A few thoughts.

I saw an Anti- War protest the other day and it got me thinking. What does an Anti-War protest achieve? Perhaps a protest of a specific war may prove to be of some affect but a protest of war in general I find relatively pointless. Nobody is really for war in general. Most people don’t wake up each morning thinking, “Man, I wish our country had somebody to kill.” If someone drives by a young woman holding a sign that says, “Say no to war!” they will not be motivated to do anything, in fact they will probably soon forget about it. On the other hand if someone drives by a young woman holding a sign that says, “KILL, KILL, KILL,” or “Bomb the world to pieces!” they won’t forget that, they may even be outraged, and outrage is a good motivator. During the potato famine in Ireland a progressive thinker named Jonathan Swift wrote down a radical solution called, "A Modest Proposal." His idea was that the people of Ireland could solve their problems of surplus population and lack of food by eating their babies. This idea drew huge amounts of attention and upset a lot of people, exactly what it was designed to do. The people of the world suddenly paid a lot more attention to the troubles of Ireland and real ideas began to be concocted.

We are not the only species on earth that commit acts of war and genocide. In actuality all communal species have wars. Whether over territory or food or water, lions, monkeys, wolves, ants, and termites all wage war on each other sometimes even eradicating or enslaving the other colony or species. War is natural, and it hasn’t always been considered bad either. In ancient Sparta to die in battle was the greatest honor one could have. A fallen solder would not be mourned over but celebrated.

With medical advances and new technologies the human quest to prolong life continues. Homo sapiens have no natural predators. War, Disease, Famine, these are our predators. As much as we must fight them we must realize that without them the human race would have died of over population long ago. How can we work so hard to prolong our lives when the quality of so many lives is so little? Is a long life so great if it meant so little?

Fear of death is a human instinct, and if anything makes us civilized it is the ability to overcome primal instincts. Traits that humans value most are all the overcoming of instinct: Courage (overcoming fear), Logic (overcoming impulse), and Selflessness (overcoming greed).

I’m still against war and I still think we should fight AIDS, but I also think we should keep these ideas in the back of our minds because sometime the evil you seek to destroy is the very thing that is keeping you alive.