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It’s So Easy to Egg On Israel and Ukraine From the Comfort of Home
Life in wartime is really hard. Cooperation makes life easier.
A couple weeks ago, my kids wanted to go ice skating. This is a very different thing than going to a bounce house. Ice is cold and hard. It’s not forgiving. We wear padding to make the falls easier to bear.
You don’t really know how hard skating on ice is until you are on the ice in the middle of the rink with no support. The experience of ice skating for me was a reminder of just how difficult life in war can be.
I’ve never actually experienced war first hand. I’ve only ever seen it in the papers and on screens, both of which are gross approximations of reality. Nothing we ever read, watch or hear in the news or see on social media, will ever come close to how difficult life is in war.
I am mindful of these facts when I see people promote an opinion that Ukraine and Israel are better off fighting. I am actually kind of wary of people who say that Ukraine or Israel will prevail in an all out war that involves American and European troops.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not even close.
When I see people rooting for Israel, America’s favorite proxy, and Ukraine, America’s distant 2nd favorite proxy, I see sincere delusion. I see people who really have no clue how difficult it is to mount an assault against someone who believes he must kill you survive. I never ever want to know what that‘s like.
War simulation games like Call of Duty doesn’t even come close to the apprehension of war because it's from what someone imagines war must be like. And for the sake of letting people keep their cookies, video games must approximate reality. A video game will never come close the fear you feel when your buddy dies next to you.
When I’m on skates, and I look down and see the scars in the ice from other skates, I am at once reminded of how hard life is when we fail to cooperate with each other. War is a result of a complete and total breakdown of cooperation between two groups of people.
I remember long ago, someone told me that man is usually in 3 states. He held up his hand with the back of his hand to me, and…