The War on War

I want to declare war!  It seems like everybody's doing it.  We had the war against Communism that spawned two armed conflicts (Korea and Vietnam) that some people didn't even call wars (notably the people who actually fought in those wars and their families don't suffer such semantic confusion).  Of course the majority of the 20th century was consumed by what we refer to as the Cold War, which was actually a lot less of a war than Korea and Vietnam.
Wars apparently are popular.  We have the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, both of which have become terrible quagmires that make Vietnam look like a well-defined and executed operation.  These wars illustrate the difficulty of waging war against an abstraction.  We should learn that perhaps declaring war on enemies that you have a hard time defining, let alone locating, is a bad idea.
That brings us to the many and various wars that people think are being fought against them and their interests.  The War against Families, the War against Morality, the War against Freedom, who is fighting these wars I'm not sure, but judging by how often people talk about them someone must be.  I have noticed lawn placards around my area that talk about a war on coal, surely this is the first time in human history that anyone has declared war on a mineral, but before I launch into some absurd analysis of the semantics of the phrase, "war on coal," I'm going to stop.
Because what I think I really want to talk about is how ridiculous it is that we use the word war so lightly.  Anyone I have ever talked to who has been a part of an actual war has at least mentioned that it was about the most awful thing they've ever been through.  My Uncle, who was an Army Officer in both Korea and Vietnam, said one time that it was always a little difficult to figure out exactly why the people "over there" wanted so badly to kill you.  That sort of thing tends to leave a mark on your psyche.
Maybe it would be better if we stopped tossing the word war around quite so much.
There's this thing that happens, call it a semantic phenomenon: the more you use a word, the less it means.  The perfect example of this is the F-Bomb, in some circumstances (Church services and kindergarten classes) it is shocking, profane and completely unacceptable.  In other circumstances (construction sites and Tarantino movies), it's punctuation.  I would argue that the ideas and realities implied by the word war should always be a little bit shocking and terrifying.  Maybe the word should hold onto the horror of all that it inevitably entails.  Maybe if we stopped calling everything a war, we wouldn't be so ready to start them.