> War justifies terrible behaviours: who cares about you being screamed at when you're at war? Who cares about your family life, when you're at war? What are broken principles and despicable means, when you're at war ?
As someone who’s been in the military and to war, this is just wrong. Families and friendships mean the most when you’re at war. You can never be closer to another human being than being at war. I’m not romanticizing it, war is a dirty, nasty thing.
It’s about strategy and fear, about trust and sacrifice. How many people do you trust with your life, how many people would die for you, or you for them? I could count them and since leaving the military, I haven’t counted another soul.
War. It’s a shitty thing to be used as a political pawn. It’s a shitty thing to be hated for it. It’s a shitty thing to be stomping all over someone else’s country without any say in the matter.
War doesn’t justify terrible behavior. It IS terrible behavior incarnate. But you know, I see people do shittier things every day. I see people walk past homeless people like they don’t exist, or walk by a crying person without even caring. I see people who only care about themselves, and that, that is worse than war.
War is a mechanism of rules. You can’t just shoot someone for giggles, that’s murder. You can’t even shoot someone when they point a gun in your face. And if you do shoot, make sure they shot first. The cops have it easy, they just have to feel threatened.
War is shitty, but there’s a humanity to it. An acknowledgment of the shit we are all in. We make the best of it. But when I walk down the street, I see less humanity than I did in war, and that sometimes brings tears to my eyes.
For kicks, I'm going to throw out a possibly odd analogy.
The length of a string determines how quickly it vibrates (assuming tension is the same). Shorter strings vibrate faster than long strings. If you're in a noisy environment and you want to make sense of all of the chaotic sounds around you, one way to do it would be to take a bunch of strings of different lengths (say a piano) and see which ones resonate more than others. The gentle ringing of those piano strings, some louder than others, tells you which frequencies are more dominant in the surrounding acoustic environment, because they cause their matching strings to resonate more.
As I get older (I'm in my forties), I feel like a lengthening string. When I was a twenty-something programmer, I could tell you how things had changed over a year or two, but trends or cycles on longer timescales than that were hidden to me. Now I know what a decade or two feels like and can see and intuitively sense cycles of that scale. At the same time, shorter trends are harder for me to pick up on now. It feels like noise or beneath my notice.
Having people of different ages in your organization is incredibly value because they all resonate at different time scales like this and help you pick up chronological patterns at frequencies you'd otherwise miss.
> War justifies terrible behaviours: who cares about you being screamed at when you're at war? Who cares about your family life, when you're at war? What are broken principles and despicable means, when you're at war ?
As someone who’s been in the military and to war, this is just wrong. Families and friendships mean the most when you’re at war. You can never be closer to another human being than being at war. I’m not romanticizing it, war is a dirty, nasty thing.
It’s about strategy and fear, about trust and sacrifice. How many people do you trust with your life, how many people would die for you, or you for them? I could count them and since leaving the military, I haven’t counted another soul.
War. It’s a shitty thing to be used as a political pawn. It’s a shitty thing to be hated for it. It’s a shitty thing to be stomping all over someone else’s country without any say in the matter.
War doesn’t justify terrible behavior. It IS terrible behavior incarnate. But you know, I see people do shittier things every day. I see people walk past homeless people like they don’t exist, or walk by a crying person without even caring. I see people who only care about themselves, and that, that is worse than war.
War is a mechanism of rules. You can’t just shoot someone for giggles, that’s murder. You can’t even shoot someone when they point a gun in your face. And if you do shoot, make sure they shot first. The cops have it easy, they just have to feel threatened.
War is shitty, but there’s a humanity to it. An acknowledgment of the shit we are all in. We make the best of it. But when I walk down the street, I see less humanity than I did in war, and that sometimes brings tears to my eyes.