The Inevitability Of War - That's Mine! Say Children, Countries, Everybody, So Man Up

Mary Longstreet sat in the park with two of her neighborhood friends, watching over their young children playing in the sand. One, Rosa Perkins' little boy, was pushing a toy dump truck towards the hole he had dug, and was about to fill it with a load of sand when Mary's boy grabbed it, shouted, 'Mine! and started digging his own highway.  The Perkins' boy looked at his truck, now at the other end of the sandbox, turned to his mother and howled. 

Mary jumped up, held her boy by the shoulders and said, 'Toys are for sharing, Jason'. 

The boy, standing defiant with long strands of snot dangling from his nose and a face turned a splotchy red, said, 'But truck mine!; and so it was that the great, true, forever drama of territorial ownership was played out in the playground of Turtle Park. 

Both mothers had done their best to train their children to share - not only as a way to avoid playtime issues but because the future of the world depended on it.  They were committed, longstanding progressives, who were dedicated to compromise, consideration, negotiation, and the settlement of disputes through generous understanding. Theirs was a responsibility not only to raise kind, compassionate children, but to add their bit to world peace. 

The little Longstreet boy, despite his mother's words which, although delivered kindly without a trace of anger and only with a pleading resort to reason and understanding or because of their Christmassy, smiling delivery fell on deaf ears.  When his mother had returned to her bench, apologizing profusely to the mother of the victim, Jason looked up from his digging, eyed a toy bulldozer, and headed towards it. 

It was an endless battle to keep harmony at home.  Her son and daughter fought over the size of food portions, who was served first, and who was more favored.  Her older daughter was smarter because she was older, but her younger son Jason was stronger because he was a boy and they fought to parity.  She tricked him, fooled him, lied to him, and calmed him with false promises.  He bullied her, emptied her drawers and threw all her neatly folded clothes on the floor, while she tried to hit him in the face. 

He stopped emptying and throwing, pushed his sister with a hard shove onto the floor, which sent her screaming downstairs to her mother. 

At no time in the history of human settlements has it been any different.  Cultural differences may mitigate this territorial imperative, this claiming of 'mine!', this angling for dominance and favor, but they never amount to a hill of beans. 

Nowhere on the social phylogenetic scale from playpen to family to school, society, region, and nation has this particular imperative ever changed.  Whether the assault of Jason Longstreet on the sand box dump truck of the little Perkins kid to the Nazi blitzkrieg, the hegemonic expansionism of the Soviet Union, Russia's attack on Ukraine, the United States' assault on Iran, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, and a thousand other major and minor wars everywhere, the lesson is the same.  Human beings are all the same and always will be. 

Deep in the African rainforest and Amazonian jungle tribes have always been killing each other for hunting, grazing, and growing rights.  Mungo Park, English explorer of Africa in the late 18th century wrote in his journals about the continual tribal raids, cannibalism, slavery, and brutality. Neanderthals fought each other with the jawbones of wild animals.  The first Paleolithic human settlements were defensive redoubts. 

 

After their children had been put to bed, Mary Longstreet told her husband of the events in the park. 'What's a mother to do?' she said over a sink of soapy dishwater to her husband, in BBQ apron and dishcloth drying. 

Bob Longstreet worked for a small non-profit organization, Physicians for Social Progress which was dedicated to assuring a better, more verdant, peaceful, and harmonious world.  He was a good progressive who, despite millennia of history,  the perennial, assured, armed conflicts which had characterized every decade, and the aggressive territorialism happening at every level of society, believed that only if we tried harder, peace and harmony would be at hand. 

The spat on the playground was particularly hard for him to handle. He and his wife had done everything in their power to avoid this seemingly inevitable battle of wills between children.  They had read them only the most peace-affirming books, allowed them to watch only the most congenial, accommodating television programs, never used demeaning or abusive language, and avoided any discussion of war, violence or civil dissension.  Their home was to be an asylum from the harsh world outside and would be the moral and ethical center of their children's lives. 

To their chagrin their son was the cause of a fracas that was not supposed to happen.  Their boy was to be the one to offer the olive branch, to mediate, to share, and to compromise; and here he was the bully of Turtle Park. 

'We must redouble our efforts' Bob said to his wife, but how?  They had swept every nook and cranny of their family life clean of contention and dispute.  Bob and his wife shared the housework, shared the child care, never raised their voices, were always kind and considerate to each other, showed tolerance, consideration, and love at every turn; so there was little else to reform or reconfigure to make the child's environment more congenial. 

The next day Mary took the children back to the park and urged Jason to act like a gentleman, to share, and to be nice to other children; yet no sooner had the boy deployed his sack of toys, that he began to canvas the sandbox for likely prey, eyed a firetruck, and honed in.  He grabbed it, trotted over to an empty quarter of sand and started to play with it.  The victim, startled at the pillage, watched his firetruck disappear, looked around for his mother, and started to wail. 

Mary Longstreet who had seen only the end of the affair but put two and two together - the bawling boy and her hyperactive son with a firetruck not his own - and realized that the unthinkable had happened again. 

She jumped up, left her knitting, excused herself, and ran over to Jason who was using the truck as a battering ram for the line of cars he had assembled in convoy.  Once again, she hugged her son, squatted down and explained to him proper behavior, and asked him to return the truck to its rightful owner. 

'No', shouted Jason. 'Mine!', and at that moment the whole house of cards came tumbling down.  It was not just that her son had behaved unconscionably, but it suggested something far worse.  If she and her husband, the best intentioned of all parents could have produced a child with this level of antisocial hostility, what did that mean for society higher up the phylogenetic scale?

There is nothing new in this scenario. Progressive families everywhere are dutifully trying to reshape the native impulses of their children, deny their hardwired human nature, and make them into Utopian models of kindness and virtue. 

To no avail, of course.  Such idealism and willful denial of reality only produces offspring ill-equipped to make their way in a world exactly the opposite to what they have been told.  It is the Jasons of the world - the refusers, the square pegs - who are the fittest. 

Bob Longstreet moped to work the next day - one in which bombs were blowing up Tehran, Tel Aviv, Doha, Bahrein, and Kiev; where Tuareg militants were raiding Malian military outposts in Mopti and Timbuktu, ISIS was consolidating hegemony in the Sahara with Genghis Khan savagery, and the Chinese were moving to eliminate Uighur nationalism once and for all. 

'Give peace a chance' was the motto inscribed over the door of Bob's office, John Lennon's honeymoon ode written with Yoko Ono, but was ironically reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain's naive overtures to Adolf Hitler, 'a man who would give peace a chance if given the opportunity'.  

Winston Churchill, leader, politician, historian knew better - not only about the imminent threat of Germany but the Soviet Union.  Force must be met with force, he said, the Battle of Britain was engaged and won, warnings and alerts about Communist hegemony were posted, and the post-war era began. 

Bob shook off his doubts, shuffled the papers on his desk, buzzed for his aide de camp and began the meeting on stopping Donald Trump's adventurism. 

What Bob and his colleagues missed was the formation of the new Machiavellian triumvirate of Russia, China, and the United States - adversaries on the surface, but likeminded nationalist powers.  Finally the United States had jettisoned its moral exceptionalism, its conditional war strategy and its hearts and minds philosophy and gotten real.  The world order was finally and once again solidly based on the principle of countervailing power. 

 

Bob tried his best to gin up enthusiasm for his campaign to dethrone the King Of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he knew he was facing strong headwinds.  The world was changing, the European and American dalliance with socialism was over, and a hardline nationalism was resurgent.  That, and his own son was becoming a mini-Trump. 

'What's the world coming to?',  he lamented, but retreated perhaps for the last time into his congenial, warm and accommodating world - until he opened his son's pre-school report card.  'Jason needs to work on his interpersonal skills...', gobbledygook for disruptive behavior and deeply anti-social tendencies but clear enough. 

All the smarmy, feelgood, considerateness and forced social niceties were to be left on the curb, a new leaf was to be turned over, some rigor, discipline, and proper intimidation were to replace the Neville Chamberlain hopefulness; and before he knew it the new child-rearing paradigm made sense for Physicians for Social Progress; but since the institution was now long set in its vaporous ways, it was time for him to move on. 

Now a pariah - dunned from the PTA, the park, his own living room, and the professional community of which he had for so long been a part, and a Trump admirer - Bob Longstreet's days were numbered; but right will always out, he found a place in the new Washington, Jason met his match in the sandbox.