“Old men start wars. Young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is accidental. We’re animals.” I was recently thinking again about those words from Sylvester Stallone (talking to Joel Stein in Newsweek some years ago). Stallone wanted Rambo to say those words, about how he felt about war, in the new Rambo film. But he decided he would cut that dialogue, “because Rambo is a silent man, and blurting out your thesis is for college papers, not movies.”

“What I was trying to say,” Stallone said, when Stein pressed him, “is that the world will never come together and say we are one. Rocky represents the optimistic side of life, and Rambo represents purgatory. If you think people are inherently good, you get rid of the police for 24 hours – see what happens.”

Historically, Americans have gained a reputation for being an optimistic people. Having lived many decades as an American in America, I’d say that there’s a good deal of truth in that. Until lately. It doesn’t seem as if we Americans think very much about the optimistic side of life any more, at least not when we are looking abroad. Since September 11, 2001, and more so in recent years, our foreign policy seems intent on fulfilling Hobbes “war of all against all.”

After a little research I was startled to find that except for four years since 1961, we Americans have either been at war or participated in a war or a engaged in a some sort of military action overseas. Think about that. During the last 56 years there have only been four years (as far as I can calculate) when we have not been engaged in some sort of warfare in some way some where. There’s something wrong with us, people.

I am not suggesting that at times real evil does not arise evil in the world that needs excising. And I cannot speak for those who have fought in war, or for those who have had a family member killed or maimed in a war or one who suffers from painful memories that lie buried and then surface. But to those of us who have never been to war, etc., I want to ask: why have many of us in recent times endorsed wars that now seem questionable in the extreme. Maybe war is just an idea to us. Or maybe our own endorsement of war gives us a vicarious satisfaction about the itch for a fight that lies latent even in those of us who hate fighting. Twenty-seven hundred years ago a discerning man concluded that the heart is deceitful above all things; so, he then asks, who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)

Despite all the considerable good it does in the world, a nation with nearly sixty straight years of uninterrupted warfare looming large in its current international legacy surely must have a pathology of war in its midst. And there is this. As that pathology spreads in our foreign policy, could it not in no small degree be implicated in why we have become a people who are so much at each others throats here at home. In medical science, besides the known symptoms of a pathology, knowledge continues to expand to reveal effects previously unknown.

People, we need to wise up. The sages tell us there are ways wiser than war (Ecclesiastes 9:18; Proverbs 3:17). And from them we learn of the foolishness of the human arrogance that trusts in military might (Psalm 20:7-8; 33:16-17).

We Americans claim to be a nation that trusts in God. And today we are complaining incessantly about the bitter polemics that are dividing the nation. The Gospels are replete with teachings from God’s son to put others first. Do we want to take our hands from each other’s throats here at home? Perhaps if we start thinking and acting peaceably first toward the foreign other, God will shed mercy on us and we will start accruing peaceable fruit here at home.

We are not animals. We are human beings. And peace is not accidental. Peace is wrestled out of adversarial foreign relations by human beings through the tediously skilled moves of diplomacy, negotiations, and mediation to prevent war. The potential to listen to the better angels of our nature is part of who we remain, even in our tragic state. We must to listen to them much more that we currently do in our foreign affairs. An increasingly militaristic foreign policy is not the solution. A return to health at home begins abroad.

©2017 by Charles Strohmer

Images: permissions via Creative Commons: guided-missile destroyer USS Barry launching a Tomahawk cruise missile; a doctor helping Afghan woman and child.

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