War - Never Vanquished, Ever Seductive
© 2011, Marc E. Brodeur
I have always sensed an uncanny symbiosis with the WWII generation. Actually, I'm a mid-era baby boomer born in 1954. Last night I was watching the A&E presentation about General Eisenhower and the prelude to D-Day. Somehow, I felt an empathy and a presence in that part of history.
I was greatly impressed by the depiction of the Supreme Commander's concern and compassion for the lives which would ransom freedom on the beaches of Normandy. I sensed at least a ghostly share of the heavy weight that he carried. I was also awestruck by the speech he made to the King and Queen of England as he presented the plans for Operation Overlord (I have no idea of the historical accuracy of this scene.) When His Majesty questioned the inevitable carnage that the invasion plans required, General Eisenhower, portrayed by Tom Selleck, reverently acknowledged the human cost of freedom and prognosticated the apocalyptic inevitability [quoted to the best of my recollection], "If they do not offer the sacrifice of their blood now, we will pay dearly with extra gallons later."
So, we find ourselves facing evil once again in 2004. Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are merely Satan's latest personnas. Yet, they are uniquely symptomatic of a deeper disease like festering boils on the dark hindquarters of humanity. The true evil is the ponderous and pervasive hostility, malevolence and hatred that gnaw at the soul of humanity. Like an unrelenting cancer, it seems that jealousy, greed, selfishness, lust, power and fear cannot be destroyed but merely coaxed into ephemeral and mortal remission.
Americans are not any more or less inherently evil than the other six billion hominal inhabitants of this island in the cosmos, but our societal imperfections and failings are too willingly dismissed or arrogantly denied by the self righteous who attribute the greatness and power of our nation to God's approval and blessing.
I see this crusade against the first "ism" of the third millenia much like the fight against the evils of Nazism, Facism, and Communism. The sacrifices that have been and will yet be made in Afghanistan and Iraq are as necessary and tragic as those made on the beaches of Normandy. America is leading the global battle against this contemporay incarnation of evil called "terrorism." Yet, the best we can ever achieve is a stalemate with evil as we futily wrest and subdue our inherent malevolence into dormant and restless hibernation, just as the sacrifices at Normandy and the horrors of the atom bomb did in WWII.
How do we mitigate this manifestly unremitting curse? I wonder. Do we even want to?
