KS&L 281 Are We Creating War? A Memorial Day Perspective by Tina Erwin

We tell people to make love, not war, but we see people who supposedly love each other kill each other in their own homes. We are, as a civilization, exceptionally hypocritical and profoundly violent.

         We fight with our neighbors, our friends, co-workers and families. We are the microcosm of war on a day-to-day basis. Is it any wonder that governments struggle with the macrocosm of crazy leaders fighting other crazy leaders? We even fight each other politically, but blessedly, in the United States, without overt violence.

However, we do engage in ‘dirty tricks’ in national and business politics. The first casualty is always the truth. First we distort the truth, so that it looks like something else and then we pretty much finish it off, by making something that starts out as good into something horrible. We have so distorted the truth that we have no idea what to believe anymore.

Television networks, which condemn cries for vengeance in other countries, think nothing of airing shows, which promote vengeance among teenagers, business people and neighbors. It sells product because people love conflict. Are we teaching our young people that vengeance is an acceptable behavior?

We cry and demonstrate against military deaths, as if death were somehow surprising. People live and they eventually have to die of something. People look at numbers and are horrified, without realizing that in an average year, the entire United States military, all services combined, has roughly 2200 people die per year, when we are not at war.  Contrast that statistic with the fact that over 6,000 young people die each year when they go to college: six thousand. In the last six years, 36,000 kids died in college where they were supposed to be safe. No one is upset about that statistic. Contrast this with the six years of the Iraq war, where four thousand people have died in that conflict. Horrible, heart wrenching as it is, in six years, that number is still dramatically lower than one year of deaths in college. It is chilling to consider that a young person statistically is safer in the military than in college, even when we are at war.

 We loose 100,000 people to hospital mistakes every single year:  one hundred thousand people. Where is the press coverage of this? And the list goes on. People live and they die all kinds of deaths. There has to be a way for people to leave when the experience they came for in this time and space is over. War, emotional, personal, national, neighborly war, is frequently a method of exit.

Another thought to ponder is that conflict offers each of us an opportunity to ‘stand up for something’ and to discover whether we ‘have what it takes’ to be a courageous person. Courage is action in the face of fear, difficulty and hardship. Well, to be able to show courage, you have to have fear, difficulty and hardship. So, back to polarity we go.

         So, these are some of the reasons there is war, and it serves to remind us that we need to be very, very careful when we accuse someone else of ‘warmongering’ or being violent. Unless this planet undergoes some unimaginable spiritual transformation that takes the concepts of violence out of our emotional structure, there will continue to be ‘low intensity conflicts,’ as a minimum and major wars as a terrible potential.

We may also want to be circumspect in using negative words about the military. Most military people really want to make peace and actually want to avoid war at all costs.

For example, if you ask a US Navy Commander, how he feels about his job of being captain of a nuclear submarine carrying 24 nuclear missiles, that could pretty effectively destroy the entire world, he will immediately tell you that he feels he was successful at his job if he never fires a weapon in anger.  That would be the definition of peace keeping. Yet, if you contrast that with a home-owner how owns a gun, he or she expects to use it to stop an intruder.

Military people really understand how terribly costly war is. Ultimately their goal is to be peacekeepers, not war makers. Actually, the military is really the only agency working to ensure that wars do not happen. Civilians in government make the decisions to ‘go to war’. Congress has to approve this, not the military. At the end of the day, how ironic is that? 

So on this Memorial Day, let us all be grateful for the sacrifice of men and women thorugh the ages who defended our freedom and let us always remember, that freedom is costly and will always have to be earned.