War is always about loss. The only thing assured by it is its own continuation into the future.
Over the centuries, perhaps the greatest loss due to war is the future. War is built upon the dreams of the "older" people who feel unfinished business from the last war. Most often they also feel the need to regain the feelings of "glory and honor" they can only experience in oppressive and crushing conflict. But it is always the youth of the cultures that wages the wars and dies on the fields of glory, honor, and valor. Those youth who survive themselves grow old to hunger for the summing-up of their "unfinished business" and their need for continued glory and honor. Thus wars always—always—destroy the future. They eliminate the lives on which the future might be built, and they instill into those remaining the need to use war again.
Freedom and peace, it has been said—over and over—are never free. But I strongly disagree. They are, after all, the only things that truly can ever be free. They are never built out of the remains or aftermath of conflict: war and conflict only assure more war and conflict, and with them the oppression that fills the spaces in between. But freedom and peace can only be built out of freedom and peace and the desires for freedom and peace without the violence and oppression that is foolishly thought to produce them.
Fear is not respect. Violence, oppression, and such are used to "vanquish" one's enemies, and in so doing to instill fear and shame. Those, it is assumed, will prevent enemies from rising again to challenge the vanquishers. That is never true. If it were, wars would have ceased thousands of years ago because of "good judgment." Cultures must learn to respect one another to a degree heretofore unseen. Soldiers and terrorists—call them all what you will—take up their weapons to demonstrate their lack of respect for one another. Religion, unhappily, has been used for all of our history to draw the boundaries of "respect" around one group or another and to exclude those for whom little or no understanding or respect need be shown.
The actions of those who participate in the world's wars are often acknowledged as sacrifice, and indeed they are. I feel a great deal of emotion about what they have done, and what they have lost. But, because of the points I have made here, their numbers may never end until there are no more wars or veterans…or people. We have grown into a culture and world that can destroy countless others by remote control. But even distance does not eliminate the madness of what is done. All that has changed over time is our ability to not only change the future, but to eliminate it once and for all.
Comments