War, huh?

"Those who cannot wage ware do not get to demand peace!"

This statement by Golda Meir captures the role of strength in maintaining peace. How many times have we been down this road? India and Pakistan, two brothers, at each others' throats for 75+ years. We're now at a point where reasons don't matter. No one wants to debate how and why this started. Maybe the British successfully drove a wedge between our religions and left it to us to sort out. Maybe we always resented each other due to all the historical conflict that comes with opposing faiths. Honestly, now it doesn't matter and shouldn't matter. We have had enough wars and enough hate on both sides. An entire generation has grown up seeing unhealthy amounts of propaganda that an entire nation is evil!

Why must we continue this chain of hatred? The truth is, simply, that it is easy for the vast majority of humans to hate someone than it is to forgive and accept them. And we, the common people without power have been fed enough propaganda periodically to not be able to let go of this hate fully. How do we tackle this? How do we prepare ourselves to better deal with all the flaring emotions political tensions evoke in us?

We think and we disassemble what we hear. It is not an easy process but it has worked for me. Anytime anyone says the other side is wrong, let us think about what they said instead of piling the hate on. Let us disassemble the items they're using in their arguments and see the individual pieces instead of what they're being used for in that hateful argument. Don't let ourselves get caught up in the emotion of the argument but peer beyond it to look at the logic and facts. In the digital age, empires can be built and torn down in a blink of eye with a biased post or a doctored image. We should equip ourselves to be better than the lies and propaganda that's sent our way.

Now, War, huh? What is it, good for? Absolutely nothing!! The legendary song by the Temptations is timeless not just for its catchy tune, but because it speaks a fundamental truth! War cannot make life, it takes. Those who ask for war have not experienced the horrors of it! Those who think fire and brimstone are the solution to this long standing problem of ours, have never had to put their lives on the line! They've never had to experience the loss of life, limb and brethren to the vagaries of war!

We are working class humans. We do not make decisions that change the course of nations and lives of thousands! We hear what we're told, see what we're shown and have to fight for even forming a healthy opinion about many things.

I'm no political analyst. I'm just a guy who realizes zero sum game is never the answer. Do I believe we have to fight to protect ourselves? I absolutely do. And we will fight with such righteous fury that no one will ever again want to try to harm us. But I urge you all to not covet, romanticize and propose war and violence. Peace cannot be had without war. But war isn't the only way to peace. 

Might should be a deterrent, not exercised.  War doesn't give anything, like I said earlier. It takes. Limbs. Lives. Land. Everything. It takes and takes, leaving desolation in its wake. On a good day, anyone can win a war. But after a war, the victor mourns, as does the defeated. The one who stops coveting war is the only one who gets to walk away.

"Kings lay down plans. Soldiers lay down lives."

Let us fight to protect our motherland, our rights, our fellow humans and our respect. But let us not, in this fighting, give ourselves in to the emotions of war and promote it. War should be avoided, not coveted.