Reply #24: Snake oil? It's our national religion

[gratuitous]

Unremitting, unquestioning faith in the power of violence to repair, retrieve, and redeem any situation. It's such an ingrained part of our culture, that we barely question it. Crime a problem? Build more prisons. Get more guns into the hands of law-abiding citizens. Tougher sentences. Someone overseas annoys us? Send out an aircraft carrier or a battleship to menace their coastline. If they don't have a coastline, do a few military maneuvers in a nearby country so they can see what's in store for them.

I certainly don't wish our nation any ill, but the direct experience of so many other nations with war on their own soil has given them a perspective that we don't have at all. For us, war is a neat, abstract concept with no real consequence. It happens somewhere else, far away, and all those bombed-out buildings, people running in the streets and mangled bodies are someone else's, not ours, and surely not our responsibility. Or if it is our responsibility, those people deserved what we did to them.