Monty Python philosophy

There's a Monty Python song entitled, "I'm so worried." To the mournful sounds of a string accompaniment, Monty sings a doleful ditty. He's worried about the middle east, he's worried about the fashions young people wear today, but above all he's "so worried about the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow." In another song on the same album we are advised, "Never be rude to an Arab." Or an Orangeman and a few other assorted easily offended types. Fearlessly, he even uses the "N" word which is only printable nowadays when used to show the ignorance of rude Southern honkies. The number ends in mid verse with an explosion. But to show his bona fides, in the next song he tells us the he likes Chinese who only come up to his knees. Growing up in a Catholic household and attending a Catholic school I had personal experience of discrimination and bigotry. At Norwood (public) school on my way to Sacred Heart (Catholic) School I used to get an almost daily dose of "Protestant, protestant ring the bell, Catholic, Catholic go to Hell." Sometimes the bullies weren't content with words and I had a few fights right there on the corner of 95 St and 111 Ave. Schoolyard bullies are frequently in the news these days with the moral of the story being that some action must be taken. True. But the action that needs to be taken is for the less aggressive boy to learn how to stand up for himself and tht being nice doesn't always work. That's what bullies are for, to teach us something. Remove that threat and you will also remove the learning opportunity. Of course, nothing will ever stop schoolyard bullies from popping up, and if the inevitable conflicts are forced underground they will be far worse than a few fisticuffs. And as far as the much deplored use of 'stereotypes' for humour, they can be used as much to defuse a situation as to aggravate it. And sometimes they can be used to puncture pomposity. And who could possibly be more pompous than our politically correct thought police?
Why am I going on about this? Or is this also an important lesson in politics, whether local or international. The idea of having international police sounds attractive to many well intentioned people but the problem with police is that they are hard to control or that the wrong people end up controlling them. Sometimes it's betterr to just duke it out and hope the good guys win. They don't always.
A commonplace of conventional wisdom is that wars never do any good. Historical thinking of recent decades has minimised the importance of war, emphasising the impact of economics and other influences. But they are wrong. Economics and sociology are important but sometimes it comes down to one way of thinking versus another. No further compromise is possible. Your way of life, your way of thinking, your culture, your homes, cities, holy places, are being threatened by a hostile force. In previous eras it was possible to pull up stakes and migrate to some other land, taking it away from people already there, but that can't be done anymore. Now the only alternatives are to fight or submit. Today we are in a war. We don't want the war, but we have it anyway.
Make no mistake. This is a pivotal war that will determine the course of history for centuries. It's hard not to compare it to the civil wars that weakened the Greek world following its defeat of the Persian army. Having proven they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world, the Greeks escalated their chronic local conflicts into a conflagration between two irreconcilable views of what it meant to be Greek. The contest was framed as between Democratic Athens and despotic Sparta but it was a fissure that ran through every Polis. It was brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, city against city. One faction would get the upper hand and slaughter the other faction, until that other faction regained power and did some slaughtering of their own. All the previous rules of conduct were abandoned in an orgy of savagery, hubris and betrayal so well chronicled by Thucydides that I have never had the stomach to finish reading it. Athens lost, but so did Greece, leaving it easy pickings for the Macedonians under Phillip. His son Alexander harnessed all that Greek energy and ingenuity and used it for the most remarkable conquest of all time and setting the table for the Romans. It is impossible even to imagine how the last few thousand years of history would have transpired if a few Spartans and Athenians hadn't stood up to the Persians.
Which brings me back to Monty Python. Why should I care what happens for the next 2000 years? Why should I care what happens 20 years from now when I'll probably be dead? Why is it so important to me that all of our western cultural motifs survive and prosper into the distant future? What difference does it make if a new dark age ensues? Or to really put it in context, as I tried to do in our local "Cafe Philosophy" a few years ago when I suggested as a topic, "Why does anything matter since in a few billion years the sun is going to burn up anyway?" Obviously, as archaeologists have proven, no species we know of has survived anywhere near a billion years, and we will be extinct someday just as surely as T Rex. So why does anything matter, other than just getting as much pleasure out of my one little life as I can? Don't really know for sure. Just asking.