Our Favorite Pastime

There is a group of men

sitting at my coffee shop

talking about war.

They speak with authority.

They speak with an objectivity

born of privilege.

“If we remove the emotional implications of all of this,

I think it will be interesting to see what happens…”

I cannot shake these words from my soul.

Photo by Drew Gilliam on Unsplash

How?

How can you remove the emotion from war?

How can you extract the pain from your heart

caused by the suffering of others?

I know the only way is to remove your whole heart.

“We need to assert our strength…”

For what purpose?

Who doesn’t know about Hiroshima?

Who doesn’t know about drone strikes?

Where in the world has our strength not already been asserted?

These men will never see the battlefield.

They sit comfortably on a fake leather couch and mid century rocking chairs.

War, to them, is just more interesting baseball.

War, to us, is just our favorite pastime.

I believe in just wars,

like I believe in God—

I know they exist, but I have never seen one.