Tropical Zen

I’ve personally spent a lot of time and energy grousing about the military, the way they do things, and the damage it’s caused (even to their own troops). I think we need to spend time thinking about war, both specific ones and in general; what is the motivation, and what is the cost? Who really benefits? It’s certainly not the soldiers, even when they can convince themselves that it was a “just” war. Not that I’ve come across any true forms of justice that involve the massive destruction of people, psyches, and noncombatants, but still. As a conversation I was in earlier today concluded, it seems pretty unreasonable that there had ever been a society of humans which dealt well with the kinds of unreasoning violence that are used in war; when trying to take the Other Guy’s stuff (food, land, women…) or prevent him from taking yours, a nonviolent conversation-session over cups of organic, fair-trade coffee sweetened with organic agave nectar falls short of accomplishing the goal.

I don’t have a good answer to the war, to any of them. I don’t agree with most of them, begun and fueled as they are by greed and fear, but I don’t have a better answer than Mohandas Ghandi’s massive protests, which any Subsaharan African, Southeast Asian, or American warlord would completely ignore. Still, it’s important to continue to think about it, chew it over, and come up with answers other than what we are spoon-fed by the media; if we’re diligent enough, we just might be able to avoid being machine-gun-fed further answers.

Garrison Keillor touches on some truths worth ruminating in his essay here: “For the troops to fall into line is a noble thing; for civilians to fall into line is shameful. ”
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/features/deskofgk/2008/04/01.shtml