Doves Have No Talons and Neither Do I

by pissed off patricia

What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I feel sorry for the injured, unarmed man who was shot in the head by the US Marine? Shouldn't I be able to say, like so many others have, well hell, they killed our soldiers with booby traps, etc. This was just one more death in a war. What the hell?

I can't see it that way. When both sides believe that what they're fighting for is right, how can either side be wrong and how can you justify either side's deaths. Could I be a soldier? Not a good one. I wonder what I would do holding a big assed gun and pointing it at another human being. I would be expected to shoot this person because they have a different point of view than I do? I'm not even sure I could pull the trigger on the big assed gun if the enemy was pointing a like weapon at me. Like an idiot, I would try to emotionally reason with this enemy. And I would probably wind up a corpse, but I would be a corpse who had never killed another human being.

Yes, I am adamantly pro-choice. And no, that isn't in opposition to my dovish attitude toward war. I believe until a fetus is able to live outside the mother's body it is just that, a fetus, not an independent human being. I also believe there is more to birth and life than exiting a womb. There is the life outside the womb and for some babies, that's a hell unto itself. Far too many people have children for far too many wrong reasons. Giving birth to a full term baby is not something you should do on a whim. It's much too big a responsibility to take it casually. Trust me, I know what it's like to be born into a family that never ever would have passed a “are you fit and prepared to care for a child” test.

So again, what the hell is wrong with me that I cannot get my war self on? Why can't I cheer for the home team and be blind to the injuries and deaths of the other team? Is that the difference between hawks and doves? Doves don't have talons but hawks do. Doves also are eaten by hawks. I've seen it happen in my yard. I cursed the hawk even though I knew in its natural world it had to have food to survive. I cried for the dove as it was tightly clutched in the hawks talons and staring at it's own death. See, even though I felt emotions for both the dove and the hawk, I didn't see a villain. I saw life's natural but necessary ugly side of survival.

War appears to be life's ugly side too. But unlike the hawk and the dove, I don't believe it to be a part of the natural world. I can't feel this war was necessary. It goes against my nature to see death through competition. Whether it's cock fights or dog fights or war, it's competitive killing. Death has so many avenues, so many ways to reach us, so many natural and unnatural soldiers carrying out its own mission. Why do we have to recruit and create more by declaring war upon our fellow human beings?


Maybe that's what's wrong with me. Maybe I'm so perplexed because I feel that life is too precious to spend any part of it killing. Maybe that's the way it feels when you have no talons.