Written by Andor Carnes   

Opinion –From the Chair- Whose loved ones will be collateral damage:

In response to: “How We Learn To Kill” By Timothy Kudo, New Your Times 27 February 15

In our societies we want the easy answer or to take the path of least difficulty, when it comes to understanding the complexities of protecting what and those we hold dear.

Most, even most of those who perpetuate it, do not want violence and war. However, it is always a possible outcome in the progression of action for protecting anyone from those who would take all they have, including life.

The truth is that conflict is simply crossed purposes, and humans do not handle it well because survival instincts are always higher than fairness and empathy. It has been this way from oral history times, and shows no tendency to actually change to either better or worse in proportion to the population. It is our nature to survive, and that is more powerful than humanism on a grand scale.

From an armchair, we comment on the horrors of killing, which are indeed horrific at any level, any time and anywhere. Yet, from that “chair”, even if we were on the front line and have returned to the chair, it is not always easy to see why we had to kill, and of course, as will always be with killing, it is not always necessary or unavoidable. The other immutable truth is that if we are alright with losing everything we have and also being killed, then we simply do not have to kill.

The sniper is a marvelous microcosm of the problem. That is why they stir such controversy. From the “chair” it seems so simplistic; we are being too aggressive. That usually means that the speaker does not empathize with the mother’s son or daughter who will eventually be killed or maimed by the actions of the sniper’s target. In other words, from the “chair” we lose the understanding of “preemptive” to save lives.

From the “chair”, we act as though it is our fault that the enemy has placed themselves in this position. Any sniper will likely tell you that people never thank them for the lives they saved. From the “chair” we tend to only concentrate on the easy thing to see, the hard decisions they made and the lives they took.

It is hard from the “chair” to reconcile any violence because all violence has the potential, and indeed the reality, for horrific collateral damage. Every terrorist who is killed had a family. Everyone they killed did as well. The calculus we live with is basically whose loved ones are going to be collateral damage. That has never changed through all of time.

We open our mouths, specifically easy from the “chair”, and pretend it is not as simple as human nature playing out for whose loved ones and lives become damaged, ours or theirs. When this is denied, and the process is seen as logical and just either way, we lose the needed sight of the real goal, the conflict must be diminished for both sides’ innocents. We need to get our brains out of the “chair” and start caring equally for both sides before we will ever affect the wheel upon which we all spin.