We don’t undertake war the way we used to. We used to go to war with spears and swords, and killing was a uniquely savage thing. Most of the people who died didn’t die right away. They screamed. They bled. They writhed on the ground. If they were fortunate someone finished the job — today we call that murder, but then we had no way to fix a serious abdominal wound that was certain to fester and kill — slowly and very painfully.

Now we have a guy who sits in a trailer piloting a drone from 500 miles away. He pushes a button and a bad guy dies. Then, when people rush in to try to salvage the dying but not yet dead, he pushes the button again and innocents die. Children. Women. Those who were not fighting. We now shoot at the equivalent of the medics in WWII and call this “justified”!

Barack Obama has personally ordered exactly this sequence dozens of times. The first death may have been of a legitimate terrorist who was going to kill innocent people. What about the second, an act that in earlier wars would have subjected you to prosecution as a war criminal?

Where is the outrage? Where is the horror?

Where is the reality in facing how we kill and how things die?

Our problem isn’t that we have too much violence on TV and in video games. It’s that we don’t have enough real violence. We instead have sterilized violence, where people die quietly if graphically. Where our food is wrapped in cellophane at the store. Where we go to the bar and order up a dozen chicken wings — and we ignore the fact that six chickens died to produce those twelve little winglet drumsticks!

On Killing

And this is done in your name, rube.