War is Still a Lie

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the Weak Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the program. War, the poet said, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. I'll say it again. War, well, I don't have to say it again because in the next hour, we're going to be talking about the pointlessness and futility of war and practical as well as idealistic ways to change that. We'll be right back. This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour.

And we're back on the zero hour. I as always am your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. My next guest who's been on the program before has written, or rather I should say rewritten and re-released a book, very important book. And I find a very surprisingly... Gripping Book, entitled War is Still a Lie. David Swanson is the communications coordinator for Rootsaction.org. He is also the executive director of World Beyond War, and he joins me now. So first of all, David, welcome back to the program. Great to be here. Thanks. Well, thank you. I think it's such an important book. I really do. And I think it's... It's addressing so many of the questions people have about the necessity or lack thereof of war. But let's start with this. I think you first wrote the book in 2010. You re-released it in 2015 and now again in 2026. So what has changed or not? Well, let me back up a second, actually. First of all, what's the fundamental theme of the book as you see it? So I wrote this thing in 2010 called War is a Lie. And I thought I would update it with each war or each year. And it just didn't seem feasible. And I updated it in 2015, War is a Lie Second Edition. And this time, I really a lot had gone by. A lot had changed, not just in wars and politics, but in the types of lies and how they were lying to us and which ones were being believed. So I changed it a little, and I called it. You can see what I'm holding up. War is still a lie. But I explained this is the third edition of War is a lie. And so I wrote a new section looking at how things have changed. And I tried to just hit the highlights, and that grew to almost 100 pages in what is now well over 500 pages. But the idea was to... You know, in 2010, Iraq was still the big topic, if anybody said war. And secondarily, Afghanistan, and of course, as always, for the past better part of a century, World War II. And... people were, you know, telling me that Iraq was a fluke, an exception of violation of the standards, that normally wars were good and just and rational and for decent purposes and all based on truth and righteousness. And, you know, I knew that couldn't quite be right. And I just went and read and read, and red, wars, wars, wars, U.S. wars, other wars, ancient wars, recent wars. And I couldn't find one.

that wasn't based on a pile of lies, including, yes, God forbid, I should say it, World War II. And there were themes. There were similar lies to get war started, to escalate them, to keep them going, to pretend they were good wars after everybody had forgotten how unpopular they'd really been. And so I didn't write a chronicle of this war, this war, this war. I wrote on... themes of, you know, everything they tell us about wars is a lie. These are some of the lies. And so I made, you know, chapters like wars are not fought against evil. Wars are not launched in defense. Wars are not waged out of generosity and so forth with examples from throughout history and across the world to try to establish those themes. And one of the things that struck me, well, one of the things that struck me listening to it was, The quote from Howard Zinn, which I will probably mingle, but where he pointed out that people say, well, the U.S. Revolutionary War was just. And he said, well, Canada got its independence from Great Britain without a revolutionary war. Well, the Civil War was just. well, Great Britain ended slavery without a civil war and so on. But one of the things that I kept thinking about, David, reading the book, was the sort of the liberal audience, the kind of audience that thinks of itself is, you know, decent and humane and not... warlike or bellicose. But you, for example, in the book, you quote an acquaintance or a friend who I gathered was on the liberal side of thing saying, well, George W. Bush was the first president to lie us into a war, to tell a lie to bring us into a war, which is very a historical, isn't it? Oh, of course. Again, there has not been a single war launched without a pile of lies. And very often literally recycled lies from previous wars. I mean, this is the only way in which the Pentagon has really gone green and done recycling. It recycles the lies. And so you have, you know, not just the lies about the Lusitania and nobody was warned and there was no ammunition on board and so forth. But you have Franklin Roosevelt. you know, just copying the Lusitania story with various ships that were assisting in World War II prior to the U.S. getting into World War II, because it was a very effective way to get people mad at Germany, and it was an established historical way. So it's better like that. You have stories going back to World War I of German assaults on Belgians. It's not that Germany didn't assault Belgium.

that Germany didn't commit atrocities. Everybody in every war does. But made up stories of particular children being threatened and attacked were recycled from 19th century wars and used in World War I. So there's not always that much creativity, you know? Sometimes it's, you know, pretty creative. Sometimes it's pretty effective. But, you know, there aren't any wars that aren't based on lies. It's just that sometimes they're really, really bad liars or they don't really put in the effort. And so telling everybody that a war is about giant stockpiles of weapons that you know pretty soon you're going to. discovered don't exist is really, really dumb lying. It's not it's not lying in contrast to truth telling. It's just really, really bad lying. And I didn't think anybody could outdo it until Trump came along and made a war on Iran be about opening a strait that had been closed by the war on Iran. I mean, that that one's, you know, dead on arrival. And to our credit, We're not believing it. You know, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly with Afghanistan and maybe even with Iraq, you had solidly established at the start that a majority of the people polled in the United States were for it. And it took many months. It took a year and a half or so in each case to where you were getting all the polls saying. a good majority says you never should have started this, right? And so, and I wanted people to catch on faster when I first wrote this book. But of course, even then, you still had a majority saying don't end it. Never should have started it, of course, but don't end it. Because at that point, you're killing on behalf of whoever's already been killed on your team, right? It's for the troops. The troops shall not have died in vain unless we kill more troops for no purpose. And that's gone now that they're not doing the big major ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying. It's not about the troopism. It's not about the revenge that, you know, is disgusting and absolutely non-legal excuse for a war, but very, very. established and respectable, you know, if it can be an effective, effective in that it speaks to the primitive in the human brain, right? I mean, that and that point about the fact that we're not seeing the mass deaths of human soldiers the way certainly we did in Vietnam, for example, but even we saw... We are, we are just not U.S. ones. Well, yes, that's, I'd hope I qualified it by saying U.S. soldiers. The... And that made me think of a comment in an essay by David Graber, the anthropologist, who said that in a way...

you know, the sort of ironic victory of Abby Hoffman in the 1960s peace movement is that, okay, American boys, as it was then, before we had a gender integrated workforce, aren't fighting and dying anymore the way they were. We're just killing other people now. And that's the legacy. And it's, I guess that's a way to transition to the fact that For one thing, you write about the fact that in this latest edition, the 2026 edition of War, now called War is Still Aligh, that we've gotten over something that was, a phrase I'd forgotten, Iraq War Syndrome, that if you go back 10, 11, 12 years, We were chastened as a country, right? We felt, okay, you know, this wasn't a good idea. This Iraq war, spent a lot of time, lost some lives, heard a lot of people, probably shouldn't have done it. It seems as if that syndrome is gone. And that was one of your reasons for putting out a new edition, am I right? Yeah, I mean, I hope it's not 100% gone, but it's greatly diminished. And it's striking, of course, that the Vietnam syndrome, the Iraq syndrome, label as a disease, a momentary bit of enlightenment where people say, oh, well, wars are horrific crimes, let's not do them anymore. It's called a disease. I think it's... It's also worth stopping and noting that you go back to before the gender integrated workplace, when for millennia wars were just about entirely male, and we decided, ah, what the heck, let's add female. We could have decided, ah, what the heck, let's... subtract male. And then you have everybody, except, you know, very, very unusual anthropologists screaming, but it's human nature. You can't. It's written in our genes. It's written in our economics. It's unavoidable. You must have it. And of course, you look at each and every particular war, and they're very carefully maneuvered into by people who want wars and profit from wars and are dedicated to avoiding peace. And yet you have people. screaming, oh, but you must have war. And, you know, not a single case of PTSD from war deprivation, not a single person on earth ever suffering from the lack of war. Everybody trying their best, almost everybody, to avoid war. And we're told this. And then we just casually add women. Why couldn't we subtract men? And so, yes, wars keep going and we keep being told they're normal and inevitable, even though 96% of humanities, governments don't do them remotely like, you know, the government of us 4% here. But they have changed and they've changed in these past, you know, 20 years. And...

Yes, it's true that this happened that you stopped killing our boys. But people don't generally believe that. If you ask people about Afghanistan or Iraq in the United States, there were polls. And typically a majority of people in the United States thought a majority of the deaths were U.S. military members, you know, when the reality was three or four percent, they thought it was a majority, right? And actually resented Afghanistan and direct for not being grateful for the service of having destroyed their countries and poisoned their land and killed their people, right? And this is why you get these conversations to this day about all our money is going to help Ukraine and Gaza and we need our money home for us. We need our money for good things, and it's so much, unimaginably so much money that you couldn't possibly spend it just on 4% of us. You could spend it, you could transform the whole world for a fraction of it. But it's not benefiting the people of Gaza or the people of Ukraine or the people of Iraq or Afghanistan. And when you... And when you try to avoid the wars being about killing the right kind of people, or even you try to hide the casualties, as Trump does, even with these tiny numbers of casualties, it doesn't mean people aren't dying. The air wars are often worse than ground wars in terms of casualties. They're just more one-sided. And so we have to, we have to get. We have to get to the point where we care about that. And possibly we do, because again, the war in Iran is very, very unpopular. It is. And I think that the availability of information from other sources besides U.S. mainstream media has helped with that. I think it's helped far too slowly, but I think it's also helped shift. perceptions about what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank as well as people are beginning to see through social media and elsewhere, what is really going on. But what strikes me a lot about this, too, is for all that's changed, David, there's so much... that hasn't changed about the way we think about war. For a talk I gave a long time ago, maybe a few years ago, I laboriously researched the anthropology on whether all human societies really wage war. I could have saved myself hours of work by just reading war is still alive because you have all that. in there, it is not an essential part of human nature. In fact, the point I made, and I think it's implicit in the book, too, is it's actually human nature not to wage war. When my neighbor and I have a disagreement over the hedges or something, we don't immediately start, you know.

air bombing each, you know, saturation bombing each other's houses. We talk about it. That's human nature is to resolve disputes through talking. But there seems to be, what's the phrase, a willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to war, and especially I'm going to go back to again, when it comes to kind of, you know, there may be, there's segments of our society that. They might be called deplorables by some politicians or whatever. You might expect them to be warlike. But I'm talking about the quote unquote good people who are the ones who tend to say, yeah, but this is a part of human nature. We've exhausted all other options. There's no talking to these people. I'm thinking of, you know, I wrote a column about this, a medical ethicist. Think about this. A professional medical ethicist at Albert Einstein School of Medicine wrote a piece arguing that all pharmaceuticals should be withheld from the citizens of Russia. because of the invasion of Ukraine. This would be mass murder of cancer populations of infants. And this is a medical ethicist. Think about what the people who don't think about ethics might want to do. And by the way, a known liberal commentator when I looked into him. So I just wonder. What the barrier is? What do you think is, I mean, obviously your book is an attempt to penetrate that barrier. I think it does a great job, but why is it hard to, why is there such fertile ground among people that would claim to you and me that they know better? Well, I mean, the good news is there's less and less of it. And 80% of us want to end the war on Iran. Maybe 70% of us falsely believe we have no power to change the behavior of the government. And that's the big lie to be overcome, is to understand that we could get active and do something and end the war. The other 20% who think the war on Iran is terrific and is either benefiting them or the world or they all need to be killed for being evil Iranians. that's that's a tough one and you know you you it's still it's pretty low there aren't too many insanities uh that that don't have 20% uh for them um so you know how how perfect do we have to get um i i do agree that i mean it's there's no question that more homo sapiens have lived on earth without ever coming anywhere near a war than have come near one i mean it's just not even close but uh i i sort of think it's important to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that we are responsible for whatever the heck we do and we can do absolutely anything. And you can call mass murder human nature and you can call peaceful cooperation human nature. And you're not going to be able to examine a human and actually find this thing called human nature anywhere. It just doesn't exist except as the lamest of excuses for things you're ashamed of doing but want to keep doing. We'll be right back after this with more of my conversation with David Swartner.

I'm Richard R.J. Escal and you are listening to The Zero Hour. You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash WeactRadio, D.C. And we are back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escad. We now continue our conversation with David Swanson about his new book, War is Still Alive. Those of us who oppose a war, you have to ask why, right? Is it because of the gas prices? Do we care at all about the illegality and the mass murder? Or is it because groceries are more expensive? You know, and when you look at the politicians, if you look at the so-called opposition, I mean, we have an online action at Roots Action for people to email Democrats in Congress and tell them to stop opposing deals that might end the war. because they include in their opposition to the war denouncing how bad any deal might be that might end it, even though it's, and of course, a deal to end a war is always going to be worse than never having started it in the first place. But the question, if we're not absolute idiots or drunk on partisanship, the question is, would a bad deal that ends the war? be worse than continuing the war and risking escalation and risking nuclear war and world war. And so you have all these, you know, Democratic senators and congress members who just about down to the last man and woman won't say a word about the illegality or the mass murder or the cruelty or the barbarism and sadism of the war, but they either want it to be properly authorized if you're going to have a war or they're upset about, you know, the price of gas and so forth. And this is, you know, this leaves some questions in my mind about exactly how far we've come. Well, and along these lines, and again, we can talk about in terms of glass half full, glass half empty. We see again, in terms of the support of the genocide in Gaza and the incipient genocide, if it has passed that now in the West Bank, that... Certainly Democrats and the American people in general are turning against these wars. They're leaders or not. We can point to structural reasons for that. We can attempt to mobilize that awareness. But that's a good news piece of it. But we are still, and this is one of the most delicate parts of your book to talk about, we are still sacralizing war fighters.

We are still, you have a chapter, you know, you're listing the various lives and misconceptions of war. I think each chapter name involves it. One of them is warriors or not heroes. This is a very delicate... This is a touchy thing to say in the United States of America across the political spectrum. You say, and it was an interesting point, that it's possible to be brave and courageous without being a hero. And tell us a little bit about... what that's all about, this business of warriors as heroes or not? Well, obviously, you can jump in front of a train and it's very brave, but does it do any good for the world? You can, you know, risk your life to murder a bunch of children, and it may be very brave, but it's also evil. And so the idea is to combine bravery with goodness, with strategic... improvement of the world for people. And then you get heroism because heroism is something you want to emulate. You have to be brave and good in a good cause for a good reason. Because, you know, if you just look at at war fighting, ants are clearly braver than homo sapiens. But. It also looks kind of stupid to us from way up here, the ants slaughtering each other. Like, do we, are we going to glorify the cause of one of the little groups of ants? Probably not. I, you know, I saw this, this movie of the Odyssey that everyone is so. Oh, you saw it. Uh-huh. And it de-glorifies. wars and it puts veterans issues at the center. According to this movie, the Greeks were lied into the Trojan War for economic reasons. Every warrior was forced into the war with threats to their family and their towns. The war was boring, wasteful, horrific, evil, traumatizing. And it destroyed the rule of law and spread fear and insecurity across their known world. And Odysseus took so long getting home because he had to recover from moral guilt and horror and PTSD and grief from the war. And everywhere he took his troops, there was raping and pillaging. And he met death. people who said, why did you lie to me? Why did you abandon me? And the whole thing was filthy and disgusting, except for the misdirected bravery. And then you get to the end of the war, I'm sorry, you get to the end of the, of the Odyssey, of the story, of the movie. And what does Christopher Nolan do? He keeps...

the ending where Odysseus locks 50 people in a room and slaughters them. Because revenge. Because, you know, you go through this whole like, hours and hours of war is evil and war is traumatic and war is pointless and you come to the end and there's revenge. Well, why didn't they just throw revenge on the Trojan War and then the whole movie would have, you know, evaporated because if revenge can, you know, purify locking 50 people in a room and murdering them, it can it can purify a whole war, as we know, from, you know, from Afghanistan and Syria and so on. So there's still progress to be made. Which gets to another sensitive point when we talk about warriors as heroes. I had an uncle, well, three of my uncles fought in World War II. And one of them was engaged in hand-to-hand combat. A very tough guy. Street. due, you know, from New York City. But he said to me once, when I was a teenager, a sort of reflective late night after a few drinks on his part, now mine, he said, you know, guys like me who did what I did, I think we should be locked away on some islands somewhere, kept away from society. And I said, why? He said, because we've killed people. I said, and he said, and we know how easy it is. And there is that very, I'm not, I don't mean to stigmatize all veterans, but the fact is glorifying them does them no service either. It does neither society nor them a service. They've been damaged. They've suffered moral injury and psychic injury, a psychological injury, if not physical, and glorifying them in a way, to me, just puts them in a box. where they can't even seek help for what we've done to them. Does that make sense to you at all? I agree, of course, 100%. The great peace activists in groups like Veterans for Peace will tell you the way to honor veterans is to stop creating more of them. It's not that you should be hateful towards existing veterans. It's not that you should be bigoted. toward existing veterans, but we should stop lying to ourselves that there isn't an impact, that there isn't a domestic violence epidemic when people come back from wars, that there isn't an uptick in racism and racist violence following every U.S. war that mass shooters in the United States aren't very disproportionately veterans who were trained to shoot on our time by our government. Obviously, statistically, almost not a single veteran is a mass shooter. You know, mass shooters are a very tiny number in the U.S. population, but they are very disproportionately veterans. And if they were very disproportionately redheads or homosexuals or people who could speak Portuguese, we would know all about it. I mean, there would be study after study. But.

because they're disproportionately people who were trained to shoot and thanked for the service of shooting lots of people by the U.S. government. That's completely irrelevant and, in fact, offensive for me to even mention. Well, a lot of this is considered offensive to mention. And that's why I went straight into it because I think that we have to get over the the taboos in terms of discussion of issues of war, which gets me to my next topic, which is, why is it, you think, so hard to have these conversations? I mean, even when you're talking to people who seem eminently reasonable, when you start saying, I can't tell you how many times, but I'm sure you know. I've been stigmatized myself and attacked and banned from certain conversation spaces because I didn't think we should support escalating violence between Ukraine and Russia, or I didn't think we should support the 2005 or 2006 bombing of Gaza, whatever it may be. It's as if it's more hateful to be against hate and murder than it is to be for it or to rationalize it. And it's almost like it's the last taboo in political conversation. You think I'm exaggerating or getting it wrong because I find these conversations surprisingly. Dare I say hostile on the part of the other party when I try to say, you know, this is not the only option we have and it's certainly not the best one. Well, this is a rot that starts from the top, right? The U.S. government is pushing this and identifying peace activists with leftists, with terrorists, identifying opposition to genocide with the most egregious of violence as opposed to actually supporting genocide being offensive. We have people getting kidnapped off the street for having written an op-ed against a genocide. We have people going to prison for decades for having opposed. genocide or having opposed paramilitary killings on the streets of the United States, for God's sake. So this is not a time to worry about being hyperbolic here. I mean, this is over the top. But I think one thing you can say to people that's very, very easy who tell you, you must support the war in Ukraine, you must support the war for Israel, you must support, you Just wait. Just wait a year or two and you and all of your buddies will agree with me because you look at the U.S. polling on Ukraine and it went from the most impressive propaganda accomplishment I have ever seen or imagined in terms of support for that war.

to the majority in the U.S. wanting it over. And if you'll recall, when we would say end the war in Ukraine, end the weapons shipments to Ukraine, stop blocking the peace negotiations in Ukraine. The most vicious accusation we would get was, we're doing this for the people of Ukraine and it's up to them. Look at the polling of the people of Ukraine. They want the war to go on. It's up to them. What place do you have to say one word just because you live on the planet that will be destroyed if this goes nuclear? You have no business. will now look at the polling of the people in Ukraine. The vast majority of them want negotiations and compromise that ends the war over continuing the war and the consequences be damned. It's true that at one point the polling said the opposite, but all you have to do is wait. And so why not be early? Why not be advanced? Why not get it right sooner when fewer people have died? Fewer people have been displaced. The hostility is at a lower level. There's a greater chance of reconciling and creating something we can all live with. Why wait? Because you know you're going to get there. You know the fever, the madness is going to wear off and you're going to have to negotiate peace or destroy the world. Why not get there sooner? And, you know, by the way, I want to add to that excellent point, David, that what always got me about that article, about that argument about it, is that if I have two neighbors out in the street fistfighting and I give one of them a machine gun. I have more, it's not up to him. Well, he wanted the machine gun. I'm still morally responsible for the death of the other guy and his whole family and the rest of the block because I did it. And in a court of law, I would be an accessory. So, you know, this business is about, well, it's up to them. No, it's not up to them what we do. It may be up to them what they do, but what we do is our moral choice and our responsibility. So that has... always driven me crazy and also the kind of us versus them reflexive. In this case, oh, you must be, oh, so you like Vladimir Putin. How much is Vladimir Putin paying you to say this and all this stuff? But I don't want to dwell just on the negative, David, because in your book, War is still a lie, you talk about some tools that are available. So before we go, I do want to.

briefly at least mention the tools. One of them is the Kellogg-Briand Pact, right? And there may be others as well, but there are some international, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, some international law provisions that might be used to prevent future wars. Is that correct? Well, in terms of the use of the rule of law, there are a lot of laws in existence that we can use. U.S. laws and international treaties that countries like the U.S. are party too, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact that you mentioned, which I mentioned a lot because I wrote another book about it and about the activism that created it. And I like the fact that it very simply says, all war is the illegal, full stop. But the U.N. Charter. says all war is illegal with a couple of very narrow exceptions that are never met by any of these wars. And yet the existence of these loopholes that people understand very imperfectly allows this pretense that, oh, well, that war must have somehow met that loophole or the Iraq war being so bad, the war on Afghanistan must have been authorized because that one was good. But the U.S. laws, in addition to these treaties that the U.S. is parted to are extensive. I mean, we can always create more. And everyone always gets excited about creating more. And it's wonderful to create a treaty to prohibit nukes, even though we've already got one that requires getting rid of all the nukes and all the other weapons, by the way. Very few people know that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty requires that everybody get rid of all weapons. not just nuclear ones, but every shipment of U.S. weapons to Israel violates at least a dozen U.S. laws. Certainly the Leahy law, right? Because that's the law saying that if there's human rights abuse is being used with our weapons, isn't that one of them? There are Leahy laws that are violated by these shipments of weapons and by U.S. participation and support in wars that are principally foreign. There are even moves now, as we speak, in the U.S. Congress, to push resolutions to get a vote on, you know, do you support the Leahy laws? And, of course, if you say you do, then what do you make of all the shipments to Israel? Of course, there's also... in the giant trillions of dollars more to the Pentagon bill, effectively emerging of the U.S. and Israeli militaries such that they may not have to hold votes anymore to just give unlimited weapons, give or sell to the Israeli military. So there are good and bad trends all the time.

The rule of law is, I think, something that we need, even though it's so imperfect and so biased. We need to universalize it and democratize it and stop inviting war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu to come visit Washington, D.C. and be applauded. while law-abiding countries are committed to arresting him under an outstanding arrest warrant. So, you know, I don't think we can do without the rule of law, but we have to be clear about how imperfect it is and what changes are needed. We have a list if you go to world beyond war.org slash list of past successful nonviolent efforts. to block invasions, overthrow coups, overthrow dictators, prevent wars, you know, situations where you're told war or nothing. What's the matter with you? We have a list if you go to world beyond war.org slash list of past successful nonviolent efforts to block invasions, overthrow, coups, overthrow dictators. prevent wars, situations where you're told war or nothing. What's the matter with you? Where people have used something other than war, where people have used occupying the streets, shutting down the government, protesting the militaries, redirecting the troops, nonviolently interfering and succeeded. Of course, there are many times when they've not succeeded, but we know from the scholarship that principally nonviolent campaigns of all sorts, including this sort, succeed more often and the successes are longer lasting. You hear the rest of my conversation with David Swanson. Please go to zero hour report.com. We'll be right back after this.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour. I hate to end the show on a bummer, so we're back on the Zero Hour on your host, Richard R.J. Esbel. I hate to end the show on a bummer, so we'll try to... spin it in a not entirely depressing way, but they say that the super el nino, now developing in the tropical Pacific, has a 90% chance of becoming the strongest in a century and a half and 150 years. That would mean unleashing really extreme weather, even more so than the extreme weather we've been having recently, breaking global temperature records. That, of course, will be disastrous on any number of levels, including lives lost or crops lost. and everything else. But who knows? Perhaps humanity is waking up to the reality of climate change, or perhaps this will be just the bottoming out we need to become aware of it and do something about it. We'll see you next week.