Why we fight

Fear is the main reason. Hubris the second. Ignorance the limping third. Ironically, it all boils down to love, the milk and honey of desire.

What's the point of a loveless life? What if there is not enough love for you to get your portion? You can't make people love you. It's not a thing you earn. It's not a right. It's a gift. So you wake up in the morning, you don't feel particularly loved (or lovable?) and angst crawls in under the covers. Abandonment. Loneliness. Emptiness. Better fill the void. Stockpile ambition, ostentation. Erect billboards that tell the world, 'look! I exist! I've got all this stuff. I'm important! You gotta love me, right? Right?'

You're after love, you fall for pride instead. Ah, but hubris wears the tailored suit with a rosebud boutonniere. Hubris tips the maitre d' in twenties. Hubris parks the SUV in VIP garages. You think I'm talking rich people here? You can have your biggie fries and a chip on your shoulder, both. Vanity is classless, and clueless. From Donald Rumsfeld to Ronald McDonald, all you need is empty calories in your hungry gut to send you off to fight your wars. Once you're weaned of love by demon pride, respect is what you're after and nothing fills the bill like the cantankerous guns of Generalissimo Ignoramus.

Contrary to the staid annals of rational inquiry, thought is not well served by the passionless mind. Passion comes bundled with conscience. Love is a lubricant, if you will. Without it, heat and friction wear your brain to smithereens. You begin to think in riddles. What's the best way to signal Stalin we can crush him? Nuke the Japanese! How to tell jihadists we're the superpower here? Occupy Iraq! Terrorize civilians, here and abroad, in the wake of unmitigated angst, unconscionable ego, unfathomable ignorance.

As I watched Why We Fight, frame after frame of military-industrial-congressional-thinktanking crowded me, gasping, into the shadows. Eisenhower warned us not to follow love lorn weapons dealers to this monstrous state. We ignored him and now we are citizens of New Rome. Who am I, a serf, to stir the ashes?

If there is a merest spark of hope in this, it is to be found in the finest capacity of a human will. In a word, love. Not the smarmy pretense that got us here, blind and foolish, breathless at the sight of the headless maiden's breast. My countrymen and women can do better than swallow Caesar's vapid lies.

We can study the curves in the broad sands of compassion. We can liberate our flawed logic from a tendency to expect love, respect and wisdom to bore into us from without. We can fight with impassioned desire to create an empire of expansive beauty that emanates from within each unblemished being.

And when our children ask us why we fight, we'll have an answer. We fight for milk and honey, dear, we fight for you, we fight because we love.