On a molecular level, there’s very little difference between a soldier killing an enemy in a military engagement and one person killing another in cold blooded murder. Save for the context, the two acts are identical. It follows then, that the act of “declaring” war on a country, or ideology, or group, is an announcement:
Capitulate now, or we will come over there and start murdering people. In fact, we’re going to murder and murder and murder until you see things as we would have you see them, or at least act on things the way we would have you act.
This is the way things have been here for a very long time, and some would say that’s as it should be. I, however, am not one of those people. Nor am I an optimist, or an idealist, pacifist or any sort of “ist“. Just the opposite in fact, I always expect the worst. I never see any good in anybody or anything, and I enjoy physical confrontations. Even so, a world where the overriding social contract that simply doesn’t allow for war, or any situation where a human or humans effort to put a violent end to the life of another human or humans, doesn’t seem so far out of the realm of possibility.
For one thing, war hurts. Bullets hurt. Modern industrialized engagements are a special kind of horror, one that never leaves anything but misery and confusion in its wake. It’s not just the casualties that suffer. Recent studies have found that proliferation of post-traumatic distress amongst combat troops is almost 100 percent. Everybody who takes the field carries the baggage, whether or not they make it back home alive or in a box.
Also, modern warfare of the sort being waged by the U.S. on at least two fronts comes with no attendant long-term financial triumph to counterbalance the blood cost. People talk about the boom times that followed WWI and II, but evolution of societal structures and the modern military/industrial complex have removed the possibility of wartime manufacturing initiatives that would jump start such a boom. Rumsfeld put it best when he said, “You go to war with the army that you have.” Standard military practices don’t allow for a market of competitors bidding for rich, long-term military production contracts. Instead, the government uses the vast surplus of goods left over from other wars, oftentimes without even the most basic upgrades, and the military saves it’s money to build hi-tech, big dollar machinery like drone fighter jets and nuclear submarines. The money starts and ends in the pockets of the same institutions: the military, and a handful of companies that the military works with exclusively.
Lastly, humans are smart. It takes time, but we usually end up eradicating, or at least trying to eradicate, things that might spell our collective doom. We’ve poured so much energy and care and thought into doing away with hunger, human rights violations, belly-fat, and whatever else. Is it really so out of bounds to think we might someday turn our attention to the ever-destructive disease state of war itself?
Awareness is the beginning. American citizenry doesn’t know anything about the wars
being prosecuted on its behalf right now, and that’s by design. The military is acting in Afghanistan without an objective. Bin Laden is dead, and a case could be made for the idea that even his extermination is of no great consequence in our country’s specific conflict. I know the war is there, because I make an effort to find out about it every day. Why it’s there is another question entirely. As it’s being related in the press, both here and abroad, we’ve got our people marching around the country shooting at whoever shoots at them. Can this country really afford to be engaged in what is so plainly a zero-sum game?
Read CNN every day. Find out about why your country is killing people, and where. That there are forces in the world that would purposely muddy that picture is reason enough to try and clarify it. Murder is an ugly, senseless thing no matter whose command makes it so, or what ideology one uses to justify its commission.
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