Bruce Bisset: The absurdity of our divisions

Seems to me I've always been ambivalent about Anzac Day. Simply because I do not understand war.
I daresay many of those who fought - or still fight - in wars would say they do not understand them either. It's just something they believe they must do.
Now, I understand many of the reasons - or non-reasons - why wars are fought, and that most of those reasons fall somewhere between senseless and incomprehensible.
But even in a rare so-called "just" war (as, perhaps, World War II) I cannot comprehend how someone can take up a killing device and slay people they do not know purely because they wear a different uniform.
To me, it is a denial of their humanity. The paradox is, of course, that the animal instinct that fuels wars is a fundamental part of being human. It's that very contradiction that I struggle to understand.
Meaning: that with all the rationality and intellectual prowess the race has developed, one might think that by now we might have realised how terminally flawed the idea of war is, and have found effective ways to do away with or at least substitute for it.
But no. We may no longer be ignorant, but we're still infantile enough to have our ire raised and our egos pricked by competition we deem not in our best interests. And to raise flags and weapons against it.
As if there were no choice. But there is always choice.
Central to the perception of lack of choice is our collective cultural identity. The ways in which we believe we are divided from each other.
Nationality, for a start. We deal in boundaries: boundaries of land and sea, of language, of skin colour, of mode of dress and taste in food and whether we wipe ourselves with the right hand or the left.
Then there's religion. No god, many gods, one god - and what name that one might be called.
And it seems the more of us there are, the smaller and more petty those distinctions that divide us become. Like whether you live on one side of a street or the other, and wear blue or red.
Absurd, really, isn't it?
We are tribal animals and, when threatened, we retreat within our respective tribal identities, where we can pretend that we are safe to throw rocks at the others.
Despite that, in reality, we are never more than singular, imprisoned within the confines of our own skulls. But yet we share the greater prison of our lives on this planet with each and every other prisoner here, without exception.
See, choice.
We can choose to stay alone, or to be part of the all, or anything in between. But no matter where you draw the lines, any division is artificial.
It's the fact that we cannot seem to grasp and recognise this that I do not understand.
In one sense, then, Anzac Day is worth commemorating because it honours a greater bond than that of a single nation; a bond forged in blood sacrifice and spectacular folly, but a bond worth acknowledgement nonetheless.
You could even say that marking as it does a surrendering of individual and even tribal choice toward an intended common good is worth commemorating.
But the act arising from that so-called good - war - is not.
It's not that I do not wish to remember and honour the dead; it's that I am more concerned with the living. Not with past misery, but with future happiness.
Praising the mad folly of Gallipoli, and a plethora of mad follies since, only reinforces the sorts of tribal divisions that led to so much blood being shed in the first place. If we are ever to break down those divisions then we need to learn that lesson well, and grow beyond the animal response that would see us tear each other apart over nothing.
I am sure the dead of every war that ever was would agree. Because they would not want to think they died in vain.
Unless we all learn how to live together in peace, they will have.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.