It’s time for me — as this is my last column of this spring semester — to talk about the controversial edifice of war, which since the birth of the nation has been the pillar of American leadership and disgrace.It’s no secret the wars the United States fights are very unpopular, as seen by the rest of the world.But more than simple unpopularity, the reasons why this country goes to war are really hard to swallow. Especially the last few.And I’m not just some foreigner critiquing this country’s foreign relations policies. I’m pretty sure there’s a legion of Americans that will sing with me in this choir.I have respect for the people that fight wars. I admire their courage. But I can see no good in a nation’s leadership that prevails by force. I actually see no good in even a single person making himself or herself valued by force.Let’s not lie, my friends. War is about violence and profit.It puzzles me that a country with a message of freedom and peace has such a strong military face.Don’t give the tired excuse you have to have war to have peace. This is the worse slogan ever thrown out to justify the unjustifiable.There’s a curse on the United States, stamped on its anthem: “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”I understand the historical context of this verse, but I think it came to mean more than that. It suggests, in the very dawn the country’s history, that this nation will stand by the sight and sound of a battle.The U.S. is not the U.S. we know without its well-advertised military apparatus and the blurry, all-consuming concept of national security.This is difficult to understand. The last war my dear and unimportant country of Brazil fought was more than a hundred years ago. We barely think of the matter, and a military career is rarely considered as a meaningful place to dedicate one’s life.Who would deny the economic motivation of wars? Who would argue the great part of American wealth comes from the despicable business of war?American families break apart to send people to “defend the country.” Defend from what?Terrorism? I can’t understand how you fight terrorism by controlling and killing people from terrorists’ countries.How can a nation build its “national security” by bringing insecurity to other nations through war?These are questions that won’t rest because the answers made of silence.Now that I’ve lived here for a year and half and have made good friends, I have started to care about the fact the best people in the world grow up believing that war is legitimate and normal. Good people have been led to believe the theater of a dirty and violent supremacy game is worth the lives of their own.The ambiguity of a nation whose principles declare peace, freedom and dignity shows itself in the plastic madness of war. And this sad reality is as old as America itself.How painful is the notion violence should be fought with violence? Only the valuable lives of soldiers and innocent people can tell.War is certainly a curse carried by terrorists. But it is also a curse on America’s core principles.There’s a war being fought, yes. It’s the war of this country against itself.
Marcelo Vieira is a 32-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_mvieira.—-Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]