“When we take a survey of mankind we cannot help cursing the wretch, who, to the unavoidable misfortunes of nature shall wilfully add the calamities of war. One would think there were evils enough in the world without studying to increase them, and that life is sufficiently short without shaking the sand that measures it.”
There is no shortage throughout history of Man’s folly in the pursuit of bloodshed, violence, and destruction. Nearly a century after the “War to End All War’s”, 65 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the “infamous” day that plunged the United States into the Second World War – a war that brought death to tens of millions of people, an unprecedented genocide in prison camps like Auschwitz, and the dawn of the nuclear weapons – we see few signs yet of Man’s collective wisdom overcoming the propensity toward war.
From religious factions, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, sectarian and tribal hatreds, to misguided super-power megalomania-driven foreign policy, the calamities of warfare continue, seemingly unabated. Even while the sands of time wind down on each of our short lives.
Would Thomas Paine see our world today and marvel? Not at the amazing advances of technology, or even the social progress of women’s suffrage and civil rights, but at how little we have come in ending the scourge of war.