The Glory of Peace

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation."

         -William Tecumseh Sherman, Civil War General

From an early age, I found warfare fascinating. The movies I watched, the books I read, the video games I played. I was engrossed in warfare from almost the time I first learned how to talk. My favorite movie was Star Wars, and my fantasy life as a kid included many a war game or two.

In our culture, we immerse males into at least a modest exposure to the ideas, history, and strategies of war from a relatively early age. I was no exception. Even the sports we play and the games we play as children teach, to some degree or another, strategies, discipline, and mindsets that are useful in battlefield and conflict scenarios, even if we never use them in such a way. It's hard to be a superpower and get that powerful, and keep that power, without getting good at waging war. That's why it starts young.

Leadership, comradery, loyalty, diligence, though all these things are useful in regular old life, getting really good at them is quite useful in war. As a culture, whether this is intentional or not, we get trained as children without really realizing we're being trained for what could be real life challenges and adversity as adults. The great advantage of gameplay is it is an excellent lesson teacher and conditioner. We often just think its all for fun and miss the subtle extra utilities of it.

Even though I thought of war as a platform for glory and purpose, I've never actually fought one. Witnessing for the first time in my adult life a full scale invasion of an industrialized country by another industrialized country has filled me far more with disgust than anything else. I grew up with Afghanistan and Iraq, but I was a kid. I wasn't paying that much attention. 

Recently I haven't just felt a lot of disgust with Ukraine and Russia, I've felt a lot of disgust with myself. I see this war as totally unnecessary and senseless like many other people do, and I find myself sickened by how much I used to almost worship this stuff. How it engulfed so much of my thoughts and actions and how it fueled so much bitterness in my life. 

 Like Sherman said, only boys who have never fired a shot or seen it for themselves glorify war. I'm one of those boys.

I started thinking how much the peace of the last few years of my life felt. How comfortable I've been. How knowledgeable I got. I feel that the glory of peace is far more fruitful than the glory of war( if there is such a thing). Peace is what allows for love to flourish, what allows us to build our monuments and cities, and what allows us to have drinks on friday night or go to church on sunday morning. 

It allows us to play our games, watch our sports, go see our superhero movies, and take that pretty girl or cute guy on a date.

War destroys all this, and there is far more glory in creation than destruction, far more glory in healing than in killing, and far more glory in restoring things than in wasting things.

War is such a waste.

I'm starting to like the glory of peace better.