Julien Bryan , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, endorses the keeper’s lament that when it comes to the slaughter of women and children, war is messier than school shootings since it splinters up so much real estate.
Both, however, require cultures that have permitted conditioning by the likes of the military-industrial-complex or the NRA, where the loss of innocent lives is accepted as essential to private profit making.
The international juggle of weaponry now ongoing is like a shopping spree in the world’s killing supermarket, where the only constraint is to tread carefully where the fused end-of-the-world cannon fodder is stored.
The keeper and his ilk remember the evil overhead whispering of outgoing artillery, and the swish-bang of direct-fire incoming as the routine sounds of their man-to-man war in the Korean mountains.
As absurd and miserable as it was, or as any war is, adding the desperate screams of wounded mothers and their dying children would have been too much.
