How Wars Are Made

In dealing with some incredibly difficult people in my personal life recently, I feel like I've learned something unexpected. I feel like I've learned how Wars are made. How they begin, and how they last for years, decades, millenniums. I feel like I've learned how such a horrible reality of life has become acceptable, expected, and normal.

The concept of War has been around since life on earth. As living beings, we fight for survival. Be it shelter, food, or protection, we defend ourselves and our loved ones to make sure we survive. But that's not the kind of War I'm talking about. I'm talking about something uniquely human. I'm talking about what I call political War, or ideological War. We fight, and we kill, for ideas and ideologies.

When we talk about Wars, and we say something like "I support the war in Iraq", we are speaking in favor of killing. The killing of Americans, Iraqis, the killing of people in general. I think we forget that when we talk about War. When was the last time we actually had world peace? War has become such a constant in our lives, that we have become desensitized to it. People blame violent music and video games, I blame the fact that we send people overseas to kill other people as a policy. We talk about War like a natural disaster. Like something we have no control over. Yet, it's a human caused problem. We could end all War right now. This very second. We could all wake up tomorrow morning and decide that killing people, killing anyone, is wrong. Invading someone's country is wrong. Spreading our ideology by force is wrong.

Wars are made by egotistical and stubborn extremists. Wars are made because people forget that the strongest religion, the strongest government, the strongest union of all is the Human Race. When you subscribe to the Human Religion, to the Human Race, you worship the overwhelming power of humankind. You pray to love, respect, and understanding. And the single greatest sin of all is killing, and War.