The Art of War

[alice wellintown]

Young soldiers and students are ignorant. They know little about
history, life, love, war. What little they know about the past allows
them to condemn its evils. They recognize universal values or ethics
but fail to consider how pluralistic ones often create paradoxes and
deadlocks.

This is how the young look at history.

It is relatively easy to look into the past and draw lines, seperate
the good from the bad.

Formulating ethics for current problems and setting criteria for what
is good or bad action, or even defining what is evil in our current
affairs is not so easy.

Unless we are merely talking about these as if they were a football match.

Not when we are called to act.

Once criteria are formulated, if we are required to act,  we must
accept that we will need to constantly improve our actions.

Moreover, we can not reduce the war in Afghanistan & Pakistan ...to
old problems and ignore the emerging ones.

More knowledge of history doesn't alway help as it often obscures
persistant problems or oversimplifies emerging ones.

We can go on and on...but one thing even the young may see with ease,
war compounds and does not solve. Communication, not love,  is the
answer.

We are in the middle of a revolution in communications (not
technology). So, we are everyday better able to communicate, to talk
our problems out and work toward solutions.

Young soldiers and young students can understand this. Can you?

> Is war Freudian? Attempts at return, or mimicry of the return to the
> mineral stasis through disintegration and decay?
> I wondered sometimes as I watched young students who had enlisted
> prepare to ship out whether it was duty or the hope for death that was
> the call they answered--a convenient and socially condoned suicide
> attempt. A way out for misfits who couldn't opt for the arts as a way
> to dump the parents, like Jim Morrison, etc. If you can't beat 'em,
> die. All the young men and women coming home now, alive by some ill
> fate, who turn the barrel back on themselves out of despair at having
> survived. There's a hole in the American heart.