Ukraine needs an armistice.
Palestine needs an armistice.
Nagorno-Karabakh needs an armistice.
Syria, Sudan, Nigeria, and so many countries need an armistice.
The U.S. public and its mass shooters need an armistice.
And by armistice I do not mean a pause to re-load. I mean an end to the idiotic madness of mass-murder that risks nuclear apocalypse, an end in order to negotiate a wiser path, a compromise without further killing.
And by negotiate I do not mean You shut up and grovel and do everything I demand or I'll start the murder machine back up. By negotiate I mean How can we find a solution that respects everyone's concerns and allows us to move toward the day we can put this conflict behind us? Negotiating is the opposite of easy. It's much easier to blow stuff up.
The world's weapons dealer, the arsenal of dictatorships and so-called democracies alike, can move wars toward armistice and negotiation very powerfully, by halting the flow of weapons.
You wouldn't hand a mass shooter more bullets while asking him to stop shooting.
Nor should our demands of the U.S. government be limited to imploring it to speak in favor of a ceasefire while shipping over more mountains of free weaponry paid for by you and me, the proud, overly proud residents of the one wealthy nation that can't do healthcare or education or retirement or infrastructure because it only cares about war.
We need a global armistice.
And we need more than that.
We need a society in which it is acceptable to say that, in which saying that doesn't make you a treasonous servant of various enemies.
We need the sort of society that celebrates Armistice Day as it was created, not as it was transformed into Veterans Day. Armistice Day was a day of ending a war and hoping to end all war making, of imagining that the world had now seen something so awful that it would not allow it to be repeated, of supposing that the peace that would be negotiated at Versailles would not be horribly mangled into effectively a guarantee of World War II. Armistice Day was a day of committing to work for an end to all war.
Exactly at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918, people across Europe suddenly stopped shooting guns at each other at least in Europe; they continued for weeks in Africa. Up until that moment, they were killing and taking bullets, falling and screaming, moaning and dying, from bullets and from poison gas. And then they stopped, at 11:00 in the morning. They stopped, on schedule. It wasn't that they'd gotten tired or come to their senses. Both before and after 11 o'clock they were simply following orders. The Armistice agreement that ended World War I had set 11 o'clock as quitting time, a decision that allowed 11,000 more men to be killed, injured, or missing we might add "for no reason," except that it would imply the rest of the war was for some reason.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
