On Warfare

“Lindsay will probably be very quiet tonight,” the mother said to her son Friday afternoon as they stood at my checkstand.  I’d heard scraps of their muted conversation as I scanned their groceries, catching few words between the register’s beeps and clanging carts.  But I’d heard enough to ask why.
 “They killed a young boy today, over on Sycamore,” she said, starting to tell the facts she’d just heard from her son.  At that moment, the facts were still being gathered by the police; the “breaking news” was hours away.  But from her story it sounded like gang warfare.
This summer I spent some time reading about warfare, particularly the effects on children.  I wanted to see if there was a difference between fighting and war, where (and why) things escalate from one to the other.  Friday’s news sent me back to Roger Rosenblatt’s Children of War (1983) in which he explored children’s lives in the war zones of Belfast, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, Cambodia and Viet Nam.
In general, he found the younger children loving and gentle, many waiting for peace and hoping to work for it when they grew up.  But as they got older, especially in places like Palestine where some became teenage soldiers, they’d become politicized, fighting for “the cause.”  The causes were (and still are) large and real: who has a right to live where. To call some place home. To eat. To exist.
When I found this paragraph, however, I saw shades of the reasons given for teens joining gangs.  Rosenblatt writes:  “I noticed in myself a general tendency to treat these children (soldiers) with respect....because I saw they had committed themselves to the most dangerous game in the world and were visibly dignified by that commitment.
“So is it valuable, then,” he asks, “this heightening, ennobling tradition that teaches the children of Rashidieh to leap over bonfires with guns in their arms, makes them more alert to each other’s welfare, gives them pride and a sense of importance?”
 “No,” he answers.  “For one thing, a state of war takes away the freedom of thought and opinion.  It provides an ideology, all right, but only one, and individual disagreement is called treason or sedition.” He adds thoughts about moral complexity and shades of gray, then concludes “War may be hell, but intellectually and spiritually war is also easy.  That may be why it is resorted to so readily, why in fact children can do it so well.
 “(T)he overriding reason that war can never be deemed useful, whatever benefits are evident or concocted, is that...the context of war is death.  For all its elaborate emphases on order and discipline, the final purpose of war is to create chaos and ruin.”
I don’t know who the Grand Marshals of our children’s armies are or what they hope to win from this violence.  But I  do know that almost all of us need to learn the harder way to live together.  Maybe we should start.
-Trudy Wischemann is a sometimes scrappy, sometimes remorseful writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your peace stories - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.