Odious Importunities

“Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another one of life’s odious importunities?” – Sigmund Freud

The reason that we as a people protest to war so vehemently is because we have a great enough intelligence to understand the horror and pain that it causes. Our minds have the capability of guilt and empathy. War is a primal urge an urge to survive and to prosper, a real competition of life. Our minds, though, give us the opportunity to put ourselves in another’s shoes and try to understand what another is feeling. When you put a rifle to the temple of another man does not an image of his family pop into your mind? Little Susie, his only daughter will have to grow up without a father, because you followed orders. War may just be one of life’s odious importunities, but we are too smart to accept it as such. The march toward peace is a march on a road that is bloodied and soiled. We must march toward peace in a single file line, boots kicking in perfect unison, chanting and screaming. We must achieve peace on the same battlefield where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address, to the graveyard of thousands slaughtered. Lincoln, Einstein, Freud, these are men who knew that man’s greatness was in the intellectual in the “superior moral.” Man has a high intellect in comparison to other species in the animal kingdom, but some men have a greater intellect than other men. Maybe, as we evolve, as we grow smarter, humans can learn how to end war. Are we growing smarter? Humans spent a thousand years thinking and learning, but what is to come of the next thousand years? Are we so engulfed in TV and sports that we really are not growing smarter? It is the knowledge, the intellect, the greater understanding of our universe that will lead us away from war? Even when we know killing is wrong ,there are other factors that overcome. Religion is the cause for an enormous percentage of  the wars in the history of our people. Differing beliefs about god and the afterlife are not respectfully disagreed upon, but instead lead us to brutal slaughter. Slaughter bred field josh Upton Sinclair must have seen a cow get hooked by the captain. We see war for what it is not for what it does. We think so hard yet we hardly think. We are so smart but we know nothing at all. We kill and kill. We kill our brothers and our mothers. Two men separated by a bureaucratic line can find themselves at the end of each other’s rifle and they will both pull the trigger because it is what they are told to do. What do we do now? The world is filled with men who lust for blood, who kill for fun. What happens when one of these men comes to power and leads a nation of millions? The results are disastrous. Blood, truth, life, being wonders. I wonder what truth this blood of wonders will bring in my life. I bring you my legs of wisdom feel the juice of degenerate being. A life without knowing. Know your life. Life of lives. In, out, super men of wisdom. Wisdom, what is it? Knowledge can only take us so far - A man can spend a lifetime learning and teaching and gaining the intellect to know what is best for our kind. A similar man of the same age can spend his life as a soldier only taking orders never thinking for himself. If these two men faced off what would come of them? One with the intellect to create a better life for everyone, and one who can bring that whole world down. As the soldier lifts his gun to intellect’s chest our whole world could be shattered. Suffocated as his blood, his all knowing blood, seeps into his lungs. His next breath may have been the one that could have saved humanity. That last breath was one breath too soon. The soldier holsters his weapon and goes to find his next victim, the next great mind to snuff.