Do you know why we war on kith and kin?

WHY WE WAR ON KITH AND KIN

Por qué tenemos la guerra 

 a parientes y amigos

We have warred on neighboring tribes since the memory of Man runneth not to the contrary.

It is not good to war on neighbors.

Walt Whitman, looking over the carnage of the United States' Civil war:

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;

It may be you are from old people and from women, and

from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps,

And here you are the mother’s laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old

mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. 

It is bad to maim, burn, blind, kill, those whom we might otherwise have loved.

From Don Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes who saw first-hand the carnage from the Iberian Peninsula Wars in the first quarter of the 19th century.  

Los desastres de la guerra

Pablo Picasso, a generation later, reacting to the German and Italian warplanes  bombing the Basque village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (Guernica 1937):

Google images depicts  today's destruction of kith and kin (we are all related by no more than six degrees of separation), every day a fish batch of horror:

The aftermath

 

Remember, the hated They are kith and kin, too.

Remember, "It may be if I had known them I would have loved them".

Images that suggest why we can't stop warring on ourselves:

. . . And bullies are  us, too.

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An Aside 

Many human animals exhibit "Patriotism," which should be in the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but isn't.

The illness is expressed as a fervent passion for the mutilation and death of kith and kin who live in whatever nation or tribe one finds one's nation or tribe to be at odds with in times of disorder -- frequent amongst human animals. 

The fervor manifests itself by an anxiety that can only be alleviated by the wish to kill  kith and kin that belong to an opposing nation or tribe.  In my 82 years, United States' citizens have lusted after killing Germans, Russians, Chinese, Vietnams, Saudi, Iraqi, Japanese, among others.  Some times the fervor passes quickly United States citizens in the main, wised to kill Germans only between1941 and 1945 -- then it was on to another nation or ideology.

If Patriotism is a Malady and if you know how to cure it, please tell.