Texting is easy.
My children can do it (in fact, far faster than I can.)
It’s an effortless thing to toss out 280-character salvos at people we disagree with, to drop mic drop bombs on strangers, to unload rapid fire violence from behind the safety of touch screens.
Every one of us understands the ease at which our words, carelessly dispensed in a moment of anger or frustration or fear—can be terribly destructive. We’ve all lost our heads for a moment and found ourselves stepping into the minefields of our own hubris and impulsivity while all hell broke loose around us. We’ve all reached that place of knowing that we had to either retreat and fallback, or press ahead into the mess we’ve made—reputation and collateral damage be damned. We’ll all have to look back and realize we’d been irresponsible with the technology in our hands and grieved our stupidity.
Fortunately, most of us will never lead nations.
Our reckless words sent out in haste may emotionally wound people and it may lay waste to relationships—but people likely won’t actually die. They won’t find themselves crammed into stifling military vehicles on foreign soil, or launching nuclear warheads at strangers thousands of miles away or laying in hospital beds with burns, simply because we weren’t mature or wise enough to step away from our phones when conflict invited us in.
And even if we were blessed with the awesome responsibility to lead a nation, most of us would find a humility and restraint that we hadn’t possessed before. We’d become a more honorable version of ourselves. We would grow into the lofty position. We’d respond differently than we had before to taunt and threat, because we’d understand the gravity of our words.
That’s because War is not a Twitter War—and decent, rational human beings know that.
War is not something we enter into flippantly. It isn’t something we run wildly into led by ego and bravado. It is not a showy public exchange for the sole purpose of making small, insecure men feel big and strong. It is not something we threaten only to feel the cheap aphrodisiac of stranger’s retweets.
War is brutal, bloody, vicious, family destroying, joy-depleting, History-altering, sickening stuff—and lots and lots of people die. It is rampant fear and gaping wounds and orphaned children and terrified parents. It should be an outcome honorable leaders do everything they can to avoid.
And world war should not be as easy to stumble into as a Twitter War. It should never be in the tiny hands of minuscule men, who have such little regard for the Office or the people they represent, that they would prize the momentary high of putting someone on blast, above the lives of millions of human beings.
Tweeting is not leading, and it’s time we stopped allowing the most powerful man in the Free World to behave in ways we’d find unacceptable for our teenagers. It’s time someone took the power from this easily baited man-child who is not capable or worthy of it.
America cannot be led into annihilation, death, and disaster, simply because our President wants to overcompensate for his emotional insecurities, his physical inadequacies, and to have his historically fragile ego virtually stroked.
And he’s not a human being worth risking the lives of our children over. Not my child. Not yours. Not a North Korean’s. Not a Russian’s. Not a Syrian’s. Not an Iranian’s.
Yeah, texting is easy.
Killing millions of people, shouldn’t be.
