Befriending "enemies"

I recently had the pleasure of watching Rick Steves' documentary on Iran. He toured many different cultural and historical sites in the country, and during his travels he had the opportunity to converse with many Iranian people.

One of the most striking scenes in the documentary, for me, was when a woman he spoke with asserted that although the governments of their respective countries may consider themselves to be enemies, that doesn't mean that the American and Iranian people have to think that way.

Civilians aren't the ones creating and animosity between nations; it's usually their politicians who are doing so. Why should civilians be implicated by the dangerous games that their politicians play?

Of course, war is not meant to be fair and civilian involvement is often an essential element of its practice. To win a battle, one must do enough damage to the enemy's people, territory, and resources to warrant a surrender.

In a perfect world, civilians wouldn't be ensnared in war due to the petty concerns of their representatives. Politicians who had beef with one another would convene on a manmade remote island in the middle of the Pacific with impenetrable barriers and duke it out amongst themselves without involving civilians in the mess.

We don't live in a perfect world, unfortunately, so we end up with disasters like the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden. We also end up with hundreds of civilian deaths in Pakistan resulting from drone attacks carried out by the United States military.

Survivors of the Hiroshima bombing

Most power players have the ability to condemn others to death while living comfortably out of sight of the results. It is the civilians who suffer the horrible consequences of war when our representatives decide to punish people for events and beliefs that they are not even remotely involved in.

Those of us who understand the true value of human life, however, will not get caught up in the deluded thinking that leads to unwarranted hatred of others.

Although we may not be able to prevent our nations from waging war and incessantly fighting amongst themselves, we can resist the notion that our politicians' enemies are our enemies.