War and Peace (not the book)...

If you are my age (68) or thereabouts, you probably remember the song by Edwin Starr that contained this lyric:
"War! What is it good for?  Absolutely nothin'."

Great song.  Easy to see why the lyrics spoke to a generation of young people ready for the war in Vietnam to be over and done with.  Surely singing about no more war is much easier than actually putting an end to war.

However, given our nation's involvement in a couple of continuing wars...that seem to have been going on...like, forever...peace-in-place-of-war seems as urgent today as it did in 1970 (when Starr's record was released).

There are no doubt many reasons for war.  I would guess that most of those reasons are just silliness...and vengeance...and aggression...and nastiness.  There may be a time and a situation when war is none of those things.  There may be.  But then again...

Peace must really be hard to achieve.  We achieve is so seldom.  Oh, we achieve an end to hostilities, but achieving peace is a whole other thing.  And it must be really hard to achieve.  Maybe war is easier.

I wish war wasn't so easily resorted to by peoples and nations.  I wish peace was pursued as vigorously as war...I doubt that it is.

I remember Jimmy Carter saying that, "War may sometimes be a necessary evil.  But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good."

And, the very next time our country is ready to do the easy thing, instead of the hard thing...I hope somebody plants this sign smack in front of the place where such decisions are made...