WAR (What is it good for?)

Throughout human history, war has been a constant threat. Many civilizations have been conquered and co-opted by other nations. People fight for a variety of reasons. They fight for basic survival, to maintain their dominance, and for commodities such as oil. Many people believe that one day there will be wars over water rights. The United States of America was established through war. First, the settlers attacked the indigenous people and fought with them almost to the point of extinction. Then, the settlers fought with the country that many of them were fleeing for “the new world.” Eventually, these settlers would fight each other in one of the bloodiest wars in human history. The United States was essentially build on war and has averaged at least one war every ten years. We were warned by President Dwight Eisenhower to “beware the military industrial complex.” These turned out to be prophetic words because Eisenhower was a general during World War II and he knew all too well the peril that we could face if we continue to wage war on other cultures.
War is also declared in abstract ways such as the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on terror. These types of wars could be waged for the rest of time since there is no actual enemy. In fact, these wars are actually waged on our own people with some profiting from them. The prison system is a multi-billion dollar business that does nothing more than to warehouse offenders. It does nothing to rehabilitate our citizens or to help them to become better citizens. It is impossible to fight against an ideology as we have learned with Communism. Communism was not sustainable because of the way it is enforced in various countries around the world. All of our overt and covert wars against it did not seem to make a difference in the long run. We are a great nation just like many other nations around the world but I am concerned that our national fervor and patriotism has turned us into a civilization that we never hoped that we would become. People are too distracted and detached from one another to stand up to their government or corporations that are pushing them into directions that will polarize us from the rest of the world.