I sometimes wonder where we’d be if all those young men we lost, not just in WWI but in all wars, had been able to become what they might have been. What contributions to society would they have made, what would their children have accomplished?
The loss of life in WWI was so horrendous that it’s hard to get your mind around it. (The word “decimate” actually means killing one out of every ten. During WWI, it was more like one in every ten survived.) We in America can’t fully appreciate the impact that such a loss of life has on a society because our losses compared to total population were not that great as England’s, France’s, Belgium’s, and Germany’s. They quite literally lost a whole generation of their best and brightest.
The irony of it is we are still paying the cost of that war, because it sowed the seeds for WWII, the Soviet Union, genocide in the Balkans and Turkey, and the trouble in the Middle East. We call our species “Homo sapiens,” but looking back on our history, I wonder if we wouldn’t be better named “Homo bellicus.”
You take the healthiest and most intelligent and send them off to war, and leave the least healthy/least mentally fit behind to breed. The ones that are good at fighting and killing survive and come home to breed. You do this for 6 or 7 thousand years. Then some guy goes off the deep end and shoots up a house of worship, or a concert, or a school, or a night club, or a post office and kills a bunch of people, and everybody is all aghast. Get a clue, people. You get what you breed for.
My burrow, "La Maison du Hibou Sous Terre" is located on the flatlands of West Texas where I live with my computer, my books, and a lot of yarn waiting to become something.
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The Owl Underground 
I sometimes wonder where we’d be if all those young men we lost, not just in WWI but in all wars, had been able to become what they might have been. What contributions to society would they have made, what would their children have accomplished?
The loss of life in WWI was so horrendous that it’s hard to get your mind around it. (The word “decimate” actually means killing one out of every ten. During WWI, it was more like one in every ten survived.) We in America can’t fully appreciate the impact that such a loss of life has on a society because our losses compared to total population were not that great as England’s, France’s, Belgium’s, and Germany’s. They quite literally lost a whole generation of their best and brightest.
The irony of it is we are still paying the cost of that war, because it sowed the seeds for WWII, the Soviet Union, genocide in the Balkans and Turkey, and the trouble in the Middle East. We call our species “Homo sapiens,” but looking back on our history, I wonder if we wouldn’t be better named “Homo bellicus.”
You take the healthiest and most intelligent and send them off to war, and leave the least healthy/least mentally fit behind to breed. The ones that are good at fighting and killing survive and come home to breed. You do this for 6 or 7 thousand years. Then some guy goes off the deep end and shoots up a house of worship, or a concert, or a school, or a night club, or a post office and kills a bunch of people, and everybody is all aghast. Get a clue, people. You get what you breed for.