June 19, 2021 Commentary from it is about to rain here

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June 19, 2021 Commentary from it is about to rain here: Wars are messy things. Especially when they are over. Is it proper to celebrate victory when so many have fallen? Is it proper to mock and hurt the enemy whose very existence is met with the righteous punishment by the victorious? Actually, mostly people count bodies, tally up the numbers. Check their accuracy and then file them away for posterity. Making it numbers is sufficient to distance us from the war. Counting and classifying the dead, bring closure to the annoying “Missing in Action” category. Now, allegedly there are 75,000 missing in action in just one state. The news is headlined as “Bihar Saw Nearly 75,000 Unaccounted Deaths Amid 2nd COVID-19 Wave, Data Shows.” How is the unaccounted shown by data? Isn’t “unaccounted data” an oxymoron? Perhaps as all oxymorons it inadvertently reveals a paradox. We see the paradox of trying to bring order to the fog of war through crystal clear numbers. A quest for clarity becomes more important to bring closure than to ponder and perhaps reconsider what we have accepted as normal. But what happens when we cannot even tell if the war is over. Do we seek intermittent clarity? And while we wait for the next attack we fortify with vaccines and hope the enemy has not learnt how to penetrate your fortification. Thus counting the dead is vital – we must know if our fortifications is holding. We need to know who the current enemy is and when and how the strike will come. We need to consider every intermittent victory as the lull between the waves, as moments to continue to fortify and defend – until the enemy is vanquished enough that it does not pose a threat. Simultaneously the intermittent peace is to hold the enemy at a weakened state. This is how wars have been won. Word War 1 would still be going on if after capture of an enemy territory, the victors put the enemy in the exact position of advantage that they had before the war. Our return to the pre- “most- current-victory” day is giving the weakened enemy its much-needed boost for the fight for the enemy’s need for survival. This is not how wars see decisive ends. Instead we will inevitably drag out this war for a long time, as other wars have been dragged out in the past. My only hope we will also not delude ourselves that we can return to a pre-war “normal” while we also choose to drag out the war. Think about that. You cannot seriously believe that an enemy will not strike as soon as it sees a chink in the amor. Eventually, we can choose to be careless and let the war drag on, or as a species and culture realize that there is a better chance of victory if we did not automatically return to the days before the current war started. If not we will continue to live like Ivan and G.I Joe as reminded by the Clash.  

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