Cease Fire-No Winner

Preface:

I am by no means anti-military. I believe we need the military in this day and age more than ever, and I respect the military personnel that serve our country in this way. I am saddened by any military personnel that perish in service to our country and I do not in anyway, shape, form or fashion condemn the US Military. If I point to any problem within the US I point only to the US as a whole, as a citizenry, myself included for the collective hate that we all possess.
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Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and President Bush are both claiming victory for themselves in the aftermath of the recent war involving Israel and Hezbollah.

In a sense everybody is right, and from another perspective everyone is wrong.

Terrorism is not concerned with winning a war, in the traditional sense that wars have been decided in the past. One only needs to consider 911. It was devastating, it was cruel, it was humanity at its worst. There is no country to do battle against, only a certain group of people who are spread out all over the world, some of them possibly still in this country.

Terrorism wins when we begin to be suspect of everyone we come into contact with. Terrorism wins, when we react like they do, when we play their game.

We have to protect ourselves, and the challenge is to do that without playing their game.

It's hard to have a war when there is not an opposing side.

In that sense, Hezbollah and all terrorists have won in this conflict. They reduced us all to continue participating in the madness that is fear and war, displacing many innocents who had nothing at all to do with the conflict. They were successful in spreading their message of fear and hate.

And our President only taunts them further, claiming 'Israel won', showing us further that we all lost. We lost an opportunity to encourage steps towards peace when it finally happened. Rather than affirm a cease-fire victory, which is where the real battle was won, we affirm victory in war. It is a fragile cease-fire. It is not real peace. The reasons for the outbreak still exist. The same suspicions and fears remain. The same taunting is still in place.

Winners or losers in war don't matter anymore. But there are ways we can become winners whether or not any of us ever fire a gun or launch a missle.

Learning lessons in how to avoid war from experiencing these conflicts would be one of those ways.

It is worth noting that though we might have been close to WWIII more than once, the memories we have of those previous world wars has been enough to stop us from experiencing another world war.

The blood from Hiroshima and Nagasaki still cries out and keeps us from engaging in further nuclear holocaust.

In this way we have made progress in the world.

If we don't continue to be able to learn these lessons, then we will all have lost.

Sometimes it appears we have reverted back to simply throwing rocks at each other. The song remains the same, only the technology changes.

Let us rid our individual selves of pride, arrogance, and hate. Despite our beliefs, love is the highest form of humanity that we can strive to live for. Let us stop with insults and taunting, however harmless it seems. Let us imagine what would be left if we let go of these dangerous vices. Let us imagine what our country would be like, what our world would be like if we could all be of one mind in this regard.

This is the difference that we can make in our world.