When my brother and I had childhood fights that were interrupted by our mother, we played the he started it card. Our mother, as grownups will do, attempted to discover the truth—who started it—and mete out consequences. More often than not, she gave up and both of us were sent to our rooms.
The he-started-it gambit is not limited to squabbling children. Adults are equally guilty. I look back at my time as a marriage counselor as I succumbed to he-started-it when I attempted to referee arguing couples. Eventually, I saw the light. I’d explain, “We’re wasting time and (your) money. You can have your fights at home.”
Most conflicts have no beginning or end, and The Palo Alto Mental Research Institute coined the term, punctuation, to describe that it’s arbitrary where you define the beginning of a conflict. Couples bring up transgressions from an hour ago, yesterday, and years past to back their grievances.
With couples who have a union of true love, while he-started-it conflicts may never go away, they’re rarely fatal to a marriage. Any intervention that convinces the parties that all attempts to win the argument are futile should be a winner. The arguments needn’t disappear, but just become less important than whether the Seahawks win their upcoming game.
Tragically, he-started-it isn’t just about childhood altercations and marital bickering. Many thousands and sometimes millions of lives are lost in like disagreements that result in war among tribes and nations.
The Treaty of Versailles can be punctuated as either the end of World War I or the beginning of World War II. The former, because the agreement formally ended the conflict between Germany and the Allied Powers; the latter, because the penalties against Germany (especially the reparations) created such harsh economic conditions that it became the catalyst for Hitler’s political elevation.
We needn’t go back to old conflicts. Journalists accompany reports on current strife in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine by invoking history many decades past, and the conflicting parties in the Middle East slaughter each other with justifications that go back centuries. Those historical he-started-its are run-on sentences with lots of commas and conjunctions that would not be tolerated by grammar scolds.
When it comes down to it, he-started-it is bullshit. Most wars are just, fuck you! I want what I want.