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A Society of Killers

Ever since I was a teenager in the late Vietnam war era, I have heard of problems with former military members who had been at war having trouble returning to society, or completely unable to return.  In that era it was the subject of huge quantities of wailing and gnashing of teeth, as well as much (mostly wasted) punditry.

Every time we have any sort of sizable involvement in an armed conflict, we go through another wave of the same thing, and since we have had a wave of presidents willing to extend the role of our armed forces beyond anything useful or rational, we have had a lot of these discussions.  The latest wave has been centered on the pitiful state of the VA (Veteran’s Administration) and its incompetence at providing care for those same veterans.

The sad part of this is that it is the same politicians who scream about big budgets that are the most critical of the VA - they are talking out of both sides of their mouth, since their “budget cutting” and “small government” stuff is the problem with the VA.  I obviously have no time for those sorts of politicians anyway - no matter how your deal with them, you end up screwed, and the truth is nowhere to be found in what they say.

SO – Back to the original point, and I will do my best not to digress again.  Regardless of the politics around the conflict, people who have gone to war have had trouble being accepted back into the broader society.  Television and high-resolution graphics have just made the ugliness harder to avoid and ignore.  Starting with Vietnam, television has made it impossible for the public to avoid the obvious statement that war is really about killing and little else.

While gunsight camera movies go back to WWII, the ability to watch the gun fired at humans while listening to the soldiers doing it and enjoying the process is far newer, dating only to the advent of Wikileaks and the leaked middle-eastern conflict images.  While many fault Wikileaks for this sort of thing, the fact of the matter is that it is about time that the “folks at home” lost their immunity to what their children are really doing in real warfare.  Once the public at large can’t avoid the thought that the returning soldiers have blood on their hands - that they are real killers - the problem of integrating them into society becomes far greater than just a public relations exercise.

The root problem is something that humanity knows in its genes - that once a human has killed another human, it is easier to do the second time, and it gets even easier every time from there on.  Once a killer, always a killer.

Tell a woman who is pregnant (or has young children) that a killer is moving into the neighborhood, and watch the panic in her eyes.  Changing the presentation - a “patriotic hero” or whatever - and the panic becomes more hidden or recedes a bit, but the uneasiness that she feels about the new neighbor doesn’t fade.  Killers in the neighborhood, patriotic heroes or whatever, are not compatible with raising children, and we know that in our nervous systems.  The fact that the returnees are killers has become impossible to avoid, and our bodies react to the threat of the killer whether we think of it that way or not.

The politicians that like sending the troops to war have no problem with whether they can return or not - their vision stops at their short term political goals, and the VA, etc. are problems for the future and someone else.  The only way to reintegrate killers into society cleanly is to not make them killers.  Our military is quite efficient at making killers, but the excuses for their use keep getting less and less compelling, and the worst excuses, such as Saddam Hussein, get so far fetched that the fight over sending troops gets started before the troops even leave.

Obviously, special cases like IS and the Taliban require stronger responses, but then we are making our own “christian” Taliban at home and giving them more and more room to move, so we really have nothing to say about or to the overseas governments that tolerate them.  Rather than just politically expedient killing, more time needs to be spent on dealing with the problem in non-violent terms.  There is no moral or ethical difference between the assassination of a leader by a few troops, killing a small group with a drone or missile, or mass killing by the millions with troops or atomic bombs.  Stopping at zero killings is still not a political option, but it is a moral and ethical necessity to try and stop before we start.

I am aware that at least our current politicians are not capable of the moral or ethical effort needed to reach this, but they were elected by people who are also limited that way, so that is hardly a surprise.  The real challenge is to create a society where killing is not seen as an option.  The current religious and moral leaders we have are quite incapable of going that far, so they need to be dispensed with and new leadership with real ethics needs to replace them, something that will not happen until the public at large is educated to that necessity.

P.S. – Just by coincidence, this same change would solve the gun control problem, since gun usage would no longer be acceptable.  Those that use guns for violence would then knowingly put themselves on the same level as any other killer, and that would be recognized by that changed society and regulated that way.  The only part of gun violence that can be controlled is the people behind the guns - if they don’t kill, the guns are no longer a problem.  Gun violence in a society that tolerates violence is simply a symptom of the society’s problems, not a cause, and taking the guns away is a meaningless political gesture.