I took my collie down to Pickett's Charge field this evening to look at the sunset. Jennie is getting old. Nobody knows how old she really is, probably between eight and ten. I love walking with her on the battlefield, but this summer she started sitting down on me, which is a problem when we're in the middle of nowhere. She's just too big to carry back to the car.
So this evening I coaxed her down to the field. We stood on Long Lane, a road that was a farm lane during the Civil War and divides our subdivision from the field where Pickett gave his command to the Confederates in 1863 and so many people died a few minutes later.
I think of that field as spirit ground. It's been storming all day. This evening a steamy fog hugged the ground along the creek and hovered between the trees in the orchard. Because I have a vivid imagination the fog made me think of spirits rising from the earth as they must have done after the battle.
Why do people go to war? I'm not a pacifist or a hawk, but the question has fascinated me for years. I know I could kill someone, if I had to do it for a good reason. In 1997 a man robbed me at gunpoint and threatened to kill me if I didn't turn over my purse. I was volunteering at the time in a Mother Teresa house in a bad neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The sisters gave me one day off a week, and I didn't want to ask them for pocket change for coffee or a newspaper, so I found a part-time job proofreading for a newspaper. The robber was waiting for me when I walked to the bus stop in front of our building. The robbery wasn't personal; I felt like a zebra that had walked in front of a lion at a waterhole. After he took my purse and jogged away, I didn't know if he was going to turn around and kill me. If I'd had a gun I would have shot him without hesitation, so I found that out about myself.
The thing about me, though, is I would need a reason to kill. I know I couldn't kill somebody just because my government told me to do it.
Back to the big scale, some wars are clear cut. Hitler was burning people in ovens and gobbling up countries left and right. It was right to stand up to Hitler. What about murkier wars? Why do we march to our deaths by the millions just because a government tells us to do it?
I believe it's a defect in our species that will eventually cause our extinction. Responsible people don't band together and take down bad governments. Most people just live for themselves. We each have our own little crumb of something that we want to protect, our humble homes, our families, our 10-year-old collies, and we don't want to go beyond that.
This evening when I was watching the fog move along the ground and the sunset between the remnants of the storm clouds, I thought about nature. Whatever wars are about, political reasons, money, territory, or plain old insanity, they're also about energy. Opposing sides meet like clashing storm fronts. People have always speculated about why life exists on earth, but no matter who you are and what you think about that, one thing is very clear to me: the thin film of life on the surface of the earth absorbs energy, changes it, and radiates it back out. Whatever we think we are, we have a place in nature that we don't have a clue about. Nature doesn't waste anything and nothing is an accident.
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