I would kill someone if i had to, no question about it. It would take extreme circumstances. I would be defending my life or my family or my freedom. It would be unquestionably a last resort. It may seem a little obvious but war is killing and when you agree with a war you are essentially saying by proxy that you are willing to kill over this. You are willing to kill people over the issues at hand. You can characterize it as an act of self-defense, which is fine, but you are still saying that you think this is something we gotta start killing people over.

I say this because I think many people don’t realize the immense responsibility that comes with wielding military power in the world. If we are a moral people we need to keep very close in our minds and hearts that when the US military kills they are doing it with our blessing. You and I are authorizing the violence.

If we separate ourselves from the violence that our military creates, we risk using it far too frivolously. It’s not just the enemy that gets hurt during wars. We are creating a whole new generation of vets with the sometimes deep scars of war to wrestle with the rest of their lives. Worse, dads and moms are not coming home to their young children in home after home across this country, because you and I ordered them over to kill people in Iraq.

We should all be doves, we should all be anti-war just like we are anti-killing. We should use war as a last resort. There are necessary wars, where we would all agree that violence was unavoidable. The US needs to actively work toward a world where there needn’t be necessary wars. We can’t do this when we are ourselves defending and expanding our interests with violence.