Tickets to Mayhem

Wars cannot get less popular, cannot end....

Unless....

Somebody somewhere, some country, finally finds it in themselves to scatter among the sites dedicated to keeping alive the memories of their own dead at least a few additional memorials honoring those whom they killed while waging wars.

(But in the U.S. especially, as a result of the campaigns that have been waged just in the most recent decades, that would get out of hand in a hurry, wouldn't it, and might even require a whole new necrotized city, brother or sister to already heavily necrotized Washington, D.C. )

It could be argued that, when he had the memorial to the Confederate dead set up at Arlington, Woodrow Wilson was headed in this direction of showing respect for the fallen of the enemy with whom one has become reconciled, with thoughts of "Never again!" But because he was a native-born Virginian, most likely at the time he was in the grip of somewhat different sentiments. Still, that was in 1914, and the unmitigated horrors of the First World War lay just days ahead. Four years later, after what he and the world had seen of all that death and destruction, he could've had a change of heart, as shown by his attempts to get the U.S. to join the League of Nations and so help keep the peace -- an effort that was thwarted by the forerunners of present day Republicans, even though the League was seen as being largely his creation.

Wars cannot get less popular until somebody somewhere faces up to the fact that, no matter how meritorious the end purposes might be, wars boil down mainly to being only affairs in which criminal acts of even the most heinous kind can be committed wholesale and "legally." The ordinary strictures that make life civilized and livable are set aside, temporarily it is hoped, and in their place deeds that otherwise would send people to prisons and even gas chambers are now considered to be necessary, glorious, and even heroic.

Many people suffer grievous wounds and die in wars. However, a much larger number survive wars and are not disastrously crippled ever afterward, and so they think, "That wasn't so bad." And they go out and lay wreaths once a year, and that gives them leave to gear their thoughts to more joyous things throughout the rest of the year that the fallen cannot enjoy .

The dead, if they could speak, would have a different opinion of how bad things were.

But since they can't, the wars, and the threats of wars, thus excused and glorified, go on, using the wreaths as some of their tickets to mayhem.