Now I Am Become Death

 "One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war," wrote Albert Einstein back in 1946. He was a pretty smart guy, so I'm believing that he had his wits about him when he wrote it. He was referring to a world that had only recently experienced the detonation of an atomic bomb, a weapon he made theoretically possible, relativitily speaking. 

World War I wasn't called that until somebody got an idea for a sequel. Then somebody got the clever idea to make war so unthinkable that nobody would want to go beyond World War II. So they decided to prove Albert wrong by simultaneously preparing and preparing for a nuclear war. The war we were trying to avoid was hypothetically called World War III, and was going to star Mister T. Or maybe that was Rocky III. For forty-five years a not-war was waged called The Cold War. That one ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

Which as we all know meant that everyone turned their nuclear weapons into ploughshares and everyone leaved happily in peace from then on. All the guns and ammo across the globe were melted down and turned into monuments to peace. 

No. Really. 

But not here. Not in this universe. 

Instead we kept on making more tanks and bombs and ways to stop people from living. Wars never stopped. They just had the precarious good taste not to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange. Neighbors attacking neighbors. Invasions and annexations. Police actions. And the most ironic possible term: "peacekeeping forces." 

Of course eventually we tired of having all those munitions and no place to use them. So we started shooting up schools. And movie theaters. And churches. Suddenly, war was normalized for everyday use here in America. 

It was only a hop skip and a jump from there to putting our bored and heavily armed troops to work shooting and blowing up our own citizens. All in the name of "fighting back." Because not fighting was never really an option. Not killing one another wasn't either. And the best thing was that now we didn't have to worry about all that world travel. Killing people in our own country meant we could save money and use the difference to fund still more guns and poorly trained thugs to carry them. 

Honestly, how much longer until those "tactical nuclear weapons" are launched at our own cities with black mayors? 

How can we simultaneously prevent this catastrophe from taking place while we cover our faces in shame?