“No One Won the Last War and No One Will Win the Next War”

I entered this world just five years after the man after whom I was named was murdered in the Krosno, Poland ghetto, and whose family had been transported and executed in the Warzyce Forest and buried in a mass grave.

Only two years before my birth, President Harry Truman ordered the release of two atomic bombs, with the neutral sounding names of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” to literally incinerate people and property in Japanese cities.

Though I was not conscious of it at the time, three years after I entered life, my country joined the battles in Korea resulting in the loss of valued lives on all sides of the conflict.

In my early teen years through my mid-twenties, I first became aware of the buildup and then the full-scale deployment of U.S. military personnel to the streets and jungles of southeast Asia, and as I witnessed the mass casualties returning to our country in body bags, I became paralyzed with grief knowing that my friends and classmates were among the dead.

When I was in my fifty-fourth year, President George W. H. Bush sent troops to the Middle East to fight in what was to become known as the First Gulf War, and his son, President George W. Bush, in his “War on terror” following the attack on our homeland in 2001, engaged our nation in war, first on the plains and mountainous regions of Afghanistan and soon thereafter on the nation of Iraq.

And now in my later years, well into my eight decade of life, President Donald Trump chose to blow up boats and ultimately to invade the country of Venezuela allegedly to extract and place on trial that nation’s president on charges of drug trafficking.

And as I write this, the President of the United States has joined with the government of Israel in a continual bombing campaign and possible ground invasion of Iran just as diplomatic negotiations seemed to have had the potential of easing tensions.

When I hear the military language spoken of our brave service members undertaking “tours” of duty in the “theater” of operations, one could imagine a guided family group outing through an exotic arts festival. But this seemingly impartial terminology camouflages something dangerous and deadly as the youth of our nation risk the ultimate sacrifice in battles that, in hindsight, need not have occurred.

Eleanor Roosevelt, reflecting on the futility and destructiveness of war, stated: “No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.” Her meaning was that true peace is never achieved by war.

Our Nation’s Capital: War & Peace

Washington, DC is one of the most popular tourist destinations not only within the United States, but internationally as well. Upon leaving the capital area and returning home, many visitors are somehow forever transformed. The Washington, DC experience represents an important and inspiring, yet limited, partial, and narrow vision of our complete national history and our collective consciousness.

First, while our monuments, statues, and memorials honor our country’s luminous heroes, an extraordinarily few pay tribute to our nation’s women and persons of color.

And second, the gleaming and stirring monuments and memorials, though certainly moving, appropriate, and important in that they keep us forever connected to an aspect of our past while helping us progress into the future, primarily embody and give testament to our nation’s past wars, and honor primarily presidents who either served during wartime or achieved prominence in war.

Thus, the symbolic and literal narrative of our nation’s capital speaks only part of our collective story. The fulcrum on which the foundation of this narrative rests represents an important though incomplete story, primarily about white male leaders with armed conflict as the organizing principle.

We do experience some monuments in Washington, DC commemorating peace and peacemakers: a Peace Monument(Naval Monument) located on the Capitol grounds, the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism, The Arts of Peace Sculptures located at Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, the inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial located on the National Mall, and the planned national U.S. Peace Memorial.

We must continue and expand not only our memorials and monuments, but also our resources and energies in valuing those working in conflict resolution, the activists dedicated to preventing wars and to bringing existing wars to diplomatic resolution once they have begun, as well as the individuals of conscience who refuse to give over their minds, their souls, and their bodies to armed conflict.

As a nation, we must encourage the practitioners of non-violent resistance in the face of tyranny and oppression; the anti-war activists who strive to educate their peers, their citizenry, and, yes, their government about the perils of unjustified and unjust armed conflict and incursions into lands not their own in advance of appropriate attempts at diplomatic means of resolving conflict?

Individuals and groups that stand up and put their lives on the line to defend the country from very real threats to our national security and survival, as do those in our nation’s military, are true patriots.

But true patriots are also those who speak out, stand up, and challenge our governmental leaders, those who put their lives on the line by actively advocating for justice, freedom, and liberty through peaceful means.

Looking over the history of humanity, it is apparent that tyranny, at times, could only be countered through the raising of arms. On numerous occasions, however, diplomacy has been successful, and at other times, it should have been used more extensively before rushing to war.

We must all find it unacceptable when one’s patriotism and one’s love of country is called into question when one advocates for peaceful means of conflict resolution, for it is also an act of patriotism to work to keep our brave and courageous troops out of harm’s way, and to work to create conditions and understanding that ultimately make war less likely.

We are once again a divided nation: politically, philosophically, economically, and spiritually. The theme of “values” has been dominant in recent public and political discourse.

The promotion of peace should be ranked as one of the highest values deserving our immediate and sustained attention before another of our brave troops loses their precious lives, before a grieving family sheds another tear, and before the United States of America loses another ally in our struggle to keep our democratic republic.