War

Given our country's recent history, war has been a hot topic of conversation for several years now. I know people who have protested all wars and I also know people who call them tree hugging hippies who are just ignorant and naive. Of all the dialogue I have heard on the subject, not much of it has seemed constructive. In fact, much of it seems to miss the point.
To make the issue more complicated, people employ religious beliefs to argue for or against national violence, and many times they use the same religion or even the same religious writing to justify their black or white view of war.
A conversation in a Christian circle might go like this:

"Don't you think Jesus showed us how to deal with violent people who threaten us? Didn't he teach us to not repay violence with violence?"
"Well what about when God commanded for people to be killed and told Israel to go to war?"

And that conversation might last for hours.

Approaching it from this perspective, it can all be pretty confusing, and most people end up on one polarized side of the issue. Regardless of what conclusions we come to about pacifism, aggression or subversive resistance, I think there are some things we can all agree on.
Most of what bothers me about hearing these conversations is that it all seems to easy. It's too easy to say, "War is just necessary sometimes for reasons A B and C. Oh well, people are going to die. That's just how the world works. Those ******** have it coming anyways. They are evil." It's not that the person believes war is necessary sometimes that bothers me. What bothers me is that it's not even something to be taken in with graveness.
I think there are a number of reasons that war is taken so lightly now. One would be the nature of modern warfare and technology. If you ask a veteran of WWII about whether we should go to war, he may say yes and he may say no. What he will not say is, "Eh, who cares? They have it coming. Let's bomb 'em." He will take it seriously because he knows from an up close and personal perspective what killing and death looks and feels like.
People I hear talking about the current wars seem to talk about killing and death nonchalantly. It is a mere side effect of a necessary drug. Or even worse, sometimes it is the drug itself.
Regardless of whether you can justify it in your thinking, I think we will all get a lot farther in discussions of war we first take in the gravity of what it means for the people on both sides of the conflict. We should never treat it as an impersonal string of logic, because we are not staging a philosophical discussion for education or entertainment, we are making decisions with people's lives.