We have strategies for war, natural disaster, (sort of), and man-made folly. We have financial strategies and metaphorically, everything is some kind of sports strategy. There are daily corporate strategy meetings and well-honed strategies in games like bridge and chess and, yeah, Stratego®. But, we have no real peace strategy, at least not one that is anything more than a by-product of some of the above.
Oddly enough, the most peaceful among us, the Gandhis and Kings and Sadats, have met with unpeaceful resistance and violent death and their remembrances have sadly become more about vacation days than the messages they preached. We hear sermons and stump speeches about the illusive and distant mirage called World Peace, and yet, the lion’s share of global policy is spent on nuclear summits and G-8’s and a myriad of conferences and tribunals of little purpose and less substance. We have failed to connect the dots between oil spills and terrorism and global warming and jobs and health care and space exploration, and our posturing for ideological supremacy, our thirst for oil and our misguided need to broker access to health and comfort continue to broaden the chasm between those dots. And, although the word ‘peace’, in whatever its translation, is prevalent in theraison d‘etre and rhetoric of every nation, the unwavering and varied demands required to move in the direction of its attainment, give little hope to the prospect.
A fundamental principle to the notion of Peace must be a sincere respect for life. The concepts of killing in its name or the inevitable and acceptable collateral damage are preposterous, (except for Jack Bauer, where they are tres cool). The drones we send after purported bad guys that end up killing innocent civilians are no better than the cowardly car and suicide bombs of radicalized lunatics. War is messy, illogical and antithetic to its rationalized purpose.
We missed a galvanizing opportunity in the wake of the horror that was 9/11 by not rallying the most peaceful nature of a world empathizing with our pain. Instead, we struck out, and continue to strike, at an indistinct, shadow enemy who is feeding and growing off of our enmity.
It has become almost impossible to bear our country’s school-nurse approach to problem solving, placing one inadequate band-aid on another:
All I am saying is, (with deference to JWOL)…give Peace a chance! Or, we can just wait until Texas rewrites history so that everything turns out OK, y’all.