Reply #1: Ah, me, history's gyre just keeps turning, flipping us over and over and over, [View All]

until maybe, some day, we get it right.

We waste all our resources on war--not to mention the godawful destruction of that most precious and amazing evolutionary development, the human brain, and how it gets splattered all over by bombs and bullets, as if intelligence were shit or garbage. And for what? 60 years after defeating the Nazis we have become the Nazis. Every war since has had no justification whatsoever. War profiteer wars. Oil wars. And what have war profiteers and oil gotten us? Bankruptcy and a dying planet.

The little lessons, and the big lessons, keep coming back around. I DO think we learn. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed it (NYT poll; other polls 54-55%). All those folks--the majority of Americans--HAD LEARNED "THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM." But what we hadn't learned--and have yet to learn--is how to hang onto our democracy. The gyre spins. We LEARN. And the malefactors among us find some OTHER way (for instance, electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with no audit-recount controls) to subvert the learned wisdom of the majority.

Now we have a whopping, epochal anti-war majority of 65-70%, and STILL we cannot get the will of the majority enforced--in a supposed democracy. A democracy in name only. A hijacked democracy run by Nazis. We've held onto it, and kept improving it, for 200 years. Now we have to learn that lesson all over again: how to achieve government that has the consent of the people?

That is a more important and overriding question that the tactics of war. There should be no war.