Send the Wealthy, the Old, and the Righteous

Recent research has established that the human brain does not finish developing until a young adult reaches his or her mid-twenties. This was not a surprise to me. I have often observed those between the ages of 18 and 25 struggling to make the transition between childhood and adulthood. Emotional maturity, self-knowledge, and decision making skills spin hurricane-like during the search for the footing and balance that is necessary to navigate adult life. These formative years are every bit as important to the development of a healthy human adult as are the years between infancy and the age of six. Why, I am forced to ask, do we train our still developing young to kill and thrust them into the traumatic chaos of war?

Any one of us would be arrested for abuse if we were to treat a child or an adolescent in this manner. What makes it automatically OK after the age of eighteen? Does killing someone violently make a man out of a boy or a woman out of a girl? Are they able to reason their way through the propaganda? Educated enough to reject the justifications given for visiting conflict upon others? Are they emotionally mature enough to understand what that weapon really means? Does the experience of combat and it's aftermath of body parts and human anguish damage their transition to adulthood? Did you or do you intend for your child to be a killer? Did you raise him or her to have them die just as they reach the threshold of adulthood? To be maimed? To be psychologically impaired for life?

Note that it is nearly always the wealthy, the old, and the religiously righteous who start wars. I was always taught to clean up after myself, so let's make the ones who made the mess clean it up. Yep, let's send the rich who profit from war, the old men who eat their young, and the god-mongers to fight their own battles. The wealthy have profitted and gotten what they wanted. The old have had been able to experience life much longer than an eighteen year-old fledgling. The religiously righteous love to hate and are control addicts: war comes naturally to them.

The wealthy can arm themselves with super-duper, high-tech weapons, layer their Humvees with the thickest, most impenetrable armour, and buy the most select, user-friendly, intelligence on the market. The old warriors can relive that adrenaline rush and the old chickenhawks can pump the air with furious fists and snarl epithets at the enemy. The righteous can herd behind their chosen religious symbols and do battle against life with sacred books and boorish testifications all the while claiming God as their sponsor.

Pseudo patroits are frequently heard to chant,"We're number one, we're number one." They are wrong. We are "war junkies". America has a war habit. It is willing, generation after generation, to devour it's young, to support it's military industrial complex. "We're number one" is a sorry-ass football chant that is being used to further a corporate American Empire. The "pseudos" (without question) paint their faces, chant, and send our kids to kill other kids and their families. That's not number one. "That's number ten, GI."

So let's send the greedy ones, the old ones who wallow in glory, and the righteous who think they own "the truth" to play guns in warland. Let's be concerned parents, responsilble citizens, and supportive members of our global family by respecting and caring for one another. Let's make sure that the young have the chance to "become", and hope that they will contribute to society creatively instead of destructively.

We can do this turning our backs on those who manufacture war. War, is after all...failure. It is the Anti-Life. Take a look at an eight year old and ask yourself, "what American war will he or she be fighting in ten years from now?" The time has come to evict the junkies from the Whitehouse, to put the monsters back in their cages. It is time to Stop The Madness!

Their brains are still developing when we send them off to war......

......................Kitchen Window Woman