August 10, 2007
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belonging
Why are wars really fought?
I believe, as much as they are fought for wealth and influence, as much as they are fought for glory and honor, as much as they are fought for power and privilege, as much as they are fought for pride and anger, as much as they are fought for faith and loyalty and love, as much as they are fought for all these things and more there is one thing for which wars are fought that trumps them all.
Belonging.
Every soldier who ever made that decision to lay down their lives, to give over their freedoms to a military heirarchy, to become a cog in the wheel of the greater military machine, or to commit atrocities on behalf of that machine, did so, in part, because of their need to belong and to defend the things to which they belong. Belonging to a nation, to a religion, to a community, to a culture, to a troop, to a squad, to a family, to a nation. Many soldiers find that before they joined the military, they didn’t know what it meant to belong to anything or they didn’t realize how precious a feeling belonging to something can be, and how far they were willing to go to protect that thing.
To belong! A thing to which you can relate. A group to which you can feel kinship, loyalty, and respect. To feel that being a part of this thing, is a reason that you exist, is a purpose for which you were placed here on this planet, at this time. A people for which you feel an affinity, a similarity, a resonance. As if they are as much a part of you as you are of them. A place where you can feel at peace, happy, and wholly yourself. Where you have no secrets and feel no shame and are surrounded ever and always by love.
Yes, we’d kill for that.
Yes.
We’d die for that.
Life too is a constant war for belonging. We may not always use guns or explosives to fight it, but we fight it all the time. We struggle and choose, one life over another, one moment over another, each time striving to find something, anything, however small, to which we can say that we belong. And when we find it, finally, a thing to which we belong? We will move heaven and earth to keep that thing! To be apart of it for even a moment longer, to let it last a second more, no sacrifice is not worth making, no risk not worth taking. We wont let it go easily. It is truly a beautiful and terrible thing to behold how far human beings are willing to go to hold on to or to obtain a thing worth belonging to.
In wars, we devastate the world around us for the sake of belonging. In our own lives, we only devastate ourselves for the very same reason. It is possible, very possible, to want something too much, or to fight too hard to be apart of something, and to suffer as a consequence.
Is there another way? Do we want there to be another way? The struggle for belonging is such an integral part of the human experience. It completes us. It makes our lives bigger than ourselves. I don’t think we would ever want to give that up. Nor should we.
But perhaps we should always just make sure that whatever else we choose to belong to, we always remember to belong as much to ourselves.
