More War

I can't watch the news today.  I just can't bring myself to click or view or even scan a headline.  CNN is sending its little updates to my phone in urgent email dings, and I want to throw my trusty iPhone across the room, hide it in the back of my closet, run away from it. 

Yesterday, when I came stumbling out of the MRI, my mother and another woman were staring at the obligatory waiting room televisions with something like dread on their faces.  It took me some time to clue in to the rhetoric falling from the Commander in Chief's lips, but I put together with the help of the scrolling titles and labels that he was talking about Libya, saying that America would not lead a military action, that it was not our place to do that. 

Today, as I woke and checked my email, the first messages that greet my eyes tell me that we are now engaged in bombing there. 

I cannot say that the people of Libya don't deserve a government that does not oppress them.  I cannot say that their current leadership is a good or just one.  I just have to wonder why, when my own nation's military is dedicated to conflicts in at least two other active zones of conflict, we have stepped into a third.  Is there nobody else in the entire world who can do these things?  (Notice I am not getting into the issue of whether or not it was necessary or why we might really be doing this.  I am not going to turn over that rock and watch all the little philosophical debates run around....)

I think about every single young man and woman who graduates out of my classes and goes into the military, every person I know who serves as a career part of the armed forces in some way, and every time we lift another banner, sally forth in another grand crusade, the chances of those people coming home in a flag-draped box goes up again, and again, and again.  I know they know that when they sign up.  I know they want to serve God, Country, and the Corps (or the Army, or whathaveyou), but I just can't help but feeling that this loyalty, honestly given and rare in this day and age, is being managed badly. 

Just because you CAN do a thing does not mean that you SHOULD do a thing, does not mean that it is WISE to do a thing.  I think that all too often, when history looks back on war, on the devastation that comes from it, the sons and fathers, the mothers and daughters who will never come home again, on the broken countrysides and the scarred landscapes, I think that the reasons why they start frequently begin to look like things that should have been taken care of some other way.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  Those rabid dogs who want to fight need to be taken and given a very sharp stick and put in a deep pit with slick, high sides.  Let them stab each other to their hearts' content.   Let them get as much blood and death and violence as they can possibly need.  Let them howl and rage and rip and one another until there is a clear victor.  Then put that bastard down.  Let the rest of us get on with living.  We have enough other problems out here among us to deal with without the warmongers adding to it, I think.