Make love, not war?

Veteran’s Day prompted a story from the Voice of America regarding the visitors to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. I read with interest that some of the visitors, people too young to remember Vietnam, are interested in this memorial because of the war in Iraq. While the reporter didn’t expand on this statement, I wonder if the memorial’s architect, Maya Lin, provides a clue as to why young people would be attracted to it. Lin described the memorial’s form as one designed to resemble “a wound in the earth that is slowly healing.”

Wars wound all of humanity deeply. It doesn’t matter if one remembers a specific war because there is one dark thread that binds them all together; humans made in God’s image are destroyed, whether directly by bullets and bombs, or indirectly through the unseen scars of emotional bullets and bombs that wound the souls of soldiers, family members and friends.

Why can we not learn that killing each other isn’t a viable long-term solution to any problem? Resorting to killing means that we have failed to be creative enough and caring enough to look for other ways to resolve our differences. Indeed, it is just that recognition – that the administration moved to war on Iraq rather than relying on good intelligence and diplomatic intervention – that may be driving people to the wall – or perhaps up the wall as well!

I’ve always found it interesting that here in the US we are constantly bombarded by movies where violent acts are the glue holding together often poorly constructed plots. Yet I can not remember a film being given an NC-17 rating based only on violence. Sex, of any type, however, is scrutinized much differently. We seem to be OK with teenagers watching people be killed in myriad ways, but let’s not let them see two people make love unless the scene is carefully edited and photographed.

Hmmm…it’s almost as though we are training our population to accept the normalcy of violence. Some critics have noted that violent video games, played by millions of Americans, are quite similar to games used by the military to desensitize soldiers to killing.

I’m reminded of reading about Bonobo chimps. They have sex constantly, and there don’t seem to be too many rules about partners or positions! But what is also true is that they don’t kill each other. “Make-up” sex takes on a whole new meaning among this species.

Interesting, isn’t it, that we refer to them as animals and hold ourselves up as a higher exemplar of the evolutionary process.