Those who live by the sword may not actually swing it.  They may live long after those who died from using it but they often revisit the scene and. like veterans of Pearl Harbor, they gather and reminisce.  But those who live by the sword and do not use it - letting others exult in its shine and deadliness, often get together and see if they cannot keep its mythology alive and warm themselves in reflected glory.

The war mongers among us are quite sure they were right.  They were mostly of the right but the left did not want to be left and enough came along to legitimize invasion of Iraq for fallacious reasons.  Now what is left is the right declaring that despite being wrong, they were right all along despite evidence piling up along with the rising death toll of those who were not given enough swords or the means to keep them sharp.

We keep on hearing about the wars in our glorious past.  There are those who reenact special parts of the Civil War carrying muskets, wearing uniforms and playing dead amidst the firing of bogus cannons and blank bullets.  There are Renaissance “Fairs” where lances take the place of swords and the adept on horses thunder at each other to unhorse the obviously deserving loser.

Think of it.  We all love a good war movie and history story complete with all the characters and effects of the times when men were men and so forth.  We are all recidivists – we come back to the scene and try to figure out why men fought so fully to achieve so little.  You can go to see where Custer made his last stand and visit the graves in France but we cannot praise enough those whose lives were snuffed out, many of them who had no chance to unsheathe their swords.

I am named for an uncle in WWI who died, not on the field of battle but who enlisted to fight for America and died of the Flu here in the good Old U.S. of A.

We are all recidivists for we have never learned that war is Hell. Those of us, of the timid variety, never open our mouths to be heard among the rhetoric and cries of the war jingoists who think it is a great idea to defuse the violence in our young men who would turn on each other so, direct their energy far away.

Then, the next step by these “patriots” is to become old warriors who talk a lot more about the great battles of those wars they favored and worked so hard to send you and me to fight for them.  I am too old now and cannot lift that sword anymore. I worry about my sons who have given me grandsons – they are the young.