During a conversation with a friend about Iran and Ukraine and the government's role in each unconstitutional war, she grew increasingly exasperated.  President Trump had just issued his Easter Sunday threat that unnerved her and much of the rest of the world. She had voted for Trump in 2024.  Where was the peace he promised? Despair broke through and she blurted out, "Why can't people get along!?"

According to a consensus of cynics, people can't get along because we're all a bunch of thieving, envious, back-stabbing sons-of-bitches.  Freaks who believe otherwise are off somewhere knitting or writing poetry.

I think a better answer is the traps we've set for ourselves.

The first trap is the State itself.  We have allowed the State to exist out of a misunderstanding of free market incentives; consequently the State, not the people under it, is sovereign.

The second trap is the State's make-or-break undertaking: War.  Is there a better example of a failure to get along?

The State creates abstractions to fill the war environment it needs.

The Russians want to conquer the world, the Iranians are terrorists.  Anyone who sides with or likes the Russians or the Iranians is not only a traitor but an agent of the devil.  And don't you dare criticize Israel, anti-semite!

Russians, Iranians, us — bound together by State criminality.  There are no specifics about the pawns who will actually engage the enemy.  We hear, read: "Kill everybody." "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." "'Good Russians' can only be found in graveyards." Terrorists are them, not us.  Automatic military registration.

And from rare voices of protest:

"The poor, sir, who are the ones called upon to rot in the trenches, have no organized power, have no press to voice their will upon this question of peace or war."

"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells . . ."

The war to end war

In All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque presents war as a spiritual and physical hell — a triumph of duplicitous abastractions.  In memoir-like fashion Paul Baumer tells how he and his German classmates signed up for the Great War after hearing patriotic speeches at school.  But the horror of trench warfare and living conditions soon changed them.  "We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk."