Slow learners

“It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.”  Robert E. Lee

Napoleon. Caesar. Grant. Lee.

D-Day. The Trojan Horse. The fate of Pharaoh’s army in the midst of the Red Sea.

Now we can add Putin, Kyiv, Kharkiv to that list.

Make room in the history books, there’s a new war in town.

And when it comes to war, either we’re dishonest or painfully slow learners.

That we’re slow learners is pretty obvious. Our problem-solving skills aren’t much improved over the Assyrians’, even if our weapons are.

As for being dishonest… Can we, at least for a moment, admit that war has us in its grip. Unchecked violence; uninhibited cruelty; mindless destruction – like nothing else they hold our attention; seize our imagination. Draw us in like vultures to carrion.

We’re held in thrall by the romance of war, the thrill of heroic violence. We can’t imagine a world without it – why else “Star Wars,” Darth Vader dolls and our fondness for Klingons? How else to explain our morbid fascination with all things Nazi; Civil War re-enactors; and the Pentagon budget?

“They say ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace,” wrote the prophet three millennia ago, “Are they ashamed of the abomination they have committed? No, they have no shame at all. They do not even know how to blush.”

I – all of us – have live our lives with war, though for almost all hereabout, it’s been a far-off thing. Just words in the newspaper. Images on TV. Something to talk about when we’ve covered football and the weather.

I was born into war in Korea. Grew up with war in Vietnam. Watched the tanks roll into Kuwait and Iraq. Lived for decades with the nagging violence in Afghanistan. In the meantime I watched the troops land in Panama and Grenada – yeah, let’s not forget how we invaded Grenada to make nutmeg safe for democracy. We sent Marines to Lebanon, bombed the hell out of the Balkans and damn near got into an atomic melee over Cuba.

And even when American soldiers weren’t involved, there was always fighting going on somewhere in the Middle East, in Africa or some steamy Asian jungle.

War, it seemed, even when Americans were fighting it, was always far away – something that happened in places hot and dusty or hot and damp, involving people who neither looked nor lived like us.

Until now.

Kyiv looks a lot like Minneapolis. The refugees look like they could be boarding Amtrak. There is snow on the ground and the blood in the snow is the blood of white people, shed by white people.

We’re not used to that.

Wars we’re used to. But not wars fought in places we imagine the Easter Bunny might stop, among people who might be on Santa’s gift list. We’ve grown accustomed to minarets toppled, mosques set ablaze – but with Christians huddled in churches in fear of the violence of other Christians, well, we really don’t know who to pray for…there aren’t even godless commies to give us theological, much less political, direction.

The war is 5,000 miles away, but if war came to Milwaukee, it would likely look a lot like this.

I’d like to think this might make some sort of difference, but, we are, after all, slow learners. We’ll replace the rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter slogans with blue and yellow Facebook memes, huff in outrage to one another and swear off Russian vodka in our Sunday brunch bloodies, then get back to business as usual.

And if the war grinds on, we’ll get used to that, too.

Three thousand years ago, Jeremiah knew us well.

All too well.