Y’know, life used to be pretty simple. War didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t happen to people who mattered, or at least it wasn’t reported on, or at least I didn’t care about it. But these days, it seems war is all we can talk about, for reasons I don’t totally understand but I think are related to the newly-prohibitive prices of my monthly crude oil bath. It seems you can’t go 10 feet without hearing about the preventable deaths of children, or the undemocratic removal of foreign heads of state, and frankly, I was getting pretty annoyed with it. But I’m a Vassar student, and an avowed progressive, and I’m willing to post any thinkpiece if it means an end to injustice.
So I’ve been reading, and the more I do, the more I realize that this “war” business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, there’s lots of good reasons to do it! Research tells us that sometimes war is necessary, like when we liberated Vietnam or Korea or Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran or Haiti or the Dominican Republic or Guatemala or Cuba or Chile or Cuba again. But other times, war is bad, like when we view all of those conflicts in retrospect 10 to 50 years down the line. Right now, it seems like the wars going on might be the first kind, but who knows what we’ll think a decade from now?
Warmongers, unlike wars, seem to improve with age. When George W. Bush started a war in Iraq, we recognized that he was a warmonger, but also knew that a response to foreign terror was necessary. Now we understand that the war in Iraq was evil, but can recognize that Bush was a principled moderate compared to Trump. Based on this, we can predict that Trump will be validated by history after Solaris Superfuentes declares war on all life on Earth in 2029.
It turns out war is bad because of the massive costs to all nations involved. When we bomb civilians, America wastes valuable white phosphorus and America loses sources of cheap foreign labor. And that’s not even mentioning the human cost: American soldiers might die!
Probably one of the worst things about war is how inevitable it is. Most problems in America have two solutions, one for each possible political position that a human could hold. But “peace” has not succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. So, much like how all two political ideologies have failed to imagine an alternate to the American healthcare system, a solution to gun violence or a reason to care about transgender people, it seems there is no option for us but war. For my part, I like blue war better than red war, but I dream of a day when we can bridge the political gap and agree to disagree.
Yes, war is complicated indeed. We don’t want Americans to die, but if we won’t intervene in foreign elections, who will? We don’t want to be complicit in crimes against humanity, but if we aren’t, how will we ensure a flow of cheap goods into our country? Yes, we all want peace—but is it even realistic? After all, it seems societies must be as aggressive as the Spartans or Romans, lest they be extinguished entirely.
The more I hear about war, the less I like it, but the more I accept it. You should too, or you hate democracy.