Those Who Can’t Create

Kids love war.

Kids – especially boys – like toy guns, toy tanks, and toy soldiers. They love making explosion and rat-tat-tat machine gun sounds. They love dressing up like knights and vikings and manufacturing weapons out of bits of cardboard, string and wood.

When I was a kid I obsessively drew pictures of war. My drawings were full of fighter jets, tanks, and of course, explosions. As I drew I would make sound effects, imagining the battle in all its fantastic detail.

To a child, war is exciting, full of adventures and exploits. The explosions of bombs and missiles are like fireworks on steroids. And war is full of cool machinery and gadgets: sleek jets, powerful tanks and night-vision goggles.

Kids love war, until they experience one in real life.

Many adults have a love affair with war too. In adults, the childish love of gear and explosions acquires a grown-up taint: a dislike of Muslims, perhaps, or reflexive invocations of the “war on terror” or the need to “bring the fight to the enemy”, or maybe a messianic desire to bring “democracy” to the world.

It’s no surprise that George W. Bush hasn’t experienced war in real life either.

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In every childhood sandbox and on every busy beach, there are children building sand castles. These elaborate constructions (which are sometimes populated by green army men who make rat-tat-tat noises as they battle each other) are always threatened with demolition by the one kid whose primary goal is to wreck stuff.

He – and in my childhood experience, it was always a “he” – isn’t very good at building sand castles himself, but he excels at destroying them, to the dismay of their creators.

Those who can create, create. Those who cannot, destroy.

Perhaps this is why artists – creative people – are frequently in the forefront of those opposed to war.