Living in my idyllic cocoon.

If it's necessary for America to go to war -- well, then let's institute the draft. Yes, conscription. Call it whatever you like. Make everybody eligible to go to war. Men and women. Old and young. Rich and poor. Even 76-year-old men like me. Thing is, if we had a draft, there would be less war. Maybe no war. Because relatively few people wanna go to war. Only a few volunteers. And some of the volunteers are crazy. Super patriots. Or just plain stupid. They don't have anything better to do. Some of 'em are sent into four, five and six combat tours. Occasionally, they go crazy. They go out and kill indiscriminately. Execution-style. Just for the hell of it. Could be they don't even know what they're doing. Which is a definition of crazy. Unfortunately, there are so few volunteers that it's apparently necessary to send even the crazies into combat. Trained killers. Soldiers turned into killer robots. Sort of like drones. Push a button. And they go ahead and do the job. Machine-like. Without human conscience. Yes, folks, we've come to that. We have computerized war. Made it a video game. We can kill the enemy in Afghanistan merely by pushing a button on a computer in Nevada. We even kill our own American citizens with drones. Merely because we suspect that they may be collaborating with the enemy. No court or legal proceedings. The decision is made by some political hack. We allow our nation to get away with murder. Maybe because we are exempted from doing the killing ourselves. No draft. No conscription. We close our minds to what's going on. Or we're like me. I know what's going on. But I keep telling myself, not much I can do about it. I'm only a powerless individual. I have no control over the big picture. I merely rant and rave. In my blog. And get on with my life. Living with my Italian true love. In my idyllic cocoon. While the rest of the world goes into rot and decay. --Jim Broede