Roots of war.

• Position: Letter to the Editor - Letter to the Editor

While Barbara Ehrenreich's column "The Roots of War" (April issue) contained a great deal of very interesting information and insight, it contained some common fallacies regarding human beings and their relation to the waging of war.

Somehow we have forgotten hundreds of thousands of years of human existence where war as we know it simply did not exist. Conflict yes, but not the planned extermination of other societies and peoples that our culture compulsively engages in.

Far from being an "inescapable part of human experience" as Ehrenreich claims, war is an inescapable aspect of our culture, which is consuming the life of the Earth.

That vast numbers of humans courageously reject war and the systems that support it speaks to the fact that war is not an inescapable aspect of the human experience or embedded in the human spirit.

Don Kliese Madison, Wisconsin Barbara Ehrenreich takes up a crucial question, but misses a perspective that is equally crucial for developing an answer. While she notes that...