By: Mark Lambert @ Cereal City Books

War is not a game. It isn’t entertainment. It’s not to be glorified or desired as a sane method of resolving conflict. It should be viewed as ugly and reprehensible, a reluctant last resort to stop the advance of a horrifying evil. And when evil has been extinguished, war talk should be stored away, or spoken about in fear and reverence, lest it be unleashed again.

Instead, we are drunk on war. We are a society bent on revenge and thirsty for battle. So much so that, with the most recent conflict overseas, the United States was the invader. We traveled across an ocean to rain “shock and awe” on a population that we knew lacked the ability to fight back. We massacred unarmed, innocent people. Thousands and thousands of them.

When Charles Taylor’s armies used machetes to hack the arms, legs, and ears off of women and children in Liberia, he was called a war criminal, and was convicted for his war crimes. We, on the other hand, considered ourselves justified in laying waste to vast areas of an Iraqi city, killing thousands of women and children to get at a few thugs who threatened our “interests.” Pity the critic who suggests otherwise.

When we aren’t fighting war, we love to practice and pretend. The most popular video games are centered on war themes. Warcraft. Black Ops. Count the number of movies currently on the big screens or available in video that involve armed conflict. If you also include the cop/spy/horror titles to the ones that deal with war, the number surely reaches the hundreds. The next time you go to a video vending machine to rent a video, simply stand back and count the number of promotional pictures on the selection board that show a weapon of some kind. We simply can’t get enough.

Even television is now presenting war as entertainment. The latest example is a celebrity reality show about to be unveiled where “Stars Earn Stripes.” The network is going to give weapons and live ammunition to celebrities and film them in some competitive arena to see who has “what it takes.” Seriously? Is anyone paying attention?

Do you want to know what war is? It is a 19-year-old kid who is drafted by his government to serve in a war he doesn’t understand. He is sent to a jungle, where his buddies give him the name “tunnel rat.” He is given a sidearm and ordered to crawl through booby-trapped underground mazes, where he shoots other human beings in the face at point-blank range and watches them suffer and die. He then spends the next 40 years haunted by the moments. War is a family that is forever wiped out because they happened to be in the calculus of our “acceptable collateral damage” equation. War is fetid piles of rotting bodies being pushed into open trenches and survivors left to endure a grief beyond comprehension. War is not entertainment.

If we stay this course, our children will grow up thinking that violence and conflict are not only acceptable methods of resolving our differences, but preferred to the difficulties of peacemaking. There are many fine organizations working diligently to improve our skills in creative, nonviolent peacemaking. This broadcast threatens to raise more hurdles to their work. Let’s tell NBC to stop production of this program to protect the gains being made by peace educators everywhere!

Go to Change.org and browse “Cancel Stars Earn Stripes,” or click here to sign the petition to cancel this show.