Imagine Peace

I had some vague plans for today's post, but I forgot about Peace Day. When this day came last year, I had only been blogging for a few months, and it was one of my first glimpses of the blogging community. I was surprised to see that many of my favorite blogs, which were so different from each other, had gathered together to think about peace: how to achieve it, what it meant, how it made them feel, and so on. Later that day, when my new friend CEO sent me my own personalized "Dona Nobis Pacem" banner, I felt the connection of blogging. I was amazed that a stranger, hundreds of miles away, would take the time to make something for me. CEO went from being a stranger to being a friend, and blogging went from being a solitary passtime to a community activity that was never far from my mind.

A lot of bloggers are writing about peace today, and their eloquence is inspiring, but I don't really have anything profound to say. I'm not an optimist about peace. There was a time, years ago, when I thought that humans might, one day, be able to live together. I could imagine a time when there might not be any wars in the world. Right now, though, I find it hard to even imagine a time when the United States won't be shipping its children overseas to kill people.

When I was a teacher, I would often have my students read George Orwell's 1984. One of the hardest things for them to deal with was the idea that "War is Peace," and they tended to dismiss this famous quote as empty rhetoric about totalitarian governments. Looking deeper, though, we noticed that war does, indeed, lead to peace. It inspires cohesion, nationalism, and a setting-aside of all the meaningless little things like free speech and the right to assemble. In fact, one could argue that the shortest route to internal peace and security is external conflict.

I wonder, though, if we could claim the converse of Orwell's statement. If War is Peace, might not Peace be War? Maybe, if we really want peace, we will need to approach it as a real war. It's a battle between those who financially benefit from war and those who physically suffer. It's also a battle between those who believe in America's beautiful rhetoric and ideals and those who can't see past its global primacy. In other words, the search for peace is a conflict between the path that our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence promise and the path that our government has chosen to follow.

The gap between these two extremes is so wide that I wonder if it can ever be bridged. I think that, if we hope to find a way across it, we must begin by abolishing the exceptions that we are so inclined to make. There should be no exceptions to our freedom of speech, or our freedom to assemble. There should be no exceptions to our defense of habeas corpus or our prohibitions against torture. Every exception we make is a deterioration of the very freedoms that we claim to honor and a step away from peace. At the end of the day, we cannot protect who we are by destroying the things that make us unique.

And we can't achieve peace by fomenting war.