Peace School

In the news is a story about some schools feeling obliged to allow peace activists access to students on a basis resembling that of military recruiters. The catch seems to be they must offer some menu of career opportunities. And that is the thought worth following.

We have a bevy of institutions teaching and studying war, but there are nothing like West Point for peace. Alternative service for people of special conscience was anything not war, but it was not required to be within a program for peace.

So America came out of a century during which it was at war about as often as not, a century with staggering numbers of war dead, without any agenda to alter the course of events. Winning was better than losing and there were no other options.

And then the new war started and even raising the question suggests temporal aphasia. But we really can’t go on just assuming it is all inevitable: that the budgets will get bigger and the tech more fearsome and the rules of conflict even less constraining. Is there no place for a discussion that begins with: wait.