What’s interesting to me is cultural division and how that intangible gap allows the same pilot, or suicide bomber or any patriotic killer to “waste the enemy” and potentially feel good about it.

Band of Brothers is something I watched recently, and I found the interviews with surviving veterans amazing. One guy, “Shifty” Powers, had a very level headed approach to his experience in WWII. I’m paraphrasing here but about the men he killed, and the men who were trying to kill him he said something like “We might have been friends in different circumstances. We might have both enjoyed fishing … or hunting … but were all just doing our jobs, following orders.”

And that’s the bummer of it all. The old men in charge of the armies make the deals. They pick the fights at the peril of the people who have to do the killing and be killed or maimed.

If our race survives, humanity will one day look back at the absurdity of it all in the same way we look back on those who once believed our planet was flat and could be fallen off of.

*sigh*