My second brother was a model child. He was good at most everything he did. He was good looking, intelligent, athletic, and attentive to his parents. He excelled in school studies. He played tackle on our High School football team and was good enough to be offered a college football scholarship. He never, to my knowledge, disobeyed our parents, and was never in trouble with them. He emulated my father, and wanted to be a minister like him. When he became a minister, his first charge was an old crumbling church in downtown St. Joseph, Missouri, which had a dwindling congregation. He took the church out to the suburbs, where he developed a new church with a thriving and burgeoning congregation. He took extra training as a counselor, and became known in town as a wise and trusted listener. He was a good father to his two children His success became noticed in the church hierarchy, and he eventually became bishop for the Methodist Church, serving the Southwest District of the United Methodist Church. This district included Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. He became a Board member for Southern Methodist University. He was at one point offered the presidency of his alma mater, Central Methodist College, now University. He was an admirable person in most any way you looked at it.
Yet I did not like my brother Lou. He rather frequently made it clear to me that I was doing quite a number of things wrong, at which I took great umbrage. I did not blame him when he knocked me out with a ball bat. He wanted to show me how far he could hit the ball, and I stepped too close to see how he swung the bat, getting clobbered in the process. That was my fault. I certainly did not mind any of his successes. I was proud of my brother and all his accomplishments in life. What got my goat was getting frequently belittled by him, in my childish opinion. One time, after he had reminded me of a number of mistakes I was making in my life, he walked away rather pleased with himself, I thought, so I picked up the BB gun on the back porch and shot him in the butt. There were immediate dire repercussions, of course. I got the BB gun taken away from me for the next year, and got my bottom warmed, along with stern warnings. I did not, after that, attempt any violent acts against my brother, but found myself gradually becoming alienated from him as he progressed in his career. I kept trying to figure out why I disliked my brother. He was a great guy.
Part of that dislike, I suppose, was juvenile immaturity; I was unwilling to take criticism, no matter how justified it might be. Part of that antipathy was the inferiority dislike syndrome. It was quite similar to the story of praise for Lucy Brown, who was good in every way. After a long accounting of praise for all her good acts for her community, the last line is: “We all hate Lucy Brown. Let’s all go out and hang her.” No group likes a person who is so much better than the rest of them; it makes all the rest of them look bad. Part of it was that I just did not understand my own brother. It seemed to me that he was playing the role of a good person to the hilt, and felt that I could never get a straight answer from him, never could count on what he said as being the way he really felt. As time went on, I trusted him less and less, and became more alienated from him. I looked at all his actions with great suspicion but did not, after that time, commit any further violent acts against my brother. I think he was simply trying to be the best person he could be, but I did not appreciate that at all.
I also had not yet learned how to be a responsible member of society. When I got my BB gun back the following year, one of my second grade friends and I hid in the bushes in the alley behind our house and shot the BB gun at windows in the apartment complex which was across a parking lot. We were trying to see what kind of reaction we got from the tenants of those apartments. When my parents started talking about someone shooting at those windows, and looking at me, I figured it was time to stop that before they found the truth. Two years later, however, after we moved to the suburbs of Independence, one of my grade school friends and I took pleasure in dropping small rocks on cars passing under the bridge, where Blue Ridge Boulevard passed over Highway 40. That didn’t last long. One of the motorists stopped and chased us. Fortunately, we could run faster than he could and got away without going to juvenile criminal court. It was scary enough, however, to convince us to not do those destructive acts anymore. I also had a bit of temper, would sometimes have immediate anger at something one of my friends would say, and would immediately attack them, starting a brief physical fight. A couple of times I stole money from my mother’s loose change bowl, in order to buy candy.
Fortunately, at some point, guilt, a bit of maturity and grade school/high school sports kicked in, leading me to abandon physical destructive acts aimed at other people and their possessions. I got over having fits of anger, shied away from any physical assault on any other person, unless it was in sports. I did not steal, and developed respect for all people of all sizes, shapes and colors, even those I did not like. I became, for reasons which are not quite clear to me, a listener, and a compromiser. The one thing I did not do was to accept all laws and customs as if they were all correct. I questioned those rules which seemed to me to be clearly unjust, and became a champion of causes that sought fairness for all individuals, regardless of our age or description. When drafted to serve in the Korean War, I refused to go off to some other country to kill people, in order to support American business interests. That whole conflict I saw as a conflagration of injustice. I became obsessed with supporting those other members of our society who were subjugated, and needed help seeking their own life, liberty, and happiness. I rode on the back seats of segregated buses in South Carolina during segregation, drank from the “black” water fountains at the bus stations, and participated in demonstration sit-ins at segregated playgrounds in Washington, D.C. My iconoclasm became that of a moralist, rather than that of a thief, violent actor and destroyer. I finally got it: unless we all respect each other and work together, we are toast. I finally grew up.
I relate these various anti-social episodes from my past in order to make the point toward where this entire discussion is directed. War, in my opinion, is juvenile anti-social behavior taken to a much grander scale. It starts for the same reasons as all juvenile immoral and unethical behavior. There is sudden anger, followed by a sudden violent act, then long term unforeseen consequences. There is greed: we want something someone else has, so we pick a fight in order to take what is not rightfully ours. We feel oppressed and belittled, so we retaliate with violence, thinking that is the only way we can correct this intolerant situation. We are afraid of being overcome by others who are more successful and powerful than us, so we strike out against them. We are angry at being shown up by someone else who always makes us look bad, because they are so much better than us, and let us know it. When the rules are not fair, we reach the point of losing patience, believing there is no peaceful way to reach fairness, and must therefore resort to violence in order to correct that injustice. Admittedly, once these juvenile emotions are transferred to the grander scale of nations, the societal loss is immense. Eighty five million people died during World War II, the vast majority of them relatively innocent civilians. That does not alter the fact, however, that these massive national conflicts are started by those individuals who control those nations, and who act violently because they express juvenile destructive behavior. They start wars because they haven’t grown up yet.
Let’s take World War II, for example. Adolph Schicklgruber Hitler never had many advantages as a child. He was born in 1989 to parents who were not well-to-do. After his father’s farm failed, and his mother died at age 46, he was destitute. He had been a failure as a singer, an artist, possibly being a priest, and was unwilling to follow his father’s footsteps as a customs officer. By 1909, he was living in a homeless shelter, an utter failure in life. At that time in Austria, there was an influx of Jewish immigrants, who were all doing well in various businesses. There was growing fear amongst the native Austrian population that they were going to inundated by these Jewish settlers, who were prospering while they were not. There was strong developing anti-Semitism in the community, being promoted for political purpose. Adolph Hitler bought into that anti-Semitism completely. He hated Jews for doing well, while he was not, and even, from his point of view, threatening his very existence. When he became a person of power, he used that juvenile hatred to powerful political advantage. His main themes, as he became dominant in German society, were hatred for invasive Jews, Germany only for Germans, and “lebensraum” for Germans to have all the space they needed to become prosperous. The result of that juvenile passionate hatred was to plunge the entire world into a giant storm of destruction.
As for Japan, the partner of Germany, halfway around the world in that global conflict, it was the result of economic suppression by the United States. In the 1930’s, Japan had been developing its economic prowess in China and the Pacific rim. What Japan is doing now, showing its economic strength, began back then toward the first of the twentieth century. You might say that even though they lost that subsequent military war, they eventually won the economic war. At that time, however, it seemed much different to them. American, British and Dutch business interests protested mightily at losing some of their profits in China and the Pacific nations. Those business interests convinced their nations to start putting the squeeze on Japan to stop being so successful. There were progressive embargos established by those nations against aviation gasoline, iron, steel and mechanical parts. There were increasing negotiations between Japanese envoys and Washington diplomats, to resolve this business battle. By 1941, Japan offered to eschew any military action against any other country if it was allowed to continue its business interests in China. The United States completely rejected this offer, and demanded that Japan either withdraw from China or face further trade restriction. Japan felt that it had been forced into a corner. It was providing better services for China than any other nation’s business, but was being prevented from doing so by the greed of other nation’s businesses. For Japan, they felt they had no other choice. They would be forced to correct this injustice by calling attention to it in a violent way. So they attacked, not because they really wanted to, but because they felt they had no other choice, if they were to achieve their destiny.
And the punishments that were allotted after these wars were also totally unethical. The victors always claim that the rules of war have been violated, so that the losers must pay by the death of various directors of that conflict against the victors, chosen as examples, as if this corrects wrongs against society. These righteous victors treat war as if it is a game, played by rigidly applied rules. It is not a game. It is raw emotion against raw emotion, and we all do, in that circumstance, whatever it takes to win. To hold any of the losers in a war responsible for crimes against society, for which they have to pay with death or lifetime prison sentences, is hypocrisy of the highest order. This practice turns absolute blindness toward the vile transgressions of the victors in that conflict. Multimillions of innocent people die in a war because there are not ethics on either side. Multiple millions of innocent people die in those conflicts because they are started and continued by adults who have not grown up yet. These unethical adults use the resources of an entire nation, and sometimes the whole world, to express their immaturity in massive ways.
There are currently few ethics in wars, other than scattered acts of kindness and compassion. Ethics, by definition, consists of deep respect for all other forms of life, in any way that life exists. War is human immaturity, and in most ways, the antipathy of ethics. The major problem we face is that, if we do not become mature ethical adults before the next world war occurs, there will probably be none of us left to talk about it. Nuclear bombs and or bacterial/viral/chemical weapons will wipe out all humans, and all ethics.