Our Service

After reading Manuel Andre's blog post "Saving Private Billy," I started to think about how war and politics is just a big game. Of course this is not always but its happens in a lot of cases. In Slaughterhouse-Five, as an antiwar  book, the author refers to war like that in a lot of times. Mary O'Hare thinks Billy was just a boy in WWII, Billy's son went to Vietnam while young and the book is even known as The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Even though I haven't seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, I can relate with what Manuel says about war, its a Children's Crusade. As he says, people have always had wars, or at least violent conflicts for power. This reminds me of a something my mom was talking about with me a few months ago. We were talking about why a lot of societies have military service or activities men must complete to rise as adults. Other than military service, we talked about indigenous communities in which men must survive in the wilderness alone for some time in order to be considered adults, about the missionary trips male Mormons must carry out when young adults, among other things. My mom brought up the point about that societies do this to reduce the competition of male adults, a very primitive thing. In wolf pack, where the leader males chase away any other adult males, and when their sons or any other male puppy grow up, they must look for another pack or territory, unless they are established as weak omegas. It is obvious that the alfas, or leaders, do this to keep in control and powerful. In a way, as my mom pointed out, civilized humans do the same. It is not as evident in military service, as most wars are fought with a purpose, but in wars a lot of young men travel away, where a lot of them die, leaving the older leaders in command from their homeland with all the women. As I mentioned in a previous blog, luckily this is changing as women now are as powerful as men and can hold positions in the government or join the military. Still, it could be that young men are sent to wars because they are stronger than older people, but it is also because the older people in command rather stay alive and in power. As mentioned throughout the book, war in a lot of times has been a Children's Crusade. In another side, as I said before, many indigenous communities have rite of passage ceremonies where teenager are sent to the forest or jungle to survive. This acts as a system of selection, only the healthy and smart people survive, contributing to the tribe and evolution, but it is also a way of having less competence for the tribe leaders. Although the ones that survive might be more powerful than the elder, the fact that they will be left with less competition from younger males shows how indigenous chiefs, unluckily only males overall, can benefit from this method. At last, this incentive to send people away can be seen in the Mormon religion. I'm not an expert on this topic and one of my few sources, the musical The Book of Mormon, is very biased, so don't take anything I say about this too seriously. When male Mormons grow up, they are sent of in a mission, many times a trip to a remote village in Africa or simply to visit another American state. I don't mean this in a bad way, but given that the way this religion was founded involves a lot of desire for power and that Mormons are polygamists, these missionary trips are a clear example of how men, in a chauvinistic way, get rid of their competence.
Our societies are evolving, and are clearly not at all like a wolf pack, but there are a lot of primitive instincts in how me make decisions.Wars at most do have purposes but, as it says on Manuel's blog, these can be the governments' decisions leaving the thousands of people who fight and die without a vote.