We hear a lot about ‘peace’ these days. War tends to bring that concept right on around to the forefront of thought for many.
I’m just curious about one thing: What is peace?
Is peace the absence of war? If the conflagrations of war that presently smatter the globe were to be suddenly extinguished, would we, on that day and at that precise moment, have peace?
I think not.
I think we seek what we do not know nor understand. Because peace is first an internal human condition, the absence of conflict in a community, be it local or global, does not equate to peace in the hearts of men. Dissention and dissatisfaction seem to foment within humans, eventually erupting in confrontation. I will wager that to the majority of people, ‘peace’ is an expectation unwittingly placed on everyone other than themselves. Peace would mean everyone simultaneously and continually yielding on all fronts to everyone else. If you've lived in a family very long, you already know how hard it can be at times just to 'get along', but the deeper reality is inner dissention and dissatisfaction. The key is how those negative feelings are processed. We choose either to entreat one another, or to erupt at one another. The reason there is not Peace on Earth is because it is filled with human beings.
Peace seems to be a favorite poster child of Hollywood. Hollywood stars and starlets tend to be very vocal about the illegitimacy and immorality of war, about its negative consequences on innocents, about the upheaval and disruption it creates in the lives of the affected. All of this assumes that upheaval is not the norm, and that somewhere this ideal of peace as a normative and good state does exist. However they tend to distill peace down to the absence of war. Yet their own lives, like the life of every other human on the planet, manifests the seeds of conflict; there is no shortage among the Hollywood elite of broken vows, nasty divorces, and patently self-destructive behavior. Conflicts one and all, and thus by definition, without peace.
So Hollywood icons use their audience access to promote the higher good of peace. Yet what do we see coming out of Hollywood? Are we deluged with programs and films that extol virtue, honor and selflessness? Hardly. We find a deliberate attempt to evict innocence from humanity, starting with the youngest among us. A deliberate attempt to project what is neither the norm nor normal AS exactly that…normal and acceptable. Young people are assailed with a culture of self-centeredness and sex. Both are portrayed as the panacea that will give them ultimate equality and freedom, though with what and from what escapes me. Advertisers understand this predilection all too well, and absolutely capitalize on it when seducing the dollars out of naive youths around the world, though probably nowhere more than in the Western world.
Movies and television programs are filled with the macabre, the sadistic, the amoral and immoral. Perversion is pumped onto movie and television screens like barrels of oil bursting from the Persian Gulf. But where unrestrained consumption of oil is bad (we are told), unrestrained consumption of sex is good! We are told that there needs to be change, that Americans are too Puritanical.
This call for change amounts to an agenda, and agendas precipitate conflict. Today our country is divided largely along lines of conservative and liberal morals and values. Liberal morals preach a ‘do what you want as long as it doesn’t harm another person' perspective. Conservative morals ask, ‘is what you are doing the right thing?’ and also assumes that a higher standard of 'right' does in fact exist.
But peace really requires more than warlords and dictators laying aside their agendas. It requires individuals to put aside their own interests and pursuits, their own personal agendas, in the interest of helping others.
Rebellion is the forerunner of war, and rebellion is what resides in the hearts of men. Rebellion is the refusal to acknowledge certain laws and moral standards as legitimate, and purposing instead to replace them with relative standards, so that what is wrong today may in fact be right tomorrow.
It is as though we are first and foremost at war with ourselves. And that would explain the rest.
