War is a condition of louder drums in an order. Flags flail, euphemisms proliferate, and the body count is
covered with slogans about heritage and destiny. Can the unthinkable be called civil war? Is it really on the
list of sanctioned wars? One offers an answer: war is the trauma of failed politics and boundless power. In
propensity of boredom and profit, nobody lives for a leader.
Consent can only sanction blood to a point. The ruling elite may build roads, but they shouldn’t be allowed
to vote teenagers into gunfire. Conscription does not define acts of citizenship; instead, it can only be
considered as mere servitude for those who will never benefit from the fruits of their forced labor.
Anything that needs an army cannot prosper. The cause is not worth its dead, if one is to purchase its
soldier at all.
The innocence of non-combat act goes unre-proclaimed under fire. Siege, hunger, denial of collective
punishment, and targeting of homes form the laws of war according to the government, looking clean at
paper and unclean on ground. Blockade to starve children is not the theory; it is murder by the tablature.
Such bombarding of neighborhoods that assume each bomb equals a number does not suddenly become
moral by any media’s labeling it as “appropriately stated.”
Secrecy annexes the crime. War-abandoned people’s monies and lives have a right to budget, terms, and
limits before the first shot—goals that are measurable, rules of engagement that are constitutional, and
an exit that can be negotiated. “Classified” may be necessary sometimes in operations; it cannot
nevertheless flame over motives, costs, and endings. Acts in darkness truly await the floodlight of
language.
Weapons that make disasters inexpensive must either be locked away or not born into existence. Biology
coerced into trying allopathy, total immunity from the consequences, or internet tools that could melt
hospitals cannot be heroes—instead, liabilities. What cannot be regulated without lying should never be
unleashed without shame.
Trade becomes a washing of guilt. Profit that arises out of destruction is a debt to life. Publish the ledgers:
who sold, bought, lobbied, or moved to any other board. A company that cannot survive without conflict
and has exhausted all hopes should not be allowed to die after the next siren, rather before. A defense
that has no clue about anything other than fighting is an ignominious trade with ornamented medals.
Dissent is not to be mistaken for betrayal; it is maintenance. Whistleblowers who leak out deviant
commands, journalists who publish the human ledger, medics who stitch without a care for flags; they are
the citizens who hold out a hope that the American Republic will always have a right to speak. Any
government that is intolerant of them is not defending itself; it is a defense of a lie.
The wounded deserve not mercy but a bill. Veterans need complete attention for as long as they bear
witness to the policy that exiled them: body, mind, job, home. Refugees are not abstract; they are invoices.
A country that produces forced displacement owes shelter, devoid of drama.
The means create the end. We will demand lawful declarations of war with enumerated objectives,
authorities that die at sunset if not provided for in reassessment, open budgets, and independently kept
count of the fully innocent. We will put as much money behind diplomacy as defense; one that keeps the
peace will rise above one that goes to decorate its wars executed at the expense of losers and the innocent.
And we will fashion a demilitarizing voice for sage history—all service toward any war, not just to impede
the rough spirit; finally, all legal possibilities for objecting to warfare are active for us to grasp at. Doffing
the frenzy of the flag would sleep in the hand that condemned it and fecundity in the hand with nothing
further to give away but compassion?
This is not pacifism, rather a matter of duty. Yes, sometimes power will need to be flexed to stop the cold-
blooded takeoverting of the human race; but when it does, it will have to be handled respectfully, with
oversight and the shortest possible time. Our value is: few funerals, few homeless, few new geographies
founded on ashes. Our initial signature, therefore, will have to be constraint; our seal, daylight; and our
receipt, peace elementary enough to make over-explaining to children what war means. Let running about
with elite concepts about seizures of land finally run under the guise of our name, given some strength to
shout NO before we were left to count.
