A case for Peace

“Only war can abolish war; the man who doesn’t want a gun must carry a gun.” — Mao Tse Tung

Oppressed by a darker sadness than mine, having no son, I could send to be slaughtered in a general’s game. Pretty structured as I kill you, or you kill me, this piece was born out of that question I’ve been asking myself: Do women react differently to war, than men?

In a climate of fear, soldiers are sent to places from where they wouldn’t come back or are committed to operations that would cost the lives of who knows how may human beings, from both sides.

The painful part — after the flag and candles, the stirring speeches and an angry hubris of a wounded nation — is the crushing goodbyes that can’t be eased up by tears or kisses, for those who abandoned their families and jobs to make a war in shadow.

At airports, docksides and homes — as our young went off to where there are no speeches, only vast areas of uncertainty and death — loved ones know that war takes on a different tone when the troops ships leave the shore.

Pain replaces patriotism in combat, and shouts of vengeance become the battle cry of those whose lives are left in the shattered paths of moving armies!

Families cling to each other in embrace. Only a strident call to duty and honor and war can create the most strident of calls, for the most terrible of duties.

It used to be that rules of war were about running bits of metal through the flesh of men — large, small, pointed, square, round splintered bits of metal that tear and kill. Metals fashioned by the intelligence of men are so good, it gets man to the moon. Yet, it isn’t his finger that pulls the trigger.

Is our existence decided by a few people? By their dreams and caprices, their initiative and will, as Bertrand Russell feared, when he wrote his misgivings?  Are they more intelligent than ourselves? Stronger, more enlightened, perhaps more enterprising?

Participants of full events that one cannot check, judgments that  we cannot contest? Think of Afghanistan.

I am consumed with a hundred feelings of inadequacy, engulfed with the fear for not having enough eyes, ears and brains to look, understand and provide information to help people think with stubborn hope.

This case is not here to defend war, but to help those who are forced to fight!

For behind every brave soldier is a braver woman who spawned him.