Why is our US government engaging in the same juvenile behavior as is exemplified in the historic Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Our middle-eastern brothers have a never-ending conflict because they react to violence with violence. This is the same behavior seen in family feuds, schoolyard hatred and gang violence. It is seen throughout human group behavior. Why are we not able to learn and live beyond such juvenile behavior?
The solution is simple. We are taught this when wiser people try to help us to learn how to get out of escalating anger. When someone confronts us with anger, we are supposed to stop ourselves from reacting with anger, from escalation. We are supposed to learn to ask what the other person needs, to try to find out what the source of the anger is, to try to understand their point of view.
We are supposed to learn how to deal appropriately with others, without anger or violence. We learn this in relationships with other people, with our loved ones and with co-workers. We should learn to use this same knowledge in relationships with other nations. This is exactly what we are involved in, in relationships, with other human beings, who happen to live in parts of the world which we’ve distinguished from the part which we live in, with artificial boundaries.
I know there are people who understand this. There are people who believe in peaceful solutions, who are actively working towards peacefully solutions. So, a more fundamental question is, why are so many human group activities ruled by the will of ones who have barely developed beyond the knowledge and behavior of their childhood? Do the aggressive and violent have a survival advantage over others, so that their genes will propagate onward? Or is it a collective cultural problem?
Humanity has developed so far beyond the primitive past. We have built such advanced technology. But our emotions are so far behind our other skills. We are not very highly evolved.
Still, we should try. Our response to attacks on US Americans should not be building more and more weapons, with huge defensing spending allocations, to wage war against more and more nations. Our response should be to understand why others would attack us, to ask what we have done to provoke attack, then to do what should be done to help understand each other, and then to peacefully resolve the conflict.
Meanwhile, we eliminate most of the Defense spending and get that Peace Dividend which was promised us.
Category: Military