Peace over profit

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche

These days I start my day with a cup of coffee, a little good intention, and inevitably— uncontrolled sobbing. It’s the humans that get me every time. I scroll through my Instagram feed of witty ontological memes and cute animal pics, feeling pretty good about the day ahead, until I come across the IRC’s death toll of children in the middle east.

I know I’m lucky to be a DINK (Double Income, No Kids) in this valley of extreme wealth and prosperity while the majority of people on the planet are just working to secure food, water, and shelter for themselves and their offspring. When families are struggling because of a natural disaster I can make an effort to manage my feelings of overwhelming sympathy. I can accept that nature is brutal and send a donation to try to help— a drop in the bucket of world-wide suffering, but a drop, nonetheless. However, when the disaster is caused by other humans, I am paralyzed. I do not have the bandwidth to cope with the hopelessness of endless war for profit.

If we can’t see that bombing the families who live in Gaza is the abyss, then I don’t even know.

In this life where habits are hard to break, generational patterns are a bitch. What I call the Warlord Syndrome exists in many aspects of life: business, parenting, and of course, actual war. When we realize that we have become exactly what we started out to change or defeat, then we know what it is to be our own worst enemy. In business we see it every time an ingenious start-up is swallowed by a bigger fish in the sea of industry and all the shareholders rejoice, “Yay Capitalism!” Whether or not we have our own biological children, we have all had that moment when our parent’s voice came right out of our mouth, “Because I said so.” And right now, at the apogee of our cultured civilization, we are sanctioning the murder of children in the name of “defense.”

I am not advocating for leniency when it comes to the terrorists who kidnapped innocent Israelis in the first place. The atrocious actions that were the catalyst for this conflict seem impossibly surreal in this day and age. But I can, and do, detest the inhumane brutality of Hamas’ actions and question the Israeli government’s response simultaneously. My first question, where is the Mossad? Why must we obliterate so many more innocent lives when we have the ability to surgically extract the source of angst? And where is all that US budget money going, if not toward the training of such an elite force?

I have long suspected that our wars have more to do with profit than people. Believe it or not, there are salesmen on this planet who would rather sell the weapons that kill innocent children than take a tax break for feeding or housing them. Usually because of their privileged upbringing, these guys have no concept of mercy, and their self-serving actions perpetuate another generation of hate and violence by inspiring future terrorists. Speaking of generational trauma, if we could break the cycle of valuing money over peace, well, hmm, then I’m not sure what this world would look like. Without greed and avarice, how would we measure our immense success? Without a perceived enemy to rally the troops, how would we justify spending trillions of dollars on military gadgets, instead of food, housing, education…

We have such a long, tired history of conflict and war, but surely we can find a reason to get out of bed in the morning other than a foreign adversary: someone to fear, someone to hate. We can choose peace over profit. Oh, cheer up, war mongers! Even with world peace, we would still have the brutal consequences of El Nino to contend with, and judging by our current actions on climate change, Mother Nature will be ramping up her attacks on a global scale… plenty of bad news to absorb with my morning coffee.