War

"It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it."
-Robert E. Lee
"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."
-George Bernard Shaw
So here we sit, 6 billion plus strong just hanging out on planet earth eyeballing each other with curiosity and suspicion. Amidst the physical necessitates for our continued in habitation/occupation of the earth we have also constructed realities, or more accurately perspectives, that justify the various behavior we must engage in to do the various things we do. What is commonly called morality is simply what a group collectively agree upon as socially acceptable. A peoples ability to use morality as a weapon against its foes is generally what separates the rulers from the ruled. Chief Calgacus denounced the morality of the might makes right logic over 2,000 years ago in the brilliant observation that: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace." It may seem a distant and uncertain reality to those on the side of the presently dominant culture, but to those under threat from our bellicose armies that level whole countries when they are unleashed upon the world is always near. The long term explanation for why the West can deploy divisions and bomb at will the globe over is primarily the we have done it so we can do it. Our whole Civilization is based on conquest, killing and consumption; no amount of idealism can ever hide that fact. So it seems rather obvious that the sustaining of our system predicates violence on a large scale. Those who speak of humanitarianism and philanthropy are childlike in their naive belief that one can alter the ruthless rules of a centuries old contest to see who can exert the most influence upon the societies of humans. The death toll is already incalculable and grows every day. Every Palestinian shot, every Iraqi blown up, every African that starves to death and all the others who face death on a daily basis know that this world is at war. The pressures from our presence seems to make this natural antagonism an ordeal from whence there is no escape. As our world grows so does our capacity for slaughter and organized violence. The sad truth is that killing for whatever reason the day provides is one of the cornerstones of our civilization, and as long as we keep on the path that we have been traveling down for the past few centuries their is no extricating ourselves from the cycle of violence and aggression that permeates our world.
Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset Because they didn't know better, they called it 'civilization,' when it was part of their slavery -Tacitus