Russell Greim, I do hope you are not so foolish as your last column makes you seem. Your arguments were poorly stated and your total lack of interest in viewpoints other than your own is, in the least, disheartening.
You stated that war is necessary because it is "as old as humanity itself" and is "crucial in any civilization." Your first point is invalid. Rape and murder are as old as humanity itself, too, and are not necessary. On that, I assume we agree.
Your point about war being crucial holds little merit. War is not crucial to civilization. War is the opposite of it. Civilization teaches us that human life is precious and that we should not murder. We all felt that urge for revenge in our blood. To say war is necessary, however, is to ignore that, without someone else declaring war on us, we would not need revenge.
You call us shallow people. I call you cynical. You claim to believe that fascist and totalitarian governments are worse than democracy, yet your insistence that those of us who do not believe in war think the victims of Sept. 11 "deserved to perish" is as disgusting and pathetic as any piece of propaganda put out by the worst of those regimes.
I have no problem with stopping terrorists from killing more innocent victims, but the question I have for you is how many innocent victims separate armies from terrorists? To destroy our government, you argue, terrorists will kill innocent people. When we kill an innocent, are we then justified in the taking of that life as long as it is accidental and in pursuit of a greater good?
You are an order freak.
This is why you want us to line up like mindless automatons and believe that war is necessary. But destructive order, whether it is religious institutionalism or just plain not questioning what you're told, is part of the reason we live in such a dangerous, dirty and catastrophic world.
Disorder, disagreements and differing opinions are creative and constructive. It is the very nature of the democratic government you love. Disorder is at the heart of art and of humor. If the world could truly accept disagreements as a positive aspect of living as rational creatures and shift its good/evil spectrum from order and disorder to creativity and destruction, war would become superfluous.
When people like yourself believe that the questioning of authority and the ability of the minority to disagree with the majority are evils, it creates a climate that is conducive to the kind of destruction and death we have witnessed during these tragic past six months.
Instead of protecting "our way of life," as you put it, let us as a world community say any single human life is exponentially more important than any way of life, any government or any religious affiliation. War, on all sides, is the devaluation of human life, the changing of people into casualties and accidental fatalities. It is the ultimate human extravagance, the most wasteful and decadent act we can comment.
I agree with you when you say, "Rallying for peace is equivalent to saying Americans are wrong." Some of us believe the majority of Americans are very wrong.
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