Hey there you fellow homo sapiens! Gather ’round, lemme tell ya a joke. It’s a real knee-slapper, been around for millennia. It goes a little somethin’ like this: a bunch of ya all get riled up, paint yer faces funny colors, grab some pointy sticks, and see who can spill the most blood and guts! Hilarious, right? War: A sick joke we keep on telling, and telling and telling.

War. Yeah, war. That big, bad gorilla in the room, the one shrunken down by our fancy dinners in front of TVs and our twenty-four-hour news cycles. We’re bombarded with it, folks. Explosions lookin’ like fireworks shows, soldiers lookin’ like action figures – all sanitized, all pretend. But let me tell ya, war ain’t no game.

Did ya play war as a kid? Probably. We all did? I did. Sticks for swords, dirt piles for trenches, imaginary enemies lurking ’round every corner. But then we grew up, right? Learned the difference between make-believe and messy reality. But some folks, they never learn. They hold onto that childish aggression, that tribal “us vs. them” mentality. It’s passed down like a family heirloom – grandpappy fought the Kaiser, daddy went to ‘Nam, so little Timmy’s gotta go blow somethin’ up in the Middle East.

Maybe you weren’t a soldier yourself. Maybe it was your brother, your sister, your spouse. Maybe they came back different – haunted eyes, shaky hands, nightmares that leave them screamin’ in the middle of the night. War steals, man. War steals lives, steals sanity, steals hope. It leaves scars on the battlefield and scars on the soul.

And the cost, folks! The mountains of money piled high, the wasted resources, the lives that coulda been woulda been shoulda been somethin’ great. All burnt up on the altar of some idiotic war for oil, for land, for some business man’s and politician’s ego trip. Have you ever seen a good war? Didn’t think so.

Now, some of you might be sayin’, “But Kevin, what about defendin’ our freedom? What about fightin’ evil?” Fine, fine. But who defines that evil? Who decides what freedoms are worth dyin’ for? War’s a blunt instrument, man. You swing it around and it takes out the innocent just as quick as the “bad guys.”

Maybe I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one so I gotta believe there’s another way: Diplomacy; talkin’ things out like civilized folks instead of cavemen with clubs. It’s a tough sell, I know. But think about it. Wouldn’t you rather spend your tax dollars on schools and hospitals instead of bombs and bullets? Wouldn’t you rather see your kids playin’ tag than playin’ war?

War’s a joke, folks. A sick, twisted joke that’s been around for far too long. It’s time we stopped laughin’ and started demandin’ better. Let’s build a world where war’s a relic of the past, a bad memory from childhood games, not the horrifying reality on our TV screens. Now that, folks, would be a real laugh riot

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Kevin Driscoll
(Mostly) Vegetarian, Politically Progressive, Daily Runner, Spiritual, Helpful, Friendly, Kind, Warm Hearted and Forgiving. Resident of Braintree MA.