The Stench of Death

When you see someone die, it leaves no doubt. It's not like television or movies, they don't stay warm, their skin immediately yellows, their extremities swell and overall, they become quite obviously lifeless. There is no romance, no songs of the past. They simply slip off this mortal coil and retreat into the nothingness from which they came.

When you see this you learn, every life has value. There is no promise of a supernatural afterlife taking you to infinity. It's all bullshit. When you die, you simply stop living. That is the end we all face. When you finally understand it perhaps you will see that life, every moment of it, is invaluable. Every moment, for every one of us. When some say that one must suffer to save the lives of many, at that moment, at that utterance, life loses all value. For if one must die for ten, then ten must die for one hundred, and one hundred must die for one thousand. And so on.

Either life, in and of it's self, has value, or it doesn't.

Any war is nothing but a series of these choices. Choices made by men who have no skin in the game. Men who congratulate themselves on preserving the greater good, while having the power to ignore the lives they sacrifice.

War ends when we choose to stop answering it's call. Not before.