The End of War As We Know It?

While watching TV during the nine o'clock hour a couple of nights last week my husband was flipping between channels during commercials to AMC. (Cox ripped TCM from our line up without even telling us and then jacked up the bill $5! There is never anything on so I am not sure why we pay this except we love BRAVO channel, but I digress). AMC was showing Troy one night and The Last Samurai the next. It was clear just how formulaic these films are as both nights when flipping at about the same time of night each movie was in the throes of the huge battle scene.

The striking thing about these battles, aside from the fact that women are never directly involved, is just how ridiculous it all is. How does taking out the young and the strong really accomplish anything in the long run? Not very practical if you ask me. (And I am always amazed at how effervescent and energetically violent these people and their animals are despite the fact that there are thousands of them amassed in one place with no apparent access to food or water or waste facilities. But that is the movies for you. And how coordinated they all are when there were no cell phones!)

Then, on Saturday we went to the local art movie house to watch the Visitor (see next entry for a review). The preview trailer featured a film about treating and rehabbing the wounded soldiers in the middle east. A documentary, the themes were so powerful that people were tearing up just during the short excerpts. Check it out at www.fightingforlifethemovie.com

I realized that in our progress with technology, it is no longer the case that the people fighting these wars are sequestered from the rest of us. They are surviving at higher and higher rates but often with major physical repercussions. They are subsequently returning to society in large numbers. We will be dealing with the effects of this new warfare in ways that never so apparent in the past. It used to be that the soldiers died and the one's who didn't either compartmentalized the emotional toll and suppressed it or turned to drugs and either ended up homeless or in a half way house. These are all subsections of society that most people don't see on a daily basis.

But now, we have people who are coming back without limbs and with PTSD. They are returning to mainstream society and we are going to be grappling with these issues face to face, in our homes, schools and workplaces. We are more likely to see it in everyday life than in any war ever before. It seems to me that this interaction will bring home with the concept of the actual cost of war and how losing an arm or a life has no relationship whatsoever to the global economy. When we can no longer sequester the effects of this oddly illogical problem solving technique maybe then as a people human kind will truly begin to progress. Just a thought.