We fight so many wars. We frame so many things in the language of war.
I grew this song. It grew out of the quote I posted in my last entry. It grew out of all the things I have learned about humans over the years. It grew out of my archaeology degree. Because we haven’t always fought. Throughout prehistory, the human respose to conflict was to migrate away from it. Like most other animals, we only fight when cornered. Until we had stuff that we couldn’t easily carry with us, this was simple. When we started settling down and building places to keep our stuff in, we started thinking of those places as home. Instead of having the whole world, we had our own place. So war is one of those diseases of civilization.
Chucking civilization would be idiotic. But we can move past the equally idiotic idea of fighting with each other over stuff and territory to keep it in. We can see the whole world as our home once again.
Here’s a soldier’s view of war.
His book, Will War Ever End helped me to pull together things I already knew, and added a few more. The path to peace and the path to war are one and the same. Paul Chappell’s assertion that we fight to protect our people and our home makes so much sense to me. The rules of war, though often broken, usually declare homes and families to be off limits. While the deaths of combatants are always tragic, the true horror of war is when innocents are killed.
War, and inequality, and prejudice of all kinds cut us off from our birthright, which is the whole world. When the world is truly our home, we won’t destroy parts of it, and those who live in it.
