No more war no more war no more war no.

I really just want to write that phrase 200 times and call it a column. What can I add to it that will affect anything? The phrase perfectly expresses my frustration about this war and my deep desire to see an end to war in general.

One of my earliest memories is seeing a photo in Life, the magazine, of bodies strewn across a plaza in Europe, taken during the Second World War. In my child mind, I reasoned that if there was a photographer present, why could they not have stopped the murder? I could not understand. That photograph is one of several that have haunted me from a young age.

As a second-grader, I was one of the millions of U.S. schoolchildren who drilled sitting in the hallway outside our classrooms holding our heads down to avoid a potential nuclear bomb blast. We walked home past signs for fallout shelters and were taught how to take shelter in our own.

My own father’s body was littered with bits of shrapnel from a bomb blast on Guadalcanal. He drank to forget that war and died early as a result of the trauma of waging it.

During the Vietnam War, it was the photo, by photojournalist Eddie Adams, of the South Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong soldier in the head. Eddie, a friend in later years, said he was walking with the general, talking, when the general raised the pistol to the man’s head. Eddie’s instinct as a journalist was to take the picture. He could not have stopped the murder but he could document the brutality for the world to see and heed.

I began to understand the role of ordinary citizens and journalists witnessing the brutality and senselessness of war and reporting on it. But that never stopped me from feeling a deep frustration at the lack of effect reasonable people have on the wagers of war. We march, we vote, we petition, we make art, write music and literature about the horrors of war and the beauty of peace. Yet it seems that one war is always replaced by another. Or that many are being waged at once. The ones we engage in seem to end badly for everyone, at least in this century. The ones we stay out of end badly for others.

Now we are faced with the real prospect of engaging in the worst kind of war, the nuclear one. The one that is supposed to keep us from unleashing the worst beast man has conceived is the one that, with the slip of a finger, could destroy much of humanity. Is that hyperbole? I hope so but I’m not sure. How did we get to this precipice?

Is there truly good and evil at work in the universe? More and more, I think so. There is no reason for a nuclear power to invade a sovereign nation, no matter what Fox News may say. The world was supposed to have learned that after World War II.

I can only pray in my secular way for the people of Ukraine and their brave and defiant leader and the brave and defiant Russians who stand in solidarity with their neighbors in Ukraine.

May the madness end.