Once our self-hatred reaches the point of open, mass violence, we ourselves, (disguised as our "Revered Leaders") tell ourselves to look at the festering sore called war and ignore the internal malignancy of our own collective greed that caused it.   "Fight the symptoms," is what our "Revered Leaders" preach.   In blind obedience, we rush to obey.

"Knock down our puppet on his invisible strings," our fearless leaders  sermonize, but they don't tell us that they (our leaders) set up the puppets we are being sent our to destroy.   We stand and say, "Yes sir."   From the puppets on the other side with invisible strings, we hear, "God is on our side."   Together, we kneel and are foolish enough to ask God to join us in committing mass murder against our brothers and sisters.   God is indeed on our side.   In honor of our "Gift of Choice," our prayers are answered.   Mass murder reigns again.

Our so-called enemy prays the same prayer to the same God by a different name.   Like our prayer, his prayers are also answered.   Some how we forget that God is on his side too.

"Kill  in the name of honor, glory, patriotism of some other canned slogan" our "Revered Leaders" continue to belch from their over-stuffed shirts.   "We are the good guys!   See, we've got all the white hats."   Once again we march and scream and chant,  "Kill the bad guys!   Kill the guys in the black hats!"  And we look out there somewhere for the cause of our own disease.  

Nobody stops to realize that there aren't any bad guys.  Nobody realizes that our so called leaders are only mindless little men ridding backwards on big horses.   And there across the invisible divide we spew our anger at a deferent group of mindless followers bowing to the wishes of another group of mindless little men ridding backwards on other big horses.

Those of us who didn't get sent out as cannon fodder, sit at dinner and on our whitewashed, TV news, we watch and hear our generals in field uniforms stand and preach to us about their successes at mass destruction, about expendable humans and body counts.   They wear camouflage uniforms to make us think that they might actually go some place that's dangerous.  

The generals seem to have forgotten that they too were once sent out as cannon fodder.   Or perhaps their unresolved anger at having been so grossly misused has turned them into users, incapable of seeing the absurdity of calling murdering grandmothers and children "Collateral Damage" when, in their anger, they splash the blood and guts of innocent people onto the walls and roofs of their neighbors homes. 

We push up piles of sand in the desert and send our sons out to kill each other in a grotesque form of "King on the Mountain."   We send out mass-death and when we miss the other side's sons and daughters and kill our own children -children who have just turned eighteen, call it "friendly-fire." 

We cut up pieces of colored cloth and sew them together.   We declare the resultant banners to be symbols of freedom and then put other sons and daughters in jail when they act freely, and disrespect our sacred cloth.   We build statues in our parks in honor of those who murdered the most.

We give out medals for the shedding of blood, and medals to those who bleed for our side and do not die --- medals to those who murder someone else's sons and daughters.   We send home medals and flags in place of dead sons and daughters as if, some how, that was a fair exchange.

And each time the explosions stop, we sit in the rubble that used to be "The Garden of Eden" and with poop in our pants we ask, "This is a living hell.   What happened to paradise?"

Oblivious to inevitable future environmental disasters that we have set into motion, we sit on the brink of own extinction and somehow, in our outrage over our "enemy-puppet's" obscenely-violent behavior, we forget to ask,
"Who set him up with stolen, political power?"
"Who originally created all these weapons of death and destruction?"
"Who sold him those weapons for profit?"   
and, above all, we forget to see that we have returned to the starting point, instead of seeing the absurdity, we simply say,
"Now that we've knock this puppet down,
who will we set up next to take his place ?"

Perhaps it's time once again to ask,

"Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?"