War Addiction

There is growing talk, and very much more serious talk of late, about an invasion of Iran. Some argue against this on moral grounds, and some cite practical considerations, such as how this would affect oil prices, security, etc. My view is that war is a form of addiction. Once you start, you can't get enough; and it infects children on down the generations.

In my childhood, my family lived in a small college town in the Eastern United States. Most of our parents worked at the college in one way or another. One winter a big kid who was a little older than most of this crowd, maybe he was twelve, had a growth spurt and began to torment the rest of us from his towering height. He would get us alone or in pairs and hit us with snowballs, chasing us all the way home from school. It was about a mile. This went on for weeks. The rest of us began to plot revenge. As I recall, we also began to cache weapons: piles of snowballs at strategic locations along the way home; in the shrubbery by the church, behind ancient trees on the campus, in the manicured patches of woods, all the way to our street.

We just made a whole mess of really hard-packed snowballs; "ice-balls" were considered too nasty a weapon to contemplate in our world. We couldn't really pack them that hard anyway, but the snow was just right on this darkening afternoon for heavy, wet offensive weapon-making. We stationed members of our cohort along the route in ones and twos, and waited, hearts pounding.

Finally, we spot this guy on his own, heading home from school. We don't need to say anything. About six of us pick up his trail, making fresh projectiles as we walk at a discreet distance, and picking up the outlying spotters as we go. At first, when the attack comes, big Steve puts up a fight. He gets a couple of us good, executing the "face wash" in a hail of white missiles. But after a minute or two, blinded with snow, he begins to back away, and then turns and runs flat out in the deep snow of an open field.

We hound him relentlessly. He begins to tire. He starts dropping his school books, finally shedding his heavy coat for the final sprint up through the trees to our street. As we run, we pick up the stashes we've planted, reloading on the fly, and continue to pelt him with snowballs, covering his body with snow-shrapnel, his hair soaking by now, his face flushed with terror and fury. It is a perfectly planned and executed operation.

He makes it. The back door slams, and we hear his loud sobs to his astonished mother in the kitchen. Outraged snow thumps against the storm door for another minute.

Now we don't know what to do. The strangest thing happens. For a moment we consider storming the place, maybe shovelling snow into the house until the kitchen is completely full. We consider whether we can get snow into the chimney. We are still hungry for revenge. We want so much to wash his face in it, until we are exhausted and replete.

But this only lasted about as long as it took to think about it. We stood in the gathering, freezing dusk and looked at each other. Everybody felt funny. Embarrassed, like, and troubled. We could hear our erstwhile tormenter's choking sobs settling down to a steady wail of misery, and the soothing tones of a mother's voice as she tried to work out what had happened to her child that he would break down so completely.

We began to return to our bodies, noticing the cold, the ache of exertion, as if waking from a dream. We shuffled away, each to his own home and family, alone suddenly with strange new feelings and thoughts. The next day, after somebody said, "Hey, we sure showed him!" and it went over kind of flat, nobody ever spoke about this again. We all felt kind of horrified at what we'd done.

I don't know if this was a universal human thing, this remorse and shame following the brutal meting-out of well-deserved justice, or a cultural phenomenon among children raised in a quiet town full of philosophers and engineers and craftsmen, at a time when we all were told to get ready to be the first people on the moon. I don't think it would happen everywhere. Today as I write there is a raging controversy in the local papers about a school hate-group calling itself something like the RNHS, for "Redneck N----r Hanging Society," pre-teens shouting racial epithets in the hallways and leaving little string nooses around for people to find. And this is in Vermont, where a couple of municipalities have passed serious ordinances requiring the arrest and detention of Cheney and Bush, should they ever be caught inside the town line. A town where you can find a Yoga class starting about every half hour. A town practically roofed with solar panels.

So I don't propose that there is really a parallel to be drawn with the present context of saber-rattling at Iran, except for this one aspect: before the snowball-ambush action of my childhood, we had a fantastic feeling of righeousness. It was like cocaine or something, and it infected us as a group. I do believe, if we had managed to get big Steve on the ground, we might have ended his young life right then and there. And I believe the people we laughingly call "our leaders" are quite caught up in this same feeling of blood-lust now, imagining the "glory" and the "victory" and the cheering crowds of people who, in their secret hearts, are on the list of those they wish could see them now, in their shining righteous authority moment.

That's why I'm so creeped out right now at the steady stream of more and more serious news about grown up people seriously trying to start a nuclear war against a real country full of real people just like us, based on half-baked, hare-brained arguments and outright lies.

Our government clearly gave up long ago on the idea of a peaceful world that could fully support everyone living, if indeed they ever entertained such a notion. But that is still the vision most thinking human beings express, when they get a chance to articulate it. That vision, a vision of the only viable future for humanity besides total destruction, represents sanity to me. What represents sanity to the feudal overlords who hold sway in our world, is choice number two: culling the herd, leaving a much more empty planet for them to keep for themselves, even at the very real risk of losing it all, for everyone, forever. Of course they will call this "saving humanity," and by a macabre twist they will be right.

It is not oil we are addicted to. It is triumph. It is that drug which hits you like cocaine before, and leaves you empty and cold after, a war. Only another war gives you the false promise of that rush again. This is the pattern of all addiction, as we seek in vain for that remembered sensation we got from the first dose. The one that was "free."