I was born in 1968. Smack in the middle of Vietnam. In the 37 years since, I've lived through wars, wars, wars. Police actions, invasions, incursions, operations. Wars direct and indirect. Big ones (Vietnam, Desert Storm, "Enduring Freedom,"), little ones (Panama, Grenada, Bosnia), endless ones (War on Drugs, War on Poverty, Global War on Terror).
I'm sick of it.
We are a nation built by and for war. There has been no single day in my life when our military haven't been deployed somewhere in the world. Our military budget vastly exceeds that of every other nation in the world, vastly exceeds all our other spending combined. I work to sustain and pay taxes to a war machine. Our eduation, media and consumer engines conspire to promote a war paradigm, to justify and ennoble it, to dehumanize it. I'm tired of going to 24-hr. fitness to work out and make myself strong and healthy while tv screens beam Bill O'Reilly and images of our soldiers running through the narrow alleys of some Arab city.
I'm tired of war. Of living in wartime. Of living in a society of war metaphors, from grade school dodgeball games to pro football to the corporate boardroom to divorce court.
Thomas Hardy, the great English poet and novelist, said in the late 19th century that war is doomed. His faith in enlightenment prinicples, the scientific and industrial revolutions and Victorian humanism led him to the conclusion that humanity had entered a new phase in its evolution. Then he saw all the gains humans had made in technology twisted to the brute violence of World War I. Hardy never really overcame his shock and horror, and thankfully never survived to witness the reptilian ugliness of 1938.
I'm not going to play their war games any longer. I am not going to fall prey to the anger, hatred and ignorance that is a necessary precondition to any act of violence.
I am going to be one of those ironic points of light that flash out wherever the just exchange their messages. I can't stop their wars, but I can refuse to fight them.