David McElroy

If two bullies taunt each other for long enough, there’s going to be a fight. It seems that a small minority of insane people in Iran and the United States are nudging both countries in that direction. And when the shooting starts, it’s not going to matter who fired the first shot. It’s only going to matter how many body bags we’re going to need for the dead.

Neo-conservatives in the United States have been trying to maneuver the country into war with Iran for decades. They wanted to attack Iraq, and they finally found a way to trick the public into supporting that war 10 years ago. The country hadn’t attacked us and the shaky evidence that was used to justify the attack turned out to be a combination of lies and bad information. Still, the war hawks had their way. U.S. taxpayers spent trillions of dollars over the last decade, and many people on both sides were killed and maimed. And for what? As most U.S. troops pull out, the place is still a violent political basketcase that could fall into civil war at any time.

But the Iraqi misadventure hasn’t taught the neo-conservative war hawks anything, so now they want to attack Iran. They’ll use any excuse. They just want to overthrow the Iranian government, ignoring the evidence that external nation-building doesn’t work.

There’s a hardline element inside Iran, of course, that’s just as bad. To them, it’s a religious struggle, and they’re eager to fight “the Great Satan.” The Iranian military is in the midst of a war games exercise in international waters that has the possibility of setting off a war, either accidentally or intentionally. The Iranians have spent years building their military and pursing nuclear weapons, in large part because they’ll always be at the mercy of countries such as the United States unless they join the “nuclear club.”

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There’s apparently a new fad in drug addiction sweeping the country. Middle school students are grinding a product into fine powder and then snorting it into their noses — as certain older folks might do with cocaine. It has drug warriors all up in arms.

The “drug” in question is a candy called Smarties. They can’t get anybody high. They can’t cause problems of any sort other than the respiratory problems that you’d get from inhaling any sugar into your nose. So why is anyone considering this a “drug problem”?

A story in my local newspaper today quoted a “drug educator” as saying it’s a problem because it shows that kids are willing to try new things. No joke. It’s a “problem” that kids want to try things. A project coordinator with the Shelby County Drug Free Coalition Project Safe Place Programs of Family Connection — I’m not making that name up — had this to say:

“It shows that willingness to experiment and try different things. Later it may not be Smarties. It may be alcohol. It may be cigarettes. It may be marijuana.”

Can’t we just say that some kids are going to act like idiots no matter what we do? Some kids shove Froot Loops up their nose, too, but it’s not considered a drug problem. Can’t we be reasonable instead of turning everything into the modern version of “Reefer Madness“?

Nobody can accuse me of taking recreational drug use lightly. I think it’s a very shortsighted decision to use any recreational drug, whether it’s the illegal ones or the legal one that causes the most real-world problems — alcohol. I don’t use any drugs and plan to keep it that way. But can’t we have a sense of sanity in what we treat as a real threat? There are a lot of problems that face everybody — including kids — but the idiocy of a few kids stuffing sugar up their noses is something for sane parents to deal with, not for drug warriors to wring their hands about.

How long until some school bans Smarties and Pixy Stix? Or has it already happened and I just don’t know about it?

A curious thing happened in Europe 97 years ago this week. Men who had been trying to kill each other suddenly stopped shooting. They started singing together, exchanging Christmas greetings and giving one another presents. But when the authorities from their respective governments got involved, they had to give it up. They were forced to go back to killing each other.

Human societies spend a lot of time and effort to keep a tiny minority of people from hurting and killing each other. Governments have elaborate systems of police and courts to protect most people — who just want to be left alone — from that tiny minority. But when politicians get angry with each other across borders, they expect something quite absurd. They expect people who want to live in peace to suddenly hate other people enough to kill them. The desire for peace is a hard thing for the politicians to get out of stubborn humans.

The narrative we normally hear is just the opposite — that humans are so violent and so war-like that society would be nothing but chaos and killing without benevolent governments agreeing to control things. But the evidence suggests that the story is far more complex than that.

The Christmas truce of 1914 was very unofficial. It wasn’t observed in all places. But in the midst of the slaughter of World War I — seen as the Great War to end all wars at the time — British, German and French soldiers spontaneously made temporary peace with one another. They came out of their trenches and socialized. Obviously, the didn’t hate one another.

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