And the stupidity of it all.  What? you ask.  War.  We promote and "advertise" war through movies and replay them over and over on Turner Movie Classics, American Movie Classics and other channels. What particularly "amused" me were the many war movies shown over the Memorial Day holiday.

Wars are not conducted by the people of any country.  Wars are planned and carried out by approximately 1,000 men and women who run a country.  In the United States Constitution,  a declaration of war must be enacted by Congress.  However, the clever legislators of our country have found ways to send the country into war by-passing the very document that politicians rave about defending.  Remember the War Resolution which sent us into Iraq?

We went into World War I, II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, without the explicit mandate of the American people.  One thousand bureaucrats in Washington send millions of young men and women to war.  And it is not the bureaucrats, the elected officials to Congress or the Senate, the President, Vice-President, the members of the Cabinet, the CIA and the Pentagon whose lives are on the front line, who are wounded or who die.  

American service men and women have no part in the decision to go war.  They fight it and die for their country without having been asked whether or not going to war is a justifiable solution.  In the case of Iraq a handful of Senators approved the war resolution;  but I submit that the American people did not approve it.  

The people, in whom politicians and poets and philosophers have invested a kind of inborn "wisdom,"  who "know" intuitively that war is the right action to take for our country, support the war makers.  And we the people do it every time, and will do it again and again.  

It happens every generation:  we go to war because we are sent to war by Washington, D.C., as though we are ants.  And that is the irony: we are not ants, but we die like ants.  So be it.  

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