Does Every Generation Need Their Braveheart Moment?
The climatic battle never solves anything. It only leads to the next climatic battle.
In the 1995 movie, Braveheart, Mel Gibson, pays William Wallace a man who several times leads an army of Scotsmen to drive the English out of Scotland. The movie is full of brave men fighting brutal battles for honor and their country. There is also a lot of lust and betrayal. The tides turn several times. There is a lot of gore, including decapitations and torture.
There have been dozens of movies in which good vs evil rises and falls until the final huge battle scene in which men rally around a leader and good vanquishes evil. Other movies involve hobbits, dragons, or superheroes finally rising to the challenge to defeat the evil emperor, king, invader, sociopath, monster, and/or alien.
Sadly, and much more frightening, we are seeing these battles take place IRL. It is happening as I write this in Ukraine, Israel, and probably five other places around the world that don’t get as much press coverage in the US.
The group dynamics of luring young men into battle by appealing to their manhood, bravery, loyalty, and immortality has been going on for 10,000 years. Unfortunately, most of the young men learn the reality, as they feel their heads being chopped off, a bullet passing through them, a bomb causing them to disintegrate, a mine blowing their leg off, or, if they survive, they get to see many of their friends die all around them. The trauma lasts forever.
There are several movies, books, and biographies that show how war is tragic, brutal, and basically useless. However, there are very few, if any that demonstrate a way to resolve a major international, or political problem without battles and bloodshed. I can’t think of any story in which social workers and community activists come together in a long and difficult meeting and successfully determine how everyone can live together without domination or violence. Maybe someone can help me here.
How about something historically real? Everyone knows about Gandhi, Mandela, and King, They were the kind of people I am looking for, but King was often beaten and then assassinated, Mandela was involved in riots and violence before he went to prison, and Gandhi was horrified by the violence between the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, and then he too was assassinated.
It seems humanly impossible to sign the treaty before the war and avoid the violence. The tradition has always been to rally the young men, dehumanize the enemy, and start the killing. The result, as we are seeing clearly in Israel and Ukraine, is more killing. The result is death and suffering all around and grudges remain for generations.
It is now 2023. We have more people who know the real history. We have amazing new technologies. We need new memes that can transform humanity. We need to see social workers, community organizers, and skilled diplomates who recognize the festering problems come together BEFORE the battles start. We all know what the major problems are. There are always solutions that are better than war.
These negotiations should be shown on all the TV networks and all of the social media platforms. They need to consult all of the always-improving Large Language Models to show how wars never solve more problems than they create. They need to use those tools to propose compromises and other diplomatic solutions that the humans involved in the process can improve upon. We need to stop killing all the babies. In that way, I am very pro-life!
That’s what I believe. it’s not very original. I think Jesus had it before me, without the Chatbots.
Great idea, No chance. I don’t think that is what Jim Jordan wants to get through Congress.
Song lyric of the day:
He’s five foot-two and he’s six feet-four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He’s all of 31 and he’s only 17
Been a soldier for a thousand year
He’s a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain
A Buddhist, and a Baptist, and a Jew
And he knows he shouldn’t kill
And he knows he always will
Kill you for me, my friend, and me for you
— — Buffy St. Marie