Originally posted by: daishi5
Yes, lets drop all the weapons, then we can have a society just like it was meant to be, where the weak fear the strong, and a gang of thugs can only be opposed by a larger gang of thugs.
I just don't understand how you can expect removing all weapons to make the world a better place. Do you really believe that all of society has advanced to some point where we can just throw all the weapons away, and no one will take advantage of the weak?
This of course ignores the premise of the "Imagine" song - this imagined world would also be devoid of gangs or thugs. With no greed or lust for power, with peace and cooperation as your main goals in life, why form gangs in the first place?
Originally posted by: manowar821
Originally posted by: Jeff7
Originally posted by: CrackRabbit
It's a great idea that everyone could live in peace, but as soon as you realize that Lennon was as high as a fucking kite when he wrote it you know that it could never happen.
Theodore Roosevelt had it right with; "Tread softly but carry a big stick." Strive for peace, but know that sometimes you have to bring out the big stick and whack some moron upside the head with it.
It sucks that some people start thinking, "I have a big stick. It'd be a shame for it to go to waste; I need to find an excuse to hit someone."
And with that short post, Jeff7, you've described our foreign policy.
Sad too, isn't it?
It's quite visible too with recent advances in war machines. The F-22 Raptor is a very sophisticated piece of engineering, and it's also quite expensive, somewhere around $137M each. It'd sure be a
shame for them to never see combat. Hey Russia, feel like starting something? Are ya chicken? Buk buk buk-awk!
We are an often-self-proclaimed "intelligent" and "civil" species, yet we spend trillions of dollars a year just on finding new ways of killing each other, and on ways of preventing deaths from similar methods being sought elsewhere. Our history's eras are almost entirely defined by conquests or wars. Sprinkled lightly throughout are the signs of progress: The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and now the "Information Age." But far more often, the delineations come from power-hungry leaders or governments irresponsibly wielding tools of destruction for selfish gain or other petty reasons, which tend to amount to "We like your dirt better than ours, and your lives are worth less than that dirt."
And then when there
is war, we employ various tactics to make it easier to kill others of our own species. We vilify the enemy, to make them appear somehow less than human. It's made so that they aren't seen as human, they are only
evil. Then our side, the "good" side, can do no wrong, since we're fighting evil. It's just a façade though; in the end, it boils down to people killing other people.
"Oh, they're different than us, they come from a different continent or a different country!" It's said as if it should make the killing easier, or somehow justify it in a single sentence. A different continent is just another large lump of rock on this planet. Countries are even more superficial - imaginary lines drawn arbitrarily on the planet for mere purposes of logistics, a way of making it easier to manage large groups of people. Then emotions get attached to these imaginary lines in the dirt, and people on one side somehow start to think that theirs is better than the side opposite.
For a "civil" and "enlightened" species, our violent, self-destructive legacy is a profoundly sad, pathetic, and embarrassing one.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross." - Dwight Eisenhower
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