In the words of Abraham Maslow, "To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." Likewise, to a country with an unnatural love for anything that goes bang, boom or zap and an addiction to conflict resolution through violent means, every problem we encounter looks like something to be resolved through bloodshed. Our insatiable appetite for violence manifests itself on the personal level in our disturbing rates of homicide and other violent crime, and on the institutional level in our complete inability to avoid warfare for more than a few years at a time if we're lucky. We seek to vanquish all opposition rather than working to settle our differences.
Curiously, or perhaps not, as a nation we are at once intensely religious, overwhelmingly Christian and extremely bellicose. Combining these attributes would tend to suggest that we desperately seek to honor and please the Prince of Peace with a mounting body count of God's precious children. While this seems absurd, if we look a bit deeper we may find a plausible explanation. Religion concerns itself with human decency, charity and compassion. It has been a powerful catalyst in getting people to give generously of themselves and help one another throughout the world. However, religious fundamentalism is all too often aligned with brutality and ruthlessness. As we are much more inclined toward fundamentalism than other post-industrial nations, this may shed some light on the paradox of claiming to be such a Christian nation while so often doing the opposite of what Jesus stood for and taught us.
Firing missiles, dropping bombs, and deploying combat troops is not the answer to every problem. When the Cold War ended, we were told that the days of excessive military spending would be gone and we would enjoy the new found prosperity of the "peace dividend." Needless to say, we squandered this windfall as the ne'er-do-well idiot son would blow through an inherited fortune because we simply can't resist armed conflict whenever something in the world displeases us. We are now debating whether or not to send more troops into Afghanistan and whether we should expand the war into Pakistan. Let me state clearly that the U.S. armed forces have been a tremendous source for good in the world, and when the job calls military intervention there is simply none better. The question at hand is whether or not military force is the right tool for the job. Yes, terrorists must be stopped by whatever means are at our disposal, but the war on terror simply can't be prosecuted in the same way as all prior wars. Our enemy wears no uniform and defends no flag. As the war of ideas is a central front in this campaign, hearts and minds are of paramount importance. Guns, bombs and so forth can kill flesh and blood beings and destroy brick and mortar structures, but they lack the ability to destroy or incapacitate ideas. There is a time to use a driver and a time to use a pitching wedge. Confusing the two will lead to a most unsatisfactory result.
