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Today's
Meditation:
We fool
ourselves into thinking that there are such things as
"necessary wars." If another country
invades ours, then it may be necessary for us to defend
ourselves or our allies, but that doesn't make the war
necessary-- the original invasion never should have
happened. As Jimmy says, it's a "necessary
evil," not a necessary war. Wars are generally
started by politicians or monarchs who don't have the
creativity to find other more effective ways of dealing
with problems with other nations.
The
people who actually die in the wars are almost never the
people who actually start them. They are our
children, our neighbor's children, and the children of the
people who live far from us. And they're killing
each other, not those who are responsible for the
conditions that started the war.
It's
important that we see war for what it is:
evil. If we do this, we'll be much less likely to
support our country-- or any other country, for that
matter-- in going to war. If more of us did this,
we'd be more likely to search for peaceful alternatives
for solving our problems. Often, the strongest
supporters of war are those people who would most profit
from war, and we can't let potential profit determine how
many of our young are going to die useless deaths in
foreign lands.
Very
few of us have direct influence over whether wars are
going to be fought, but when more of us share a common
vision of a warless existence, the chances of preventing
war grow considerably. Let us stay opposed to war,
and let us teach others the futility of war, and the great
cost that can never be measured in dollars or
profit. While we may understand the occasional evil
that may be necessary to defend ourselves, we cannot
sanction war for any reason other to defend ourselves or
our allies.
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