Napoleon. Caesar. To agree. Lee.

D-Day. The Trojan Horse. The fate of Pharaoh’s army in the middle of the Red Sea.

Now we can add Putin, Kiev, Kharkiv to this list.

Make room in the history books, there’s a new war in town.

And when it comes to war, we are either dishonest or we learn painfully slowly.

That we learn slowly is quite obvious. Our problem-solving skills aren’t much better than the Assyrians, even though our weapons are.

As for being dishonest… Can we, at least for a moment, admit that war has us in its grip? Uncontrolled violence; uninhibited cruelty; wanton destruction – like nothing else, they hold our attention; capture our imagination. Lure us like vultures to carrion.

We are kept spellbound by the romance of war, the thrill of heroic violence. We can’t imagine a world without her – why else “Star Wars”, Darth Vader dolls and our fondness for Klingons? How else can we explain our morbid fascination with all things Nazi; Civil War re-enactors; and the Pentagon budget?

“They say ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace,” the prophet wrote three millennia ago, “are they ashamed of the abomination they have committed? No, they have no shame. They don’t even know how to blush.

I – all of us – have lived our lives with war, although for almost everything here it has been a distant thing. Just words in the newspaper. Pictures on TV. What to talk about when we covered football and weather.

I was born in the war in Korea. Grew up with the war in Vietnam. I saw the tanks enter Kuwait and Iraq. Lived for decades with the nagging violence in Afghanistan. In the meantime, I watched the troops land in Panama and Grenada – yes, let’s not forget how we invaded Grenada to make nutmeg safe for democracy. We sent Marines to Lebanon, we bombed the Balkans, and we nearly got into an atomic melee over Cuba.

And even when American soldiers weren’t involved, there was always fighting somewhere in the Middle East, Africa, or some scorching Asian jungle.

It seemed that war, even when Americans were fighting it, was still far away – something that happened in hot and dusty or hot and humid places, involving people who didn’t look like us or live like us.

Kyiv is a lot like Minneapolis. Refugees appear to be able to board Amtrak. There is snow on the ground and the blood in the snow is white blood, shed by white people.

We are not used to this.

The wars we are used to. But not the wars fought in places where we imagine the Easter Bunny might stop, among people who might be on Santa’s gift list. We’ve grown accustomed to toppled minarets, burnt mosques – but with Christians crowded into churches for fear of violence from other Christians, well, we really don’t know who to pray for…there isn’t even impious cocos to give theological direction, and even less political.

War is 5,000 miles away, but if war came to Milwaukee, it would probably look a lot like this.

I’d like to think it might make some sort of difference, but we are, after all, slow learners. We’ll replace rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter slogans with blue and yellow Facebook memes, outrage each other and swear Russian vodka at our bloody Sunday brunches, then get back to business as usual.

And if the war continues, we’ll get used to it too.

Three thousand years ago, Jeremiah knew us well.