The mindset that war is normal must be addressed
By Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today
We seem to be a generation of people (some conservative, some progressive) who have grown up and gotten old amid endless war.
It is an entrenched status for us…as Americans of the 20th century. We have been at war for the entire century.
President Obama was quoted in one of the newspapers I often read, and he said: “I don’t want to end the war, I want to
end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” The “mindset.” He was talking about the ongoing decades old war in Arab Country describing the U.S. as instigator, but failing to mention President Bush or Cheney.
As I read on and thought about America’s past, I knew he could have been talking in a more historical way about the 20thcentury present predicament we find ourselves in and concluded that America has always lionized war. Most of the “frontier” stories we hear over and over again are used to argue in favor of policies that simply spell more conflict and more war.
Indeed, many of America’s so-called “Indian stories” are about War and Death as celebrations: who won….who lost! And, as America devotes itself to Democracy in some kind of phony way, one manmade disaster follows another.
Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn. Courtesy photo
Every past U.S. president whose figure now lines our city streets has encouraged War: occupying Palestine is OK just as it was ok to invade and occupy the Black Hills. It is ok, to celebrate our occupation of Cuba, take over the Philippines, claim the Panama Canal. Even when we think of World War II we celebrate its heroes who returned in triumph with injuries from which some as human beings may never recover.
It was “the good war”, after all, and it is important to make distinctions just as “frontiersmen” made stories of their good work of killing Indians. Eventually, it all leads America to that fateful August morning in 1945 when we failed to learn that even as we would try to keep secrets about atomic fission, the “mind set” would continue.
It is not that America’s leadership is ignorant or incompetent, foolish or worse, malicious and evil. It is that there is a historical “mind set” spoken of by Obama and many others who have believed for a long time that we should look for viable alternatives to constant war.
America has gone from “the Indians are coming…the Indians are coming”….to “the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming”…. And on and on. Who is next??
Once Trump gets over himself, (or the courts indict him….or not…), America’s national dialogue could move toward something even more daunting than the latest amusing questions that rise out of that mantra of fear to: shall we improve relations with Russia, should we get out of Syria, lets denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, what about invading Iran?
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Toda
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