Making War No More, For Awhile

MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED MILLION people died in combat during the twentieth century, which, ironically, was a far less violent century, according to measurements involving deaths per population, than previous centuries. Statistically, humanity is becoming more peaceful, a fact which defies our perceptions, so violent is our present world. Since recorded history began, there have been only a handful of years during which there was no war anywhere raging. There is an iconic photograph of Albert Einstein, late in his life, sitting at a desk wearing a dark sweat shirt, with an ink pen tucked into it just below his chin, with Einstein, with his halo of unkempt white hair, looking up at the camera, with an expression of great solemnity, but with his head lowered, his eyes exuding sadness. he has just responded to a question: "do you think there will ever be an end to war"? No, said teh father of relativity, as long as there are people, there will be war. we are, nonetheless, currently taking a bit of a time out from our organized violence. all over the world, in hot spots such as Syria, Afghanistan, and across Latin America and Africa, various ongoing wars have settled down into unplanned truces, actual cessations of hostilities, in apparent reaction to the global pandemic. we have, at least for a short time, laid down our arms to care for our sick, dead, and dying. how long this will last is anyone's guess; your best bet is that as soon as the war against the Covid 19 virus starts to become successful, the human against human wars will flare up once again, and normalcy will resume. I grew up with the Viet Nam War in the news every day. the casualty numbers were placed on the black and white grainy television screen like a baseball scoreboard, while Walter Cronkite informed up of teh most recent combat action. The Americans, as I recall, lost about two hundred soldiers a week, the South Vietnamese about a thousand, and the enemy about two thousand. I was seduced into thinking that my side would win, through attrition, until February of 1968, when I finally figured out, with Cronkite's help, that the North Vietnamese would pursue the war no matter what their casualty rate, because they h ad only to wait for the American public to loose patience, and the Americans to go home. Since then, all war has seemed futile to me, as, of course it is. ther are never any winners. As a child, I hoped an e believed that Einstein was wrong. But, alas, he rarely was. Now, I tend to agree with him, that there will always be war. For the moment, however, we have a time out, which, though doubtless short lived, is perhaps the one and only benefit from our global viral nightmare.