Weekly Bumper Sticker
May 2nd, 2008 by 
Steven Gould
My favorite bumper sticker this week:
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
On using the Google it I find it was a quote from Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the United States House of Representatives and the first female member of the Congress.
They called her “the Lady of the House.”
I’m not the pacifist she was. She opposed our entry into both World War I and World War II. (May have had a point about Number 1.) However, she has a very important kernel of truth. War is a natural disaster, indiscriminate in its victims. Even in a justifiable war (not necessarily a “just” war) everyone loses. The question is, are you going to lose even more by entering than not?
In the case of Iraq, the answer seems clear and I can’t call that a justifiable war by any stretch.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:41 am
Nice.
My favorite bumper sticker this week has been:
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:59 am
Oh yeah.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
“War never solved anything except for ending outbreaks of Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.”
It never seems to permanently end a given ‘ism’, though. There seems to be an endless supply of people willing to abuse one another on a national or international level - thus the need for a military and the stones to appropriately use that military.
War is a bad thing to everyone directly and indirectly involved in it. It should only be entered into when we know that not entering is even a worse thing. That can be a wide grey zone with many legitimate individual points of view on where the line is between not stepping up and paying the price or stepping in and paying that price.
It is a shame that in our over politicized republic we can’t seem to have or use the information and prognostication available to make the right choice more often.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
That is a great quote. I would like to learn some more about her.
My favorite quote along those lines currently is:
“Proud of my country
Appalled by my government”