Killing Kids, No More

THE SEVEN CHILDREN, according to confirmed reports, killed by the all American drone strike, were all under the age of eighteen, including at least a couple of infants. The infants won't have much to remember this time around; better luck next time, if there is a next time. Their premature deaths should be more than ample reaon for the United States, like Japan, to formally renounce war as an instrument of policy, to promise to never wage war again outside its own borders, and not at all, unless attacked and invaded, in which case all bets are off, justifiably, in the name of self defense. Indeed it should be sufficient reason for all the powers of the Earth to outlaw drones, to proclaim all war illegal, and to invest all effort and resources into creating a future of healthy, happy prosperity for future generations. None of that will happen, obviously. I've read enough utopian science fiction to imagine a world without war. But, like Einstein said, imagination is infinite, knowledge is extremely limited, and, like he also said, as long as there are people, there will be war. We are free to hope otherwise, therefore, let us hope otherwise. You plainly see what makes war among humans inevitable, if you simply pay attention to people, no matter where you live. You see the greed, the deceit, the arrogance, the pettiness, and the refusal, the inability to let go of anger and grudges. Grudges never sem to end. Every damned time somebody gets mad at me and stays mad, I condlude that its for the same reason: I told the truth, and the mad person didn't want to hear it. Then, the grudge begins, lasting years, prsumabely, the rest of our lives. Grudges never seem to end, but rather, to grow, and intensify. Most horrible is not our personal anger and pettiness, nor even our violence, but our proven expertise in organizing it and manifesting it on a huge scale, involving millions of people. What Einstein meant, what he saw, is what all well trained sociologists and psyshologists see; that the human personality traits which lead us incessantly to war are deeply embedded in each one of us, and that to therefore eliminate war, or for that matter violence from the human behavioral portfolio, it will be necessary to either fundamentally alter fundamental human nature, or to suppress it. I am endlessly appalled at how little it takes for people to become not only annoyed, but seriously angry, how long they remain angry, how they seem to cling to their anger and to willingly allow it to morph into continued resentment, and how even the memory of the alleged offense, after ostensibely offering "forgiveness", continues to play a prominante role in future relationships. Before we can funadmentally transform society, we must fundamentaly transform ourselves as individuals, and that task seems so overwhelmingly prodigious as to be effectively impossible, at least in our current state of evolution.