Living with War

It is a rare day when the war does not enter my life in some way. I do not have any direct ties to this war, other than perhaps the fact that I work for a company that manufactures components for body and vehicle armor. I thank God each day that I do not have a child or a niece or nephew or a friend who is fighting this war. How did my grandmother deal with the day to day emotions of having two children at war in Germany during WWII, and knowing that a third child might go as well if the fighting went on too much longer? I'm not certain I could have handled that. Perhaps God makes each generation strong enough to deal with the burdens he knows it will bear. That would be a comforting thought, but it would be naïve.

I struggle with how to integrate this war into my life. I know I am probably in the middle of the spectrum. For every person who is more strongly tied to this war than I am - emotionally, politically, or in whatever way - there is another person who gives the war no thought at all and who sees no connection to it in any way. I cannot do that. I feel strongly that we are all tied to one another in some mysterious way - that our thoughts and our feelings affect others more than we may ever realize. There is scientific evidence to that effect which is only now beginning to be evaluated and understood. Perhaps someday, we will realize just how much our individual thoughts can affect the entire world.

I hate this war - I think I would hate any war, although I do not recall having this type of emotion tied to the Vietnam War. But I was a teenager and a young adult at that time. It must be an "age thing". It is not the reasons for the war, or the politics involved, that I hate. It is just the unfair control that such a war has over the lives of those who must fight it that I hate. Young children - who had little or no involvement in creating the world situation which led to the war - must give up their lives and their dreams and possibly even their life, and go fight to resolve what others have created. Where else in life is that type of reasoning fair?

But I cannot change war or the way it is fought. I personally cannot let it envelop my entire life through political action or activist movements. Nor can I personally ignore it and pretend it does not exist and does not affect my life in any way. So I have made this promise to myself. Each day, for at least a few moments, I will give conscious awareness to the war. I will pray for those whose lives are in danger and who may be dying even as I pray. I will throw out positive thoughts towards those in control of the outcome of this war - the politicians - that they will find some way to end this conflict very soon, and I will vote for those politicians that seem to understand what it is going to take to do so.

The war on terror will never end. America and other first world countries will always be a target for political and religious fanatics. But this type of war cannot be fought on the battlefield, or in the streets of a foreign nation. It must be fought in the hearts and the minds of the young people of the world. This type of war cannot be won or lost in a few months or even a few years. It must be fought for generations, with education and understanding, with aid and assistance to the world, with peace and compromise and an unerring determination to bring the nations of the world closer together and to the realization that we cannot continue to fight and kill one another, because we are all brothers.