It's been so long since I've written I realize. Life has been crazy with graduate school. And then I got overwhelmed with the different thoughts and ideas in my mind over the last few weeks, that I could not even approach my blog. So much has happened in the last few weeks...Iran, Michael Jackson, North Korea... It's sometimes too much for me too handle and I end up closing myself off from news, from people. I just can't take how much we, society, allow to take place in our world. Especially, how many people we end up hurting, whether through physical beatings, verbal banter, or silence.
I don't know why, but one particular issue compelled me to write something this morning. I am currently reading a book that was released last year by Ishmael Beah entitled A Long Way Gone. It's an autobiographical account of life as a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone rebel army. I've rather randomly ended up having lots of conversations about soldiers and wartime lately. A few of my friends are dating/engaged to soldiers who will soon be going out into the field, and, of course, there's the whole issue of the fact that the U.S. is fighting multiple wars right now. So, perhaps it's not all that random. Nonetheless, it is not a topic that I would LIKE to discuss in-depth. I do not say any of this with an anti-American mind. If anything, my love of people makes me hate war, and those who enable such atrocities - not my beliefs about nationalism and nation states (which I can go into further in another blog post).
I've been thinking a lot about pacifism and how many attack individuals who hate the military and hate the war as somehow anti-American. Reading Beah's touching and disturbing story confirms in my mind that there is nothing radical and extremist about pacifism. It is not anti-American to wish that individuals and the government would stop insisting that war is the only solution to our global problems. Why is that mentality not regarded as radical and extremist? In our society we think that those against war are foolish, yet we do not see the lack of logic in solving disputes with amunition. Soldiers, too, end up becoming tools of the ones who started the fight in the first place, and who instead of carrying it out verbally, decide to risk others' lives to win a battle of muscle-flexing. Wars are really, then, more like a children's fight blowing way out of proportion. And while lives are destroyed and families torn apart, everyone begins to forget why the fight started out in the first place.
Why has this extremist means of resolving issues become status quo in our society? Why has our society driven individuals to voluntarily agree to risk their lives so that they can kill others and supposedly protect our nation (even though none of these wars comes anywhere close to American soil...and all the fighting does not seem to do much to quell terrorist attacks globally)? Why do we consider blowing anything or anyone up in the "name of the U.S.A" a noble and heroic task?
I do not believe that it is because somehow we have some innate evil in us that drives us to kill others. No. I do not believe that there is very much about our behaviors that is innate, if there is anything at all. There is nothing natural about war. I mean, most animals do not kill their own species as much as we do. War is a social construct, just like gender and race...and pretty much everything else in our world. The notion that war is the only solution to trans-national problems, then, is also a social construct and not one that we have to accept. Instead of talking about blowing up people and killing others as something we have to do to maintain security, cannot we start talking about how we should care about everyone's lives, not just our own? Cannot we recognize the hypocrisy of assuming that somehow mass murders lead to peace, and subsequently demand alternative means of communication? Just because we've been doing it for so long does not mean that we have to keep solving disputes this way. There is ALWAYS another way. And wishing that thousands or millions of people did not have to die for a cause they barely understand does not make anyone anti-Uncle Sam. It just makes them pro-humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment