War is the Deadliest Disease
During a public health class, the lecturer spoke of a conference in which the speaker said that thanks to advances in disease prevention, most of the world's communicable diseases would be wiped out in a decade. I thought about this for a second. It sounded good---but implausible. It only took me a moment to figure out why. I was a lot older than the other 20 something students. I had been around a long time. I raised my hand.
"Only if we eliminate war," I said. "War destroys all public health infrastructure."
There is no disease so deadly as war. Even Ebola strikes by accident. Ebola does not deliberately target the women of the opposition, raping them in order to impregnate them, in order to dispirit them. Ebola does not turn children into soldiers, imprinting their young minds with images so ghastly that they will never be sane, no matter how much psychotherapy they have. You can outwit Ebola. Ebola can not steal dozens of young women and hide them away, threatening to sell them into slavery. Ebola can not sell blood diamonds in exchange for bigger, better weapons with which to kill more effectively.
Coronary artery disease strikes middle aged men and elderly women. It does not take out children, because the middle aged men happen to be standing among the children. The same for stroke. Vascular disease does not mean to terrify you into submission. It just is. If you eat a balanced diet and don't smoke and exercise, there is a good chance that you can avoid vascular disease. Some people have no chance of avoiding war. If you live in a country where a fascist dictator has decided that your race or ethnic group or religious group will make a convenient scapegoat, you will die. If you are standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, playing ball with your brothers and sisters, you won't die of a heart attack or a stroke, but you could die from a bomb. You could even die from a bomb that someone planted twenty years ago beneath the ground in a war that ended before you were born---because wars never really end.
When you have an asthma attack, your asthma will not leap from your chest and accidentally kill someone passing by--but a bullet aimed for your head can. Your tuberculosis may infect your neighbor, but it won't leap up into the sky and shoot down a plane that just happens to be passing overhead. War turns health care workers into CIA spies--and therefore children catch polio. War destroys water treatment plants, causing cholera. War destroys crops, causing famine. War is the first and last horseman of the apocalypse.
Eventually, when the wars "over there" get bad enough, someone "over there" brings it "over here". Civilians die. We rally around the flag. We send out the troops. Our troops die by the thousands. Their civilians die by the millions. Our troops come home. Some have PTSD. Some kill themselves. Some just live as if they were dead. Once you have seen death up close, it is hard to forget it.
War is an excuse for every atrocity. No civil liberty is safe in time of war. War devours the nation's resources. The most basic human necessities must come second to the needs of the war machine.
War puts everyone at risk. No one is safe. Trying to solve the world's disputes by war is like trying to harvest crops with fire----
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