Oh What Lovely Wars

If you have been following the news lately, first of all my condolences. Second of all you may have noticed that war has been enjoying an upsurge in popularity. Why? Maybe things are just getting back to normal after a little lull. The history of mankind is all about war and conquest. It’s what we hairless apes do best.

Face it. If it were not for war and all the petty day to day confrontations it springs from, what would we have to keep life interesting? Nothing gets the juices flowing like a good, rousing war.

Some people, perhaps, like scientific researchers and creative artists, can be happy in the absence of conflict. They are too excited about accomplishing worthwhile things to waste time on petty gripes. Few of us, however, possess their talents. Apologies to John Lennon, but for most of us the prospect of a meaningful human life in the absence of conflict is completely un-Imagine-able. And by the way, Lennon obviously wrote that song when he was high on something.

After the end of the Second World War and its postscript, Korea, people kept busy having kids, watching Ozzie and Harriet, buying houses and shiny new cars and mowing their lawns. They’d had enough war for a while, and there was a brief lull in war’s popularity. Viet Nam corrected that crazy state of affairs, but for some reason it got into the heads of draft age people that peace was a better option than being shot in a rice paddy. For a while they thought they could be content to sit around stoned singing “Kumbaya” and engaging in a little hanky-panky between verses. As we know, many of them outgrew that tomfoolery and became Republicans.

Have you ever read a book, seen a movie, play or TV drama, that contains no conflict between characters? You never will. Without conflict, things are boring. No one would watch a movie about unremarkable people going through their ordinary routines unless they were also hurling zingers at each other in the process. The only exception to interpersonal conflict driving a story is when the conflict lies within the protagonist themself who is striving to overcome their own impediments on the way to achieving some sort of lofty goal.

We are weaned on violence. Mother Goose and Grimm’s fairy tales run red with blood. Everything is a war of some sort. The war on drugs. The war on poverty. The fight against cancer. The war on hunger. The battle of the bands. But love, you say, that’s an exception. Nope. After a brief delusional period during which their brains are flooded with endogenous narcotics, most lovers spend the rest of their relationship fighting the battle between the sexes.

The most popular fiction usually involves murder, mayhem and many explosions, but we can satisfy only so much of our craving for conflict vicariously. Sometimes there is simply no substitute for a good old honest to goodness war. Sure, after a while we get tired of the killing, especially the unfortunate ones who get stuck in the actual horror of it rather than watching it, almost as though it were one more violent show, on TV. Too late, stuck in a trap our own making, we soon long for the peacefulness that preceded it. But once it’s peaceful for a while, the restlessness returns.

But, you say, peace is the ideal, isn’t it? Not in this life it isn’t. After we die we are supposed to rest in peace. But since you no longer exist, you can’t enjoy it or get bored with it. And what if there’s an afterlife? I always got a laugh out of the stereotypical fantasy of a perfect peaceful Heaven. If that’s the way it really is, I just hope they provide us with a lot of drugs up there. Otherwise, if it were not for the climate, Hell might be a far more interesting place to spend eternity.

As long as there are humans, war will probably be inevitable and if by some chance we ever stop having wars, it won’t be any time soon.

The only solution to endless wars would be for one war to bring about the end to our species. Perhaps the next intelligent life form to take over might be a little nicer.

Nah. If that were the case they’d never take over.

Our options are as limited as our nature. We can accept the nasty, confrontational, belligerent state of affairs or, like many, even enjoy the excitement it provides. Or we can “fight” to end war.

But either way, in typical human style, we’d still be fighting wouldn’t we?