peace is not the answer

(Originally posted 10/25/2014. So much has changed since then. Wait… nope. Everything is still exactly the same.)

So I’m engaged in a battle of e-mail with some friends of friends right now regarding the war with Muslim extremists, wars in general and why pacifists make me ill. Without going into it too much I guess I’m just wrestling with why being so intellectually dishonest seems to hold such a powerful sway over some people. I know talking about your strong beliefs in ‘peace’ is really an all-you-can-eat buffet of moral superiority and self-aggrandizement, but at the end of the day only folk singers and 13 year old wannabe-poets can really believe any of it. Right?

Then I remembered a gig I did a long time ago with a close friend of mine who is on the complete opposite political spectrum as me. His bass player couldn’t make a show so I filled in for him. I like his music so it was a lot of fun and the show was going well. We come to the last song and he ends with Rockin’ in the Free World by Neil Young. The place goes bananas. We’re thundering out this stinging indictment at about 140 decibels, my balls are swinging like swollen melons between my legs and you can see the panties literally melting off in pools around the legs of the tree-hugging females in the audience. I was passing judgment… I was assessing blame… and all it would take was a touch from my kindler, gentler machine gun hand to bed any of these naïve young ladies. Is this the answer I’m looking for?

There has NEVER been peace. Tens of thousands of years and countless cultures later there has never been peace. Not once. Ever. Do you see a pattern developing here? The bottom line is that people suck. All of us. And it’s not just people. If you take a look around the animal kingdom you’ll find that everybody is eating everybody else they can. Eating and fucking, that’s all the other animals care about. While we worry how our stock portfolio is doing, all the other animals are just sitting there trying to fuck somebody and trying not to get eaten. That’s their busy day. Our reality is one of teeth and hunger and fighting and anger. Animals get it.

Maybe it’s even deeper, this weird denial that so many people live in. Why do we lie to ourselves about what the human race is capable of? We attack our leaders with such rage for being human. What gene pool do you think we get our Senators and business leaders from? The same one where we get the assholes at the mall and the same one where we get the moron at the dry cleaners. We’re all just people… and people suck most of the time. Stop blaming people for being just people. We seem to really hate the most in others the weaknesses we see in ourselves. Show me someone who is enraged at government corruption and I’ll show you someone who lays awake at night thinking about stealing the Little League money to go spring for a blowjob downtown. How many preachers have to be found fondling young boys before we get it?

And these hippie asswipes want to talk about peace?! Peace is a cop-out. Peace means you refuse to actually deal with problems. It says that you don’t want to be held accountable for the way things are… and you refuse to actually be involved in making things better. It’s a ‘get out of jail free card’ for the mentally weak. Everyone is a racist and a sexist and a whatever-else-you-got-ist. We are always going to fight for limited resources… whether that’s oil or the last spare rib at the Chinese buffet.

The problem is nobody likes serious people. Dick Cheney is not getting a lot of ass. We don’t reward pragmatic thinking… we reward bullshit. No girl is going to read this and say “wow, I want a big piece of this asshole.” If I wrote “why can’t we just love each other?” my mail would be littered with overheated girls telling me what a sweet guy I am.

Fuck it. As fun as it was to blast out Neil’s anthem to self-loathing and share in a group delusion for a few moments, the terrible truth is that war is not only the answer … war is the only answer.

And it always will be.

And to those who still believe that the human race will someday all settle down and work together and build a beautiful society where we all get along fine and share everything equally among ourselves … good luck with that.