Thoughts on Peace

"Peace isn't something we win! It's not like a carnival prize," someone wrote in response to a comment on a YouTube video.

But wait, isn't that what we're fighting for? We're fighting for peace, aren't we? And when we win, we'll have it, won't we?

How does one "fight" "for" "peace"? Isn't peace the absence of fighting? If we stop fighting, won't we have peace then?

Didn't we have peace before we went to war? Why did we go to war to have peace? Wouldn't it make more sense if we stopped the war now and then we'd have peace?

Maybe, maybe not. It's been observed often enough -- though not talked about in public very much -- that we actually had more peace when Saddam Hussein was in charge of Iraq. Oh, to be sure, there were plenty of threats and fears, but we weren't at war. Does that mean we have to have a dictator in Iraq, or anywhere else, in order to have peace?

Is having a dictator the price some people have to pay in order to have peace? Is peace, then, something one buys, whether one is an individual, a group, a nation, or even a planet? Buying suggests some kind of exchange, one currency for another or something like that. So what is the price of peace? Must we continue to pay with the blood and limbs and lives of our military and the civilians of Iraq (and Afghanistan, not to mention Syria, Lebanon, Chechnya, Israel, and anywhere else there's no peace) to buy peace? Or is it a matter of spending billions and billions and even trillions of dollars on weapons? And how much peace to do we get in return? How long must we pay? If you ask me, we've paid enough, and we don't seem to have very much peace in return. So maybe we can't buy peace after all.

There are plenty of people saying we have to pray for peace, not just at this particular time of year, but it does seem to be a popular sentiment. "Peace on Earth," the angels said, but they didn't bring any. Maybe it was just a promise, like when parents tell their children that if they're good, they'll get a reward. But it seems people have been praying for a very long time, and there doesn't seem to be any more peace as a result. Surely if God or Allah or Jehovah or the Buddha or any of the thousands of other deities to whom human beings have been praying and lighting candles and sacrificing virgin lambs to really wanted us to have peace on earth, wouldn't we have it by now?

Wishing for peace seems to be just about as productive as praying. Holiday cards offer wishes for joy and peace, for happiness and good health, for prosperity in the new year, but no more happens than with prayers.

So if we can't win peace or buy it or wish it into existence or persuade the gods to give us some, how the hell are we gonna get it?

Maybe we'll have to make it ourselves. It's probably going to be hard work, and I imagine it will take the efforts of a lot of different people bringing a variety of skills and experience and knowledge. We may not succeed on the first attempt; have you ever made something that turned out perfect on the first try? We may make mistakes in the process, but as someone who has tried her hand at a lot of different crafts over the years, I've found that studying pattern books and learning from those who have been successful in the past -- yes, even learning from their mistakes -- can cut down on errors and speed the process to achievement. And we can't give up after a few mistakes; we have to keep trying, keep learning. Practice will make perfect.

We won't be able to make it on our own. We're going to have to rely on help from friends. We're going to have to cooperate and compromise -- peace isn't just mine or yours; it's ours -- and figure out how to make our enemies our friends, because that's part of the making peace process.

And we're going to have to look at peace from a lot of different perspectives, too, if we want to end up with a final product worth having. Like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble, we need to walk around and look at it from the back and the front, from all sides, even from top and bottom, to make sure it's something we will want to display for the whole world to see and that everyone who looks at it will see something beautiful, something they will want to have for themselves and keep forever.

Then, when we're done, when we've made this beautiful thing called peace, we will still have the responsibility to care for it, to make sure no one breaks it. But I have a feeling that if everyone helps to make it, everyone will have that much more reason for keeping it intact.

The best thing about making peace is that the more of it we make, the more we will have to give away. Not buy or sell or fight over, but just hand out for free. Yeah, almost like a prize at a carnival.

Peace,

Tansy Gold

That youtube comment was mine. Small cyber world :)

I object to the idea that we have to fight to have peace. That's like eating to lose weight.

If you think about Iraq, like I said in my comment, they were more peaceful when Sadaam was still in power. Then we invaded and destroyed that peace. It just seems ironic to me that we invaded a country, bombed their cities and killed their people so they could have peace.

And think of the escalation of violence in the middle east since our invasion of Iraq. Go back even further and you find many believe that al qaeda's motive for 9/11 was to protest the US alliance with Israel.

So we aren't bringing peace to the middle east. We are just making a bad situation worse. And a big part of the world is far less peaceful, thanks to the good ole USA.

It seems to me that if we really wanted to help bring peace to the middle east, we could start by bringing our troops home from Iraq. They are not fighting for peace.

A friend of mine made the YouTube video, but I couldn't get it to work, despite many tries. That's why I didn't put in a link, because I didn't know for sure if the link she had sent me actually worked, which meant I couldn't link to the original comment, either.

But as soon as I saw that comment, the ol' light bulb in the brain went on, and the ol' fingers started spittin' out words.

Thanks for the inspiration!



TG

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=10870&mesg_id=10870

and kudos to your friend!!

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me....

It begins by finding peace within your own heart. This is not always easy, especially when we are buffeted by people, thoughts, and ideas that are contrary to our own. It can be achieved through practice, and that practice must be constant.