War is not a Choice for Women

That comment that men suffer more in war than women has really infuriated me. For the most part, men have a choice whether to participate in war or not, and they usually have arms at their disposal with which to defend themselves or strike back. A woman in her home with her children didn't invite the war in on them. She has no safe place to take them when bombs fall on the house and no man - since he is probably elsewhere fighting - to protect her when armed men drag her into the street to be raped and tortured. Their food stolen by invaders, destroyed by bombs or spoiled from lack of refrigeration, any woman left alive gets to watch her children who are not murdered outright starve as they all languish without medical treatment or proper shelter.

War never takes place in wealthy countries. Many victims of war had little to begin with, and nothing remains after. Aid is often not able to find its way to them, and many are unable to flee even if they knew an attack was immanent. The idea that people held so powerless by deliberate design of patriarchal religions and power structures suffer the brunt of the misery for actions they had no power to influence is the greatest shame of the human race. If men choose to fight, let them do it away from civilized people and suffer the consequences, having chosen to be in that time and place. Any man or government that attacks a civilian population is a coward and a criminal of the worst kind, no matter how pure they believe their cause to be.

I can't look at a child and see her as collateral damage. I'm a woman - every child is, in some sense, my child. When a child dies on the other side of the world, it hurts me, it hurts us all. To needlessly cause that death is less than human. To structure our governments to support that effort above the well-being of the people they serve is obscene. War has to stop. The governments who start them must be toppled and the soldiers who act as its instruments of destruction have to be punished for their crimes against the humanity of us all. Every one of us knows better, and that means we have the responsibility to DO better, right here, right now.