Cycles of War

There will be war. Not because war is a good thing, or because it is necessary to serve justice. No, there will be war because conflict is part of human nature and seems to be essential to maturation.

Every generation has had its own war. In this country, there has been a significant war since even before the country was founded. The French and Indian wars, the Revolutionary war, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, The Indian wars of the 1870s, the Spanish-American war, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and now a looming Middle-East/Eastern European/African war —all essentially a generation apart.

Don't get the impression that it is an American problem, either. The history of Civilization on every continent—Europe, Asia, India, Africa, Australia, and maybe even Greenland—is a history of war as each generation has to learn the lessons of the past. It seems that the hardships, the cruelties, the tests by fire and combat, the grief and mourning, the futility of revenge, and so many other consequences and lessons of war must be repeated over and over.

The generation of WWII came home a more sober and wiser generation and built a period of peace and prosperity unlike any seen before. Having seen the destruction, the death, the devastation of war, they understood the value of a civil society that valued justice, rule of law, good relations between neighbors, civility, faith, family, respect for others, and so many other virtues that seem almost absent today

This Greatest Generation did not start out with such maturity and wisdom. After all, they were our parents and grandparents, no different from us. It was their near-universal experience of war that matured them, that taught them what was truly valuable, and gave them the wisdom to build on what they had to make something truly great in history.

Literature is filled with examples, both real and fictional, of people who learned the lessons of war and conflict. Yes, some people are enriched by war, but many others are impoverished. War can destroy entrenched oppressive totalitarian regimes, clearing the way for better, freer systems. It can also remove freedom so that new systems of oppression can be established. The American writer, Mark Twain wrote of this two-sided nature of war in his short story "The War Prayer".

There is no doubt that war is exciting. Choosing and fighting for a side can provide a sense of purpose and meaning to an otherwise banal life. Movies and stories of war heroes, of powerful superheroes, of Good Guys violently smashing the Bad Guys, replete with lots of blood and gore, encourage a vision of virtue triumphing over evil that gives war an often illusory justification. The visions are stimulating, never showing the aftermath of grief, rebuilding, and all the lost hopes and dreams, both personal and societal.

True, sometimes war is the only justifiable response to a situation. The current conflict between Israel and Hamas is a prime example. For decades, Israel has endured rocket and terrorist attacks from its Hamas neighbors who have sworn to erase Israel from the face of the Earth. Israel has responded with great restraint, largely seeking to prevent the attacks in various ways.

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The Iron Dome system is a purely defensive system designed to destroy inbound rockets. They built an extensive and expensive wall to reduce the ingress of suicide terrorists bent on gaining "paradise" by killing large number of Israeli citizens. 

The final straw came last October when a Hamas raid in force killed hundreds of unarmed civilians at a festival in Israel. Ironically, the purpose of the festival was to promote peace. The Israeli response has been to seek to eliminate the ability of Hamas to continue its program of genocide of Jews and destruction of Israel. Even now, the Israeli response seeks to minimize the suffering of Palestinian civilians while eliminating the ability of Hamas to attack and persecute Israel.

There will always be situations where one people wish to take by force from others, and those attacked will need to defend themselves. There will always be injustices, wrongs to right, offenses to redress, attacks to oppose. A lesson of war is how to resolve such matters without violence when possible, as well as when and how a violent response is required. There is a famous prayer that encapsulates this choice explicitly when it asks that we be granted the courage to change the things we can, to accept the things we cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. I would add that in addition to wisdom we be granted the strength to follow that wisdom.

Now we find ourselves in a situation where members of one generation who would gain from a war in which they would not participate are actively seeking to provoke a war for a younger generation to fight. In a sense, this generational duality has always been the case, and will likely continue to be true so long as humans remain human.

The lust for power will ensure there will always be those who will risk all that someone else has for their own gain. It is up to us to have the wisdom to recognize this and the courage to stop their provocations. This is not an easy situation as there are many who seek the gratification of war for gain without pain. At least without their own pain. It is much easier to ignore the suffering of others than that of one's own. Many are in positions of power which makes stopping them problematical. Not impossible—just difficult.

There currently is a group of powerful people within and associated with our current administration who would like to see the US involved in another war soon. Among other reasons, that would provide justification for declaration of Martial Law or a National Emergency, whereby Constitutional protections could be suspended, the November election postponed "for the duration" and changes made to our country that would be difficult or impossible to undo, changes that would leave them in power indefinitely.

Hopefully, such action is no more than an unpleasant fantasy, but I am certain that it has been entertained in more than one court.

It is time for the adults to step forth. We have interests in supporting our allies, but not in promoting new wars. Our meddling in Ukraine has only succeeded in prolonging a war that should never have happened in the first place, and would not have happened if we had real leadership.

Likewise our involvement in the Middle East has only proven us to be an unreliable ally. The absence of clear American interests, coupled with the expense in both economic and stature terms, means that only our enemies have something to gain. That includes our domestic enemies as well as foreign.

Let us first remove the log in our own eye before we seek to remove the sliver in others. That is the grown-up thing to do. Let this generation be the one to break the cycle and grow without the need for war. Challenges and tests of strength and courage abound. We don't need a war this time around. It is time we found new and better ways to bring a generation to mature adulthood.

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