What is war, and if it is so horrible why do we do it?

Lately all we hear on the news are stories about Syrian refugees, Isis, and war in general. Unfortunately my son has been catching snippets of these stories and parts of conversations my friends and family have on the subject and a week ago he asked me, “ what is war.”

I answered, “A war is a large fight between two or more countries or groups of people over things like land, resources, and ideas.

Of course with a child questions often lead to more questions that become more and more difficult to answer. Children have no context for a lot of things so they want to understand every side and part of a thing.

My son continued the interrogation, “But what happens in a war? How can someone win a war?”

I answered, “Well people fight and hurt and kill each other using weapons until one side is either destroyed or agrees to give up and do what the other side wants.”

“I thought killing and hurting people was bad,” he said with a confused look on his face.

I looked at him and told him that of course it was bad. I already knew that I was was setting my self up for some difficult questions but I think its important to answer questions like these for our children even if they do give you a headache.

“So if war is bad and people get hurt and killed, why would anyone want to go to war?”, he asked me looking even more confused than before.

I was about to answer that sometime its necessary because people are trying to defend themselves from evil people or to fight for freedom and important ideals but I stopped and thought about it and decided that not only were these not the right answers but they could be dangerous answers to give a child as the foundation to his ideas about war. Instead I thought about it and answered his questions with my own questions.

“Sebastian last year when people would make fun of you or pick on you how did you feel?”

He quickly answered, “Well I felt angry?”

“What happened when you got angry? What actions did you take?”

He grimaced and said, “I hit them or screamed at them.”

I could see his mind was grabbing unto the memories as he answered and I continued to push, “Were they really always making fun of you and even if they were did you hitting them and losing control solve the issue or make you feel better?”

“No they weren’t always making fun of me, I just thought they were and I always got in trouble when I hit someone or got crazy.”, he answered looking a little guilty.

Sebastian was diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum. While he is highly functional and intelligent, which leads most people who meet him to dismiss the evaluation and think he is spoiled, he does have a hard time with certain social cues and he easily loses control of his emotions getting him into trouble at times. I realized that because Sebastian has had to learn social cues instead of instinctively seeing them he could see war in a way most children couldn’t if I could lead him a little bit.

I looked at him and smiled, “Sebastian don’t feel bad you have learned to control yourself more and use words instead of just lashing out. But you see that's the same reason wars occur. People become angry, afraid, and they lose control. This causes them to act irrationally and attack each other. Some people will tell you that this war started over freedom and that war started over oil and other stuff like that but that is not really the case. People are afraid of new things and things they don't understand. Most people want everyone to be the same because if everyone is the same then its easy to understand them and we are usually not afraid of things we understand. The big problem is as individuals and countries go to war and hurt each other they become more and more afraid, so even when the war ends both sides are more scared than they were before the war ended making them lose control for even smaller reasons. So you see the reason we have wars even if we know they are bad is because we are afraid and that fear eventually becomes anger and once a group of people become angry enough they stop thinking and feel that the only way to solve their problems is to figh.”

I could tell my son understood what I was telling him so he said thanks and asked if he could watch Adventure Time.

After he left I began to think about what I had said to him and realized that it was true. We are at a very dangerous point in our history as a country. We must decide if fear will rule us. By being afraid of people who we don't understand, like Muslims, we lash out at them and hurt them. This makes them afraid of us and leads them to begin to sympathize with groups of people who are angry and afraid of the same things they are. Eventually their fear leads them into losing control and attacking the people who attacked them confirming everything that we feared. Its a self fulfilling prophecy that we can only escape by trying to understand each other by answering hate with love and ignorance with understanding.