War some more

War is glamorous. From it emerge the heroes and the daredevils we all like to imagine we are. Wars are forever infused into the retelling of our histories. We still hold forth on the exploits of Odysseus, of Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and Thomas Edward Lawrence. Few places in our histories, our schools, our songs or our religions do we celebrate peace or even honor it with anything more than a perfunctory statement: A period of peace ensued for X number of years.

We do not want peace. We should stop pretending we do. We give a great deal of lip service to the concept of peace, but we leave it for others to achieve. We can't possibly expect peace to arise out of a nation of people who stockpile weapons in their homes, yet we believe it will. We cannot possibly believe that peace is the objective of a nation that spends far more on guided missiles than on safe drinking water, public education and food and shelter for the poor, yet we tell ourselves otherwise. We cannot possibly be a peace-loving species when we have taken the most profound of our technological discoveries and manifested the greatest means of destruction known to man, yet the hypocrisy escapes us.

Everything about us as a nation says we have no desire for peace, while individually, we insist that we do. We insist bombs are a justifiable means to keep people from being driven from their homes in Kosovo, but we made no such insistence in Rwanda. We insisted that military force was the means to protect democratic self-determination in Vietnam, although the same reasoning apparently doesn't apply to Tibet, Taiwan or Ceylon. We insist Hitler had to be stopped in World War II, yet we didn't lift a finger until 6 million Jews and twice as many Russians were dead, and only then because we were attacked by the offender's ally.

We do not love peace. We love predominance.

We love to win. We love to be right. We love to prevail. We do not go to war to prevent oppression. We do not go to war to protect those in need. We go to war to protect what we feel we need, and we've learned to believe there's never enough of whatever it is we need. There's never enough money, enough land, enough oil, enough energy. Never mind that a comparative handful of people in the world control the bulk of all of these things as a greedy child would hoard candy. We fear doing without because we most despise those who have nothing and need our assistance. God help us should we ever depend on the good graces of the souls we have refused.

Peace requires balance. There is no possibility for peace in a world where a black woman has to raise a white woman's child to make enough money to barely feed her own children. There is no possibility for peace as long as a small circle of primitive men continue to hoard money and recklessly manipulate the economy. Peace will never rise from the smoking ruins of bombed-out villages and broken homes. Only resentment. Only imbalance. Only the tension that lies in wait for another generation to come along and tip the scale again.

The interims between wars are not peace. They are moments of exhaustion, of tired bewilderment when we momentarily rise to recognize the futility of war, only to forget it again as we regain our strength and tell once again the stories of the heroes and daredevils we all like to imagine we are.

Monday, May 31, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.