To the Editor:

India had 2,000 years of peace thriving with an eastern philosophy advocating meditation, inner awareness, and deep breathing. During peaceful times sadistic tendencies are tucked within. During war, people whose more dominant characteristics relish in malevolency find opportunities to expose this mental illness and relish in it.

Cruelty, hot-blooded adrenalin, hormones that rise to the occasion flourish, victims are tortured. History is written by the winners who exaggerate the atrocities committed by the other side. The defeated lick their wounds, and unless individuals write of their rapes, scalping, and other ways they were humiliated and those accounts make it into some historical record, the winners think that their victory is won in a fair, justifiable, and noble way.

I hope a book I am currently writing about Molly Brant and her people will allow your laughter, guffaws, chuckles, smirks, titters, giggles, hee hee hees, and heh hehs. In my attempt to make this book light hearted, I added humor to events of the 18th Century wars and was doing okay with this perspective until I encountered Tim Compeau’s research.

His research exposed that the winners of the American Revolution including Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine deliberately used the tactic of emasculation to shame Tories and activate the rebels. Even Quakers were picked on: peace-loving Quakers who tried to remain neutral.

Cruelty breeds cruelty. Our immune system, under stress doesn’t function as well. When the guard against invasion of a human enemy needs to be up, the guard against disease is down. Problems compound themselves. War is not good for plants or other living things.

Everyone has to be amused by something. How can we get rabble rousers, war mongers, propagandists, to meditate?

Patricia Barkman

Newtown