Write Club - War
This is a piece I wrote for an event called Write Club, in which pairs of poets compete by writing pieces on opposing themes. I was given War, and another writer given Peace. Peace won, which I will take as a hopeful metaphor to console myself.
One—The Imagine
Fallacy
John Lennon’s
dream was a world without war and his roadmap to such an achievement
was best summarized in the song Imagine. I can’t recite the lyrics
without crossing the boundaries of fair use, and I don’t feel like
being sued by Yoko Ono. But I’m sure you’ve all heard it enough
times that it’s already an earworm in your head as I’m reading
this. At any rate, permit me to summarize.
If we no longer had
religion to fight over, there would be no war.
If we no longer had
countries to fight over, there would be no war.
If we no longer had
possessions to fight over, there would be no war.
John Lennon had two
sons, but they were born to two different women and raised on two
different continents. Had they been closer in age and raised
together, he would perhaps have realized the futility of these
notions.
Because sooner or
later, the two brothers would fight over something. Perhaps a
certain toy that they both wanted. Suppose it was a boat. By his
logic, the way to end the conflict would be to take away the boat so
there would be nothing left to fight over. But they would only move
on to the Tinkertoy set and start fighting over that. Take away the
Tinkertoy set and they’d squabble over the fire truck. Remove
every single one of the toys, and the conflict would shift to a
question of who was touching who.
The Imagine ideal,
no matter how beautifully presented, no matter how much it makes you
want to believe in something greater than ourselves, simply won’t
work. Because taking away the object of contention from the smallest
conflict to the most brutal wars is solving only part of the problem.
Two—The Us and the
Them
We are wired for
conflict. It served our ancestors well as they hunted for food for
the tribe. It perhaps served our ancestors not so well when tribes
competed for the same hunting ground and blood would be spilled to
claim a territory. We’re still wired to define in-groups and
out-groups in competition to one another. Liberal versus
conservative, Crips versus Bloods, Georgia Tech versus UGA, intown
versus suburban, the New York Yankees versus everyone else and so on.
In simplest terms, Us versus Them.
In war, Us versus
Them goes to its greatest extremes. Them can be Them for any number
of reasons. To borrow the examples from Imagine, Them can be a
different religion, Them can be a different country or Them can be
those who have something that the Us wants.
In war, Them is not
merely a rival—Them is not human. Them is the other, the alien,
the monster, the demon. Them can be robbed, raped, enslaved and of
course killed because Them doesn’t count as actual people. The
world is done a favor by eliminating Them. The fight is driven by
the fear that if Them were to prevail, the human race of Us would be
annihilated. Thus blood is spilled by the millions of lives until
exhaustion leads to surrender.
And yet Them is not
an absolute. Like race and gender, Them is a construct that is
subject to alteration. In the same way that the Irish went from
nonwhite to white, Them can become Us and Us can become Them. In the
period of the Civil War, the Us of the United States was shattered
into the two Thems of the Union and Confederate forces. At the end
of the war, the two Thems resumed being an Us, or a sort of an Us
that still has rivalries, but with far less bloodshed involved.
What we need to
bring an end to war is not to eliminate the differences between
ourselves so that there will be nothing to fight over. The key is to
eliminate the concept of Them as an inhuman other deserving of
slaughter, so that there will be no one to fight against.
Three—The View
From an Elevated Place
I once went to
Pienza, Italy with my family and stayed in a bed and breakfast that
had a rooftop platform where we would go to drink wine and watch the
sunset. Pienza is a UNESCO World Heritage site because it was a
Renaissance urban renewal project put together by Pope Pius the
Second. The cathedral there was celebrating its 550th
anniversary.
One night, we
noticed a glow of a large television coming from one of the windows
that we could see from our rooftop vantage point. There was a soccer
game between Italy and England that night and it seemed everybody
around us was glued to it. When a certain play went in Italy’s
favor, a roar went up throughout the entire town, loud enough to be
literally heard from the rooftops.
As the game went
on, it occurred to me that not even a century ago, Italy and England
were fighting one another in one of the most brutal wars in human
history—a war where the logical and horrifying conclusion of
Themness was reached in the concentration camps. The gate to Pienza
had been damaged during that war. Before that, the cathedral had no
doubt stood through many other conflicts between those nations in its
five and a half centuries. And now they were duking it out on a
soccer field instead of a battlefield.
I used to hate
sports. But after that night, I discovered I didn’t mind them at
all. We are wired for conflict, but those conflicts don’t have to
end in blood. They can end in sweaty handshakes. They can end with
the Them of opposing teams reverting to the Us of the league that
they play in.
Despite what John
Lennon sings, and how movingly he sings it, the end of war will not
come with the end of religion, the end of countries or the end of
private property. It will come when a critical mass of humanity
accepts and practices this essential truth—
There is no Them.
There is only Us.
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