Killing is Hard

The best gift a father can get on Father's Day is the absence of his kids. Don't get me wrong its great to see them but even better to know they are off in the world enjoying themselves. So with no commitments and only my needs to consider I started a leisurely Sunday with a trip to the coffee shop. Enjoying my pastry I flicked through the paper trying to remain neutral about the craziness going on in the world and find my way to the sports news.

It was near the back of the Sunday Times I found an article with the headline, 'Killing jihadist fathers is hard.' It was a sympathy piece about the UK operators of drones who complain of stress and fatigue and say they are frustrated by the lack of public recognition for their work. These 'courageous' operators often track a suspect for weeks becoming familiar with their routines and families. 'The familiarity made it hard to kill him' said one of the crew members involved, 'but we did'. 

Are these people sure they want recognition for this work? 

There is a way to avoid the stress of killing people. Stop killing people. If everyone of those stressed killers, on both sides of the religious, ideological and ethnic divides decided to remove the stress of killing from their lives by stopping killing people then things might change a bit.

How naive of me! Aren't those guys playing with their killer drones keeping us safe? Their continual persecution of war must be the only way to peace. Killing lots of people is a sure fire way to make friends. Sure Manchester, London Bridge and Westminster were terrible for those directly affected but is that suffering any different to that experienced by the families of the 300 civilians killed by US led coalition airstrikes in Raqqa in Syria since March?  (Plenty more elsewhere if you think the people of Raqqa had it coming to them).

Someone has to stop the violence first and risk the consequences. We know the psychopathic political and military machine is unlikely to make such a choice so perhaps individuals have to start refusing to dance to the puppet masters tunes. Maybe there will always be someone else willing to do it. Maybe the career in the Airforce is fantastic. Maybe the pension scheme is unmatched. But is it really worth it?

Unfortunately for many we are moving into a time of personal responsibility. Peace is available right here and right now if every individual chose it. The stress these guys experience through killing, however remotely, suggests they have some element of humanity intact. Trying to remove that stress would be to make them inhuman. It's probably too late for those guys to make sense of their actions but I would urge them to simply stop killing people as a first step.

It has to start somewhere, and it is unlikely to start at the top. Time to man up guys and stop fighting. That is where the real courage is.

Love,

Bill