The War on Drugs. The War on Poverty. The War on Terror. The War on Crime. The War On Obesity. The Battle of the Sexes. The War on... all bad stuff.

By using the word war so many times, I risk being profiled as a warmonger, but I am just trying to illustrate how many un-won wars have been going on in my lifetime.

War requires so much time and energy that there is no time left for love.

War talk may seem specific at first, but if you start asking about the details, the ideas becomes fuzzier. War talk seems designed to appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. Just know that, yes, we need to jump in the tank and fire off a few rounds and volley and show rage and fume and kill those bastards and send them into oblivion. That's what war is all about, right?

Do you recognize these words "We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia"? It is from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don't mean to be critical. I'm not an expert on war, but sometimes a little common sense would go a long way. When you wage war, you make a war plan, right? You size up the situation, gather your collected intelligence, and carefully determine your course of action, much like building a house. To win a war, you have to have a winning strategy or else you just slaughter a lot of people and destroy a lot of things that are expensive and/or impossible to replace.

Isn't it time we started to win our wars or else get off the rhetorical high horse? Isn't it just a little bit embarrassing to wage a war for decades and be in exactly the same place decades later? If you keep doing the same things over and over again and fail, does it make sense to keep doing the same things over and over again?

That is, of course, if your objective is to win the war.

When used, the words The War (on anything) sound so righteous and defensible, but are they really? If you wage war on something, that thing must be bad or why bother?

The frequency of a word used in any language tells how important that word is in the particular culture in which it is used. Eskimos have many words to describe the different kinds of and different uses for snow. The Greek language has many words to describe love. The English language mostly just uses the word war. One of the reasons is that it is a three letter one syllable word. Were it multisyllabic, something would have to change. War would have to end or people would find a monosyllabic word for it. Besides, too many words can look like clutter.

I don't fault the Inuit for their use of snow or the Greeks for their use of love. It's useless to fault a culture for their love of anything, including America's apparent love of war.

The ingenius strategy would be to discern what is intrinsic in human nature and to turn it into an advantage. Doesn't anyone remember the phrase kill'em with kindness? That, of course, doesn't jive with the jump in your armored vehicle, shoot canons, make a lot of noise and generally appeal to the inner caveman squadron of the brain.

How can the intrinsic need for "two minutes hate" be turned to advantage? How can we growl, scratch, scream, make ugly faces, direct bad words at the enemy, and just loosely cast off all the rules of propriety and civilization that family, church, and school have spent so many long years inculcating in us?

There's always love, sex, and peace, but there's no time for that. We are At War and always have been: WWI, WWII, (Please explain to the young that this and www has noting to do with the World Wrestling Federation), the Korean Conflict, The Vietnam War, The Persian Gulf War, The War in Iraq, and the War in Afghanistan, just to hit the highlights.

How about a War on Grime? Is there anyone that you could not convince? Isn't grime a bad, evil, hateful thing, usually? It crosses all cultural and national demographics, and you don't have to be kind. People hate that.

A War on Grime could be an unending war, waged with vehement force. Grime could become the psychological whipping boy. There's plenty of it, always was and always will be. You thrash one grime monster and a new one springs up in its place. That's the nature of microbes.

Finally, a never-ending war that can be won. Imagine the news updates on the number of macrophages set upon the enemy, the number of specific bacteria and virus entities destroyed by our forces.