All You Need is Love? I Wish.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. How true. When we look at the current chaos and violence in Egypt and the world, we shudder and wonder how we got this far down a road no one claims to want to be on. We assume that peace and stability were once the norm, a norm we can return to if we make the right decision or elect the right President--or if we can all just learn to get along.

I don't know why people think the whole world can learn to get along when most of us can't go a single day without sniping at someone we actually know and sometimes claim to love: spouses, children, parents, neighbors, some guy who cut us off in traffic. Why do we apply idealistic expectations to an entire world full of complicated, alien people with whom we have little or nothing in common when we can't love the one we're with when we're with the one we love?

Because peace is not the norm. Violence is. Don't believe me? Consider history. Every age is replete with war and rumors of war, with mass migrations, hunger, and crime.

I chose to write about 1919 because WWI and its end produced changes that moved the US rapidly from a rural, semi-technological age into an age of unprecedented change. From the Civil War to WWI, the only war America engaged in was the Spanish-American war, a short war with few casualties.  Yet even without war violence, and at a time when the population was relatively small, 250,000 babies died each year, any large city had its slums, railroad and mining strikes were often violent, and work itself, in mines or factories or farms, carried the possibility of sudden death. And this in a country that was more prosperous and peaceful than most of the world. We had elected Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive known for work that eventually helped found the United Nations.

Then WWI came to Europe and later America. The US instituted the first real draft. The machine gun brought trench warfare, in which young men stood in trenches that were often full of water and mud, exposed to frigid winter weather and Spanish flu. More Americans died of the flu than in battle.  

When the war ended, the world had changed. Revolution had come to Russia and brought with it decades of violence, the Gulags, and uncounted millions dead at the hand of their own government.

In America, mail bombs were found in Seattle, New York and Georgia, where Senator Hardwick’s maid got her hands blown off when she opened a package that had just arrived.

Through the ages, we sometimes have brief respites from the violence. My father once told me that in the fifties, as he traveled across the South working for the FAA, he always picked up hitchhikers. Always. By the mid-sixties, he picked up only soldiers. By the mid-seventies, he stopped for no one. Why? He had learned the tragic truth that the world already knew: violence is the norm.