Moral Warfare

Hannah Duffy ’28

Contributing Writer

Our world is one of battle encroaching on mortal morals; one of endless fighting, bigotry and the need, above all, to win. We’ve seen dancing Army men and drunken sailors carousing in the streets on Victory Day, only for Johnson to order, retaliating, for troops to scour Indochina in ‘64. We’ve heard incredible survival stories — three weeks alone in the jungle, tragic plane crashes and alarming illnesses with a death rate of a thousand percent. Yet, these miracle survivors can suddenly be cast into death through something as simple as slipping in the bathtub. There has been battle after battle, desperate efforts to be named something other than loser, and yet when has it gone too far? Are there times when one should, despite obligatory moral values, throw in the towel?

Since 2014, Ukraine and Russia have held a back-and-forth tug of war, with a significant increase in warfare in 2022, when Russia began a full-scale invasion. Ten years of cities reduced to rubble hasn’t incited further vindication. Many feel that the citizens of Ukraine might believe that their country has reached a point of no return, in which there is no longer a hope of victory. Even in World War I, General John Pershing, disapproving of a peaceful agreement, continued the fighting for an unnecessary amount of time, although the war had technically been resolved, just as the prolonging of Russia and Ukraine seems, although pessimistic, wasteful. The breaking point comes from complete devastation. Warfare can crush values and reshape them in the battered destruction. So, when it comes to the point when the morals of the losing team have been dropped into their grave, why keep going? Why do humans continue to fight, even when loss may be inevitable?

In the human body, the adrenal glands, located atop each kidney, produce adrenaline, releasing it into the bloodstream, increasing heart rate, blood flow, and most importantly, endurance, which increases chances of survival in times of fight or flight. In times of great trial, it is exactly this adrenaline that aligns itself with our morals. Fear of a threatening regime builds this adrenaline; muscles coiling, you decide how to protect your morals. Despite all the carnage, tens of millions dead and counting, battered and bruised buildings, bloodied battlefields, despite all of this, we have an undeniable need for survival. In times of struggle, our tunnel vision leads us to the only respectable option: fighting.

We can see this theory in our own country. Protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict have erupted all over the country, predominantly based on college campuses, such as Columbia. In our own Trinity bubble, many of us pass by the demonstration in Gates Quad: a neatly built tent protesting the Palestine genocide. And yet, people have argued that this protesting is counterproductive, reverting sympathy towards the opposition, rather than those being protested for. America has a long history of holding a discriminatory face towards all forms of protesting, whether this be the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, or the feminist movement in the 80s. Even the Vietnam War protests created a counterculture that directly defied their values, in which citizens, looking down upon the protests, ascended into conservatism. The Palestine-Israel protests mirror this, where some believe that these protests are hurting the cause, rather than helping. The opposition uses any outbreaks of violence in these protests as fuel to the fire against their argument. So why continue protesting? Why fight?  Partly, I believe that we rely on fear. Fear of a harsher reign in the future, fear of a second shoe coming down upon us to stamp its shoelaces in antagonism. Or fear of the “second life,” fear that we will reach heaven or Jannah or paradise and face the crushing rage of a God disappointed in us for not standing up for our morals. Because that is really what it all comes back to — morals. We rely on our morals to build ourselves and construct how we fight and why. We can look at General Pershing (albeit his morals in this sense weren’t exactly fantastic) and we can decipher why he continued the battle, despite its obvious ending. He could have feared a surprise attack from Germany, an irritated country, sour at their loss. Or he could have feared something deeper, such as defying his morals of fighting until the very last second. The adrenaline kicks in. Fight or flight, suddenly our tunnel vision narrows even further, and we see nothing but working towards making our morals a reality, despite all crushing opposition. I’ve found that we can always fight, whether fighting for a winning or losing cause, because fighting is in our human nature. We are crafted, thick of blood and muscle, to speak with curled fists, sore knuckles and kicking feet. And with our morals, the most important organ in our bodies, loss may be inevitable. But at least we never go down without a fight.