Discard the generals

Source of Danziger cartoon


An old question: why do people prefer violent solutions that history shows to be ineffectual? From the earliest times, conquest, colonialism, apartheid, and other forms of violent repression arouse violent liberation responses. And the undoubted heroes that make it into legend are those who find peaceful solutions to injustice: Buda, Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Fehullah Gulen, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Mother Teresa, the monks in Tibet, the anonymous boy who danced the tank to a stop in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But somehow people continue to think they can accomplish something positive with armament.

From Manifest Destiny to the Alamo, from Korea to Vietnam, and now from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the people who sell us guns want us to use them. We fight “over there” and our kids shoot up their schoolmates "over here".

It’s time to find another way.

If a mouse in a Skinner-box always makes the wrong turn, it is
discarded as an experimental animal. Our generals always advise us to bomb’em back to the stone-age, and we follow patriotically along. Maybe we should discard some of those generals.