War often causes arbitrary actions, cruelty, suffering, hate, enmity, sadness to the parties involved and tends to weaken our sense of humanity.
I remember an American woman on TV, protesting the gulf war. “I don’t want to lose my son, nor do I want other loving mothers to lose theirs. I don’t want my son to be educated to believe that killing loved sons of other mothers is right.”
This mother’s cry that could soften a stone, couldn’t melt, move the hearts of Kreshna* and all the warring leaders of the world to stop the “Bharata-yudha”** war.
And I asked myself whether there’s a loving wife who ever wants to lose her husband. Even though a father’s hailed as a hero, could a child be happy and proud of his father while he knows that his father killed many fathers and is causing sadness to their children and their mothers? There’s no girl who could be happy and proud, realizing that her darling is killing some dearest honey of another girl, wishing her unhappiness, as she never wishes such a fate herself. More over, who ever wants to lose his life in compulsory military service in the event of war?
But not all military personnel behaved badly.
Once during the Japanese occupation, when we were still small children playing, chatting, having fun in the garden, a Japanese man in civil clothing came along and asked politely whether he could join the lively, spirited party, for seeing us gay and happy, he remembered his own children and his wife in Japan. Isn’t he also a victim of war, as he is forced to be separated from his family? How many more, does war divide people from their beloved. And I think of the soldiers who could never return home as happy birds returning to their nests.
* Hindu God
**Hindu war in the Mahabharata
From Jayakarta, 31 July 1992
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