The History That Peace Made - Part 1

"It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

Wislawa Szymborska, I Don't Know: The 1996 Noble Lecture.

It is difficult to decide the best way to pose the question: should it be at what point does peace end and war begin? Or, at what point do those who love peace accept the reality of war's ongoing presence in the world? On the weekend of February 14-16, 2003, more than 8,000,000 human beings decided that peace was something that had to begin with them and war was a reality they could not accept for the reasons offered by those proposing it. The profound courage and intense beauty of their attempts to curtail war was one of he most notable and noble achievements ever recorded by humanity. Yet as triumphant and potentially redeeming as the accomplishment was, the popular media and federal government officials in the United States responded to the phenomenon as though it were little more than an amusing afternoon matinee. Those who lived it and those who, watching mesmerized from the sidelines, thrilled at the sight of this spectacular contribution to the annals of enlightenment - despite the inability, ultimately, to avert war - knew that something much greater, much more rare, and much more precious, had taken place. A vision of humanity as a unified force for peace had come alive in the form of millions of living breathing souls and an ideal of international democracy had been realized on a small but unprecedented scale. History was not only made; history was tremendously honored.

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves. And whereas peace allows one to easily embrace such elements essential to integrity as respect for the truth and reverence for life, war perhaps begins with the abandonment of these same elements.

Another question: what best defines victory in a world where men and women wage war much more brutally and effectively against other men and women than they do against the failings of their own character?

The apparently endless number of zealous human beings willing to literally detonate themselves in the name of a promise of glory would indicate they believed self-extinction one form of triumph. The finality of this conviction does not, obviously, leave them room for second thought. Unless such thoughts take place in a different world altogether but certainly not in this one. A similar train of thought seemed to motivate those who consoled themselves, following the massacres of September 11, 2001, with visions of bombs and marines raining down on Afghanistan and Iraq like a polychromatic technological biblical wrath unleashed for all the world to see and fear. The proficiency with which nations have learned to deal out death to other nations does indeed generate much shock and much awe but far less so than the realization that the billions of dollars spent and the thousands of human lives lost - children's and women's and men's lives, Christians' and Jews' and Muslims' lives - have not resulted in anything resembling resolution or stability, neither within the United States nor outside it.

The lethal harm that the militant extremist Osama Bin Laden visited upon the collective heads of the United States, and, truly, the rest of the world, was an act of butchery that can never be exaggerated or forgotten. The estimated 3,030 lives lost in New York City, Washington, D. C., and Pennsylvania will forever haunt the halls of United States history even while many in other countries accustomed to the ravages of terrorism view the atrocity as the United States' modern political coming of age. The madness with which Bin Laden pleasured himself was and is ineluctably reprehensible and yet politically comprehensible. Placing religion respectfully to the side (an authentic and practical possibility) one may not sympathize with Bin Laden's perception of the United States as an arrogant imperialistic super power deserving of attack but one is forced to grasp some measure of what makes the clock of his insanity go tick tock to the rhythm of barbarism. A less understandable insanity is the undeclared civil war that citizens of the United States wage against each other without the contorted rationale of an Osama Bin Laden.

The fact is that even without the official sanction of official war, violence tends to be a sad and pervasive element of life in the United States. Whereas Osama Bin Laden in 2001 racked up an estimated body count of 3,030, in that same year Americans surpassed him by depriving some 15,980 fellow citizens of their lives. The following year, in 2002, the figure increased to approximately 16,348. By further contrast, the United States lost approximately 100 military men and women in the Afghanistan conflict following September 11 and by the end of January 2004 had lost more than 500 military personnel in the Iraq war since its beginning March 19, 2003. Clearly, even when combined, these figures reflecting the loss of lives in wars that cost billions of dollars to wage - and that as of this writing are still being waged - do not begin to approach the number of lives lost in the United States due to what can only be described as a lethal faith in the power of destruction. Moreover, an estimated 30,000 erased themselves from the pages of this world by their own hands; theirs were not attempts to become political or religious martyrs - they apparently were trying to escape a world where it seemed the possibility for peace or joy or simple sanity was, in fact, no longer a possibility at all. The chilling contrast between those lives lost in military campaigns and those lost to domestic violence can easily lead one to conclude that the deadliest war in which the United States engaged in 2002 going into 2003 was actually an undeclared civil war obscured by more politically charged endeavors.

That terrorists and the more legitimate military organizations traffic every day in life-annihilating extremism is a tragic given. That ordinary citizens of ordinary countries do the same - sadly, the United States surpasses other industrialized nations in the number of citizens who routinely kill fellow citizens - is an extremism that few, in this modern world at the beginnings of the twenty-first century, allow themselves to acknowledge. It is the reality that on any given day there can be found in the United States a husband, once thought loving, beating his wife to death; a mother, once believed saintly, drowning her children in a bathtub or pool; a student, once considered a delightful child, armed like an Israeli soldier and cutting down fellow students one by one. There can be found an employee emptying one bullet chamber after another into a room full of coworkers turned instantly into corpses, a neighbor cutting the throat of a neighbor, or a perfect stranger raping and robbing and killing a perfect stranger.

Acts of annihilation flow from an acquired faith in violence with such soul-chilling calm that many in the United States scream in the face of it but few question the origins or inevitability of it. Fewer still dare to wonder if our country's penchant for attempting to police the rest of the world is little more than yet another expression of our neighbors', and possibly of our own, seeming belief that the purpose of life is the destruction of life.