Charlie Brown, Lucy, and War

I give Charlie Brown a lot of credit, he really tries hard to kick that ball. Granted he’s foolish for trusting Lucy to hold it for him when she’s lied to him EVERY SINGLE TIME, but he’s a trusting individual and he really wants to show what he can do.

And Lucy always has the best excuses. Well, maybe they’re not the best excuses, but they’re what Charlie Brown wants to hear.

All right, let’s face it, Lucy’s mean for constantly making Charlie Brown fall for the same old trick, and Charlie Brown is stupid for falling for it over and over. More than stupid, there is some egotism involved that urges Charlie Brown to believe her. There is something deep in his psyche that makes him want to believe.

But for all of Charlie Brown’s shortcomings, he is the one to pay for his folly. He comes charging up to kick the ball, Lucy pulls it away, and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Time after time. You’d think he’d learn, but he never does.

As George W. Bush once tried to say: fool me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me. At some point you have to stop feeling sorry for Charlie Brown, although you never have to stop blaming Lucy for her behavior. At some point Charlie Brown has to wise up. At some point you have to call him a blockhead for trusting someone who’s fooled him countless times.

Now imagine what we would think of Charlie Brown if each time he fell for Lucy’s prank, people died. Imagine if he went to kick that ball, Lucy pulled it away, and little children got blown into bloody chunks. How tolerant would we be of Charlie Brown then?

Because that’s what is happening, over and over again. Every time a nation gears up for war, it (Lucy) prepares its population (Charlie Brown) by telling it anything necessary to get it to go along.

There are many reading this who remember the Gulf Of Tonkin incident. It was an alleged attack on a U.S. ship by the North Vietnamese that President Johnson used as a pretext for escalating our involvement in Vietnam. Except it never happened. Lucy, dressed as Johnson, held the ball for us, the American public, and we charged. Only when she pulled the ball away 58,220 of us died, far more scarred for life by a war that shouldn’t have been. Oh, and if we count the suffering of non-Americans, a million men, women and children more died, a country defoliated, and generations of suffering ensued.

Fast forward to the First Gulf War. Babies were being ripped out of incubators and thrown to the floor to die, said Lucy, posing as a nurse who had actually witnessed such things. Except she wasn’t and it didn’t happen, but we all fell for it and fell flat on our back. Fortunately, few people died in the ensuing war, less than a hundred and fifty. Well, unless you count Iraqis, in which case tens of thousands died, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of later sanctions, not to mention the deaths caused by depleted uranium used by us. But we don’t have to worry about depleted uranium, Lucy said so.

How about the time Lucy dressed up as Colin Powell and started talking about chemical labs being transported on trains and trucks around Iraq? Boy we sure were going to clobber the ball that time, weren’t we? We’ve gotten up and moved on from that incident but people are still killing and dying because of our naivete. What has it been, now, 14 years? It’s hard to keep track, especially since Lucy’s been keeping us occupied with her old games since then.

Remember Libya and how we were going to help them? This is what it looks like today.This is what happens when we let Lucy sweet talk us. Shame on you, Lucy, shame on us.

And yet we go on with our lives as though nothing has happened. And Lucy now holds the ball for us and somehow we’ve all forgotten our entire history with her. But it’s not cute and it’s not funny because people die. And while we try to pass the blame by saying it’s not our fault, we are responsible. Charlie Brown had issues, but they were almost endearing. We have issues and it’s costings millions of lives. It’s costing people their limbs and their health and their sanity. The billions of dollars we spend on war is money taken from those who do not have enough to eat, do not have a decent education. Hell, we can’t even afford drinking water for Flint. But Lucy is sweet-talking us, and what she says appeals to a weakness within us.

I’ll tell you what that weakness is. We are lazy cowards. Working for peace is hard work and can even be dangerous. Look what happened to Martin Luther King.  So instead we permit the government to make our decisions for us, so that we don’t have to be responsible. We fear in moments of crisis to stand alone against the herd and speak against the popular narrative. We wish to blend in, not make waves, or else shout loudly as one in the crowd. We prattle on about peace all the while acquiescing to the warmongers.

We don’t want a nation of the people, by the people, for the people, because then we the people might have to make adult decisions and that idea terrifies us. Better to listen to someone else, even if in our heart of hearts we know that that someone else is lying, has always lied.

This is the road that leads to fascism. Fascism is the bending of the individual’s will to the state, to power, to war. That is our fate if we do not choose our course for ourselves, if we continue to listen to the seductive lies Lucy speaks.

Governments don’t demand peace, people do. If we ever want peace, it’s up to us as human beings to create it. We cannot leave it up to our governments, because they will always insist the way to peace is through war. How many more times will we let the ball pulled away from us? Because when we fall flat on our back, people die.