is an element of conflict. If conflict has not caused something to change, a story has not happened. Harmony is static. Conflict is dynamic.

Dissonance lends emotional depth to music. Pure consonance is dull and uninformed. Dissonance anticipates resolution. Conflict puts harmony into context, makes it redeeming instead of stagnant.

Our cars, like our lives, are fueled by conflict. Gasoline combustion is terrorism on the molecular level. Every cylinder in every engine is a ghetto, compacted mercenaries which explode at the first good spark, hindsight manifestoes labeled SO, NO, and CO2.

Rumor has it we’ve evolved to Sapiens status, enjoyed world-wide today, by eons upon eons of conflict. Once mousy little burrowers, doing our best to stay out of something else’s stomach; later we became “intelligent apes,” fashioning stones into spear-tips, old root bark into war paint.

The physical world as we know it is founded on a prolonged electro-magnetic argument. Were it not for the polar dispute between the electron clouds comprising your feet and those comprising the ground, you would fall to the center of the earth and incinerate.

Our planet is illuminated by a gigantic ball of atomic warfare, brief alliances shattered in a burst of life-and-light-giving energy. The song of a star resolves itself with the cool, eternal consonance of a black hole.

From the unknowable realms of quantum disagreement to the grandiose conspiracy of world war, conflict will manifest anywhere and everywhere that an opportunity arises. The very existence of the universe is an elaborate, protracted argument against absolute nothingness.

Harmony creates homogony. Homogony, with nothing to differentiate itself from itself, becomes nothingness. Conflict is the cause of existence.

Conflict is the form. Harmony is the essence.