What Have We Learned?

Memorial to W.W. I Soldiers

 My husband and I graduated from college during Viet Nam.  We were about to retire when nine-eleven shocked America.  Today, America is involved in helping those we believe are in the right to defend themselves against others who started war against them. We are not fighting, but we are indirectly involved.  Centuries ago, Plato said "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

The existence of the United States of America began on April 19, 1775, when 700 British soldiers were confronted by 77 minutemen. Both sides thought they were in the right.  Decades later, Winsten Churchill said "War is mainly a catalogue of blunders."  

If we know that what these men who have experienced war concluded, why do wars continue?  John Steinbeck explained it this way:  "All war is a symptom of man's failures as a thinking animal."  While that may be true, it does not offer a solution.  Richard Nixon thought he had the answer, when he said:  "Short of changing human nature,,.. the only way to achieve a practical peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war."  While that may sound like a solution, aren't most wars fought for some perceived benefit--to acquire land that is valuable in some way, to gain access to a shipping passage, to achieve a benefit of some kind?  His comment seams more of an observation than a solution.

Yet, great minds have warned that we must find a way to halt war.  H.G. Wells said, "If we don't end war, war will end us."  Albert Einstein described the importance of avoiding wars in this way:  "I know not what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

In more recent times, Madeleine Albright said, "I am an optimist that worries a lot. ...I have seen enough examples of altruism and sacrifice to live in astonishment at what humans are willing to do for one another; and enough examples of cruelty to despair at what we are capable of doing to each other.  The contradictions within human nature are inescapable.  Liberty is our gift and our burden, carrying with it both the responsibility to choose and accountability for the choices we make." 

At the end of WW I there was a genuine effort made to end wars, and Woodrow Wilson was a part of it.  He said of the American soldiers, they fought for "the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free."  He would have been saddened by the wars that have followed since then.

To answer my question, What Have We Learned? I have not found an answer.  I don't suppose I should feel embarrassed, since those far wiser than I am, cannot seem to find the answer either.  I suppose that what is important is that we do keep trying to find an answer as best we can.