war is dumb

sometimes i wonder about weird things.
like, who first looked at a shiny piece of metal and thought it would be a good idea to shove it through their earlobe?
or, who looked at the liquid streaming out of a cow's nether-regions and thought it would be a tastey beverage?

but the biggest thing i've never been able to figure out is war.

i'm not talking about my personal opinions on the war in Iraq, or the War on Terror, or anything like that--it's not that kind of a blog today.

i just wonder how war ever happened to begin with.

violence i can understand.
imagine random early people living in their 'natural state.' one guy has a rabbit or something to eat, one guy doesn't. the guy without the rabbit instinctually knows that he needs to eat, or he will die.
violence ensues.

but, war? that is a totally different animal.

think about the big battle scenes in movies like braveheart.
i just don't know how it came to be that two people would have an argument about something that they couldn't seem to work out, and then one was all "that's it, i've had enough. see that big field over there? tomorrow, at dawn, i'm going to line up all the men i can find at one end of it. you put your guys at the other end. then we'll make them all run into the middle and try to chop each other up. whichever one of us has more guys left at the end will be the winner."

not that i like it any better, but at least the 'conquering' kind of warfare made logical sense--you feel you're somehow entitled to something that's not yours, you take all your friends with you and attempt to kill all the people who have the thing you want. if you succeed, the thing is then yours, and the war is over because you have killed everybody.

but this rushing into a field business is complete rubbish.
in fact, i think war has gotten dumber and dumber as civilization has advanced.

i mean, i guess we improved on the field thing a bit when we started digging trenches at each end, and attempted to kill each other by poking our heads out to shoot bullets across the field. even i have to admit that was a great improvement over the running and chopping situation.

but, these days, i think war is probably the silliest it's ever been.
consider the following example of how i think war works.

--an imaginary exchange between war-making type people--

leader of country:
i do not like that thing you're doing. please stop it.
leader of other country:
no, i will not stop it because i am the leader of my own country and you are not the boss of me so there.
leader of first country:
if you do not stop doing that thing i don't like, i will send the youth of my country to fly airplanes over your country and drop bombs on it and you will see who is the boss of you then.
leader of other country:
bring it, biznitch.

airplane flying, bomb dropping, and an excessive loss of life ensue, until...

leader of other country: (only if not killed by bombs)
ok. i'll stop doing the thing you don't like now. i really have no choice because you have destroyed my nation and we are incapable of doing anything now anyway.
leader of first country:
how do you like me now?

--end imaginary exchange--

so, yeah. war is definitely dumb.

if i were queen of the world, we wouldn't have war at all.

sadly, i'm not the queen of the world.
and even though i think it's just about the dumbest thing ever, i guess war just...is.
i don't think there will or could ever be a complete absence of war.

but...
my friend Big Steph and i were recently discussing how much better the world would be if we were in charge of everything, and even though we have very different political views (read: she does not hate GWB, and i do), we both agreed that the world would be much better off if we went back to sword fighting--if we just completely got rid of all guns and bombs and whatnot.
sure, i went off on a bit of a tangent about the idiocy of people hacking each other to pieces in large open fields. but i think there would be several benefits brought by a return to sword-fighting: far less loss of life, less destruction of property, and a more level/fair starting point for both sides of a conflict.

we also decided that we would be much happier of the human gestation period could be cut back to three months, instead of the ridiculously long nine months that we have to put up with now.

but that's a different story altogether.