The human body is a remarkable instrument, as you surely know if you ever pay any attention to yours.
Sometimes I sit and consider my heart, which has been beating regularly nonstop for close to 69 years, and my lungs, which inflate and deflate more or less automatically, and the whole system that reprocesses the food I eat and the other things this body does, not to mention this bio-electric device inside my skull that makes it all work, and I am in awe.
It helps me respect the other people I encounter all the time, whose bodies and minds are just as miraculous.
I am gobsmacked by some of those people, though, particularly the ones who develop ways to rip, tear, shred and disintegrate bodies and minds, and most especially the ones who invent reasons to use those weapons.
War is the most baffling, stupid and insane human activity ever invented. If the intent is to resolve a difference of opinion, it’s also useless. How many Ukrainians do you imagine have been convinced that their land really belongs to Russia, as a result of the war being waged today? How many Afghans lost loved ones to U.S. weaponry and concluded, yep, those Americans were right all along? All the violence does is perpetuate the violence in an endless cycle of revenge and retribution.
All of those war victims lived inside human bodies as miraculous as the one you’re occupying this very moment. Can you imagine the depravity it takes to order such destruction by the thousand?
I’m not talking about the soldiers caught up in the system and fighting for their lives; I’m talking about the sociopaths who sit in safe little rooms and say, “I’m mad at that sociopath in another safe little room miles away from here, so let’s you go kill people and blow up stuff in his country!”
Somebody has to say no to these madmen. Just no, no more. We ain’t gonna study war no more, except as a classroom exercise about why ceding authority to sociopaths is always a bad idea.
They say war is hell, and I say to hell with war. Lay down the weapons, beat them into plowshares, and the next time someone suggests going to war or supporting a war, tell them to STFU.
