Why do we War?

My mind was on the email that a friend had sent conceptualizing the world’s population from within a group of 100 people. Where 70 people are illiterate, 50 are poor and 99 have no college education. This email really grabbed me by brains balls and made me look at the world in a different light. I would like to find out where he got the info and verify the numbers. But how would you do that, even with Google? In my heart I believe them to be true and so what if they are off by 10%, the concept is still staggering. I have always understood that there was poverty and need but I always viewed it thru my American filters. This puts everything in a different light.

Let’s take war for example. We are a country that, for the most part (or contains more people who have the luxury to) can sit around and contemplate its navel and feel self satisfied in doing so. Many countries and people do not have that luxury. Their very existence is based on abject poverty and disease and hunger and need and domination and no sense of purpose and total freaking helplessness and uselessness. These are the kinds of people that if herded together or controlled by some dominant force could see war, brutality and seizure as their only means to survival. They see a world in which others have and they have not. Where all of the carrots are being dangled but none are being offered. Where armed conflict is not seen as simply a method of removing themselves from their situation but a God given right that they have to take from those that do not understand the gifts and generosity and graciousness with which they have been blessed.

Where strapping on bombs and going a-suiciding is seen as the only act of magnanimity that they can perform. Where they are helpless to change any part of their life except thru a weapon. Where killing others is a true calling of God and they hope for their reward in heaven and are damned happy to get there so that they can receive it (or at least get out of this life because the threat of hell is no deterrent when the life you are living is worse than any concept of hell proposed by Man).

As long as these people live like this, we will always have wars and terrorism and brutality (these always sound better in 3’s). But let’s not be stupid about this whole concept. There are people in this country that call for wars. There are groups that make a better living while we are at war. There are people that call for us to turn away from all wars, to turn the other cheek and that if we will only give peace a chance then all will be right with the world. I wish that I had the gift of blind stupidity so that I could allow myself to live within either extreme. Life would be much simpler and would seem to have a purpose. Then I could go thru my life annihilating or being annihilated but do so in a smug sanctimonious manner which would ease my glide into heaven where God would be bound to hug me and console me in a way that the pagan sons of bitches were too blind to see.

War is a horror where we attempt to better train our kids to more effectively kill their kids, while they are training their kids to kill ours. This almost sounds like a corporate mission statement.

However the Idi Amins, Hitlers and Sadam Husseins (got’ta love the 3’s) will not go away on their own nor by the grace of God. These are people that rape, mutilate, torture, kill, and imprison just for funsies, as past times to get thru the day since they don’t have any decent soap operas to watch. If we sit back and allow it to happen then we are no better than they are. If we attempt to stop them by embargo then we are only appeasing our own consciousness that we are doing all we can, while treating them as humans, and hopefully forcing them to stop one day. Bullshit. Every day we allow this to continue we are vicariously doing the atrocities thru them.

People are dying every day in some kind of armed conflict over something. Whether it is food, oil, gas, land, brutality or the sanctity of the individual. This is how our countries have come to be formed. To take what they need by whatever means so that we can survive and through our own grace we will allow your survival to continue.

This is also corporate America, where greed is king. And he who has the most toys) wins. Where people are trampled on and treated like cattle so that other people that invest some of their money can reap benefits and retire like kings. Just so you are not part of the corporation that has taken money from someone else and now it is your ass on the chopping block, not someone else’s. Oh well. Corporations are allowed to run free, gobblin’ up all that they need and much, much more. So that their shareholders can earn a good return? Not really. So that the people involved at the top can make so much money that they can buy small third world countries. In that mythical group of 100 people, 59% of all the wealth would be held by 6 people.

I am neither a Communist nor a Socialist. I am not into giving hand outs to everyone just ‘cause they don’t feel like working or they would rather get a hand out than a hand up. But I don’t think that our modern view of government and industry can continue if we truly want to grow and prosper as a civilization. We have to find some way to think outside the box. As it stands today we are all appalled by the greed of Dictators and CEO’s yet at the same time we are pissed because we are not the ones sitting there making half of all the money in the world. There but for the grace of god.

We have been raised within this social and personal consciousness and all too easily can go along with the status quo; to accept all of this as simple fate and curse God for what has befallen us. Or we can be the agents of change. To be the gadfly of America to constantly pester and annoy so that people will/can re-examine life and what it can be.