I only go to my local library on Poetry Writers Group day, every other Tuesday. That’s when I visit the free book section, and also when serendipity has a chance to show itself  This Tuesday it delivered to me Whatever Became of Sin?  by Karl Menninger, M.D., a book copyrighted in 1973.  I was drawn to his words on page 102 in the chapter on  Sin as Collective Responsibility:

“Most people never see the awfulness of war; they only read about it or hear about it from reporters or survivors.  War continues to be a deputized human activity; some citizens are sent out to do what the  total citizenry couldn’t and wouldn’t do.  The rest of us sit (or stand) a long ways off –and watch or listen, occasionally.  And we are so accustomed to receiving reports in prosaic words,  in statistics of “body count”  and bombing “missions” (sic)  and metaphorical phrases such as “punished,”  “cleaned up,”  “resistance met with,”  and “right on target” that the horror,  the awfulness, the reality of the total event become denatured.  The pain, the terror, he sorrow, the blood and filth and mud, and the loss of all that is loved that are squeezed out of the reports, leaving dry husks of unassimilatable  “facts” in endless heaps.

“The picture of one screaming, burning child or one half-dismembered or disemboweled  woman shocks and revolts us, although we are spared  the sounds of the screams and groans.  We are not witnesses to the brokenhearted mother’s sorrow.  We know nothing of the despair, the hopelessness, the loss of everything.  We don’t go with them into the hospitals and observe the hideous wounds, the agonizing burns, the shattered limbs.  And all this is one tiny dot on a great map of millions.  It cannot be described.  It cannot be grasped.  It cannot be imagined.”

He adds on the next page, “Why don’t we outlaw war,  just as we have long since outlawed cannibalism?  How infinitely more horrible it is than cannibalism, which so shocks our sensibilities.”

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Of course, with internet journalism we can and do witness more suffering.  I’m sort of glad the good doctor isn’t around to witness our imperviousness to it–by many, not all.

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All war.  Whenever, wherever, whyever.  Both sides, all sides.

We need to start attending to our genetic out-of-date blueprints that may have been useful so the earliest primitive man could survive, but…

We have the ability to think, figure, plan, speak and write now.  From my point of view, we need our work to be done not with  our version of monetary economics, power and competition but with an international halt-fire and focus on rational problem-solving.  Perhaps it’s a pipe dream, but better and more humane, clear-minded and rational than what the world has unloosed on itself, unloosed in the world, despoiled all.  No end in sight, save “armageddon” in 2050.

Rationality, in all languages.  Back to the drawingboard with intellectual capacity  available but rusty.  A.I. needs to be re-formatted, with different values imbedded, but it’s the humans who need it most urgently.

A United World, not just Nations.  No more sports competitions; more barn raising bees.  A long period of engineering climate change, and helping refugees everywhere.

The Earth is large and there is space for everyone.  Sharing is the magical word, and mutual respect.  Elevating “our civilization,”  “our race,”  “my family” and “me” over others  has  led us to the current deadly impass, in my opinion.  Pollyanna thinking?  What do you suggest?