Something to Think About

Photo by Quaritsch Photography on Unsplash

Some of my earliest memories are of World War II, at least World War II from the comfort and safety of my Midwestern home.  Rationing stamps and victory gardens.  Even the length of women’s skirts was under government control to conserve fabric. 

The war didn’t worry me particularly.  It was, after all, going on “over there.”  Besides, I was a very young child, and from what I knew, war was just the way of the world.

I do remember asking about our blackout curtains and being told that they were to keep bombers from finding our house at night.  But even that didn’t worry me particularly, though I do remember both my question and my mother’s answer.  Maybe it was her calm that kept the bombers from flying through my imagination.

(And it intrigues me now to realize that we were covering those windows—being required to cover those windows—though we lived in the safe middle of this vast country.)

The poster outside our small-town post office didn’t worry me either.  It was Uncle Sam pointing a fierce finger and saying, “I want you!”  As a little girl, as a girl, I knew he didn’t want me. 

In fact, I remember how grateful I was to be that unwanted girl the day my first-grade teacher reminded all the boys in the room that they, too, would be fighting a war one day. 

I did wonder, though, how it must feel to be one of those little boys.  Proud?  Powerful? 

Terrified?

So I spent my early years with war as the norm, and when my country dropped not one, but two atomic bombs, I rejoiced with all good Americans.  Because the war was over.  At last.

And in the years that followed, I accepted “peace and prosperity” as my due.

I do remember, though, the precise moment it occurred to me that the war “over there” had taken place in other children’s backyards.  That’s how I thought of it then, that the guns had been fired, the bombs dropped in other children’s yards. 

Which was when I realized for the first time how terrible war must be.  How wrong.  Not merely a game for handsome, square-jawed heroes to play out in movies, but deeply, profoundly evil. 

An opinion I hold still. 

All my adult life I have stood against war.  Against the way my own country bullies its way around the world.  Against the more than twenty percent of my taxes committed, not to making life better for our citizens, but to “defense.”

(There was a time when the Defense Department was called, more honestly, the War Department, but we have learned a thing or two about manipulating language . . . and people since then.)

It’s easy, however, to be against war.  I don’t deny it.  Especially for a woman who hasn’t had to justify herself before a draft board.  Especially for anyone living in a country that has never been invaded. 

As it’s easy today to be against the troops “over there” invading Ukraine.  (I heard recently that most of the Russian soldiers are so young that the Ukrainians who capture them telephone their parents to let them know they’re all right.) 

All of which leaves me thinking, not so much of Putin’s marauding—though there is much to consider there—but of my own country’s incursions. 

How much of what I take for granted in my day-to-day life was won through violence?

Could there have been another way to establish our independence from England?  Or to continue as we were as Canada has done?

Another way to settle the issues of slavery and states’ rights?

Or to respond to the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Today, three-quarters of a century later, it’s easy to object to the atomic bombs we dropped on our now-good-friends in Japan. 

Yet even more died in the firebombing of Tokyo we carried out without the help of nuclear weapons.  Should we object to that, too?

And it’s impossible to know how many more would have died had “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” never been brought into being. 

Or how many would have died—and who—if the Nazis had perfected nuclear weapons first.

I find myself asking, too, are these wars different than the other choices we make every day?  The way we live our lives in a luxury that has come to feel like necessity, ignoring the devastation we leave in our wake?  Refusing to know that we are not separate from this thing called nature we destroy.  Refusing even to understand that we are that nature we destroy?

Recently, I read about some astronomers who used a mathematical formula to calculate the likelihood of civilizations existing elsewhere in the universe.  What intrigued me wasn’t their formula—it was beyond my understanding—or even that there might be a meaningful way to use numbers to ask such a question.  Rather, I was fascinated by one number these scientists used in their calculation, the length of time they presumed it would take any “intelligent” civilization to destroy itself. 

We kill one another through war or we kill ourselves by destroying the very life that sustains us.  Either way, we are rushing toward an all-too-inevitable end.

Which is surely something to think about!