Together

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms

            I’ve been questioned as to why I am and continue to write about achieving peace.  I’ve even been alerted to the fact that people who preach about peace and who desire it with the utmost passion are usually the ones “taken out,” as to which I responded:

“Great.  Hope it’s for Chinese food because I love being taken out to Chinese food.”

But I digress.  Something like this should not even correlate any aspects of meticulousness when it comes to ‘self.’  If I could write a whole string of pieces on peace and have people read it, contemplate on it and even share it, then I would be satisfied to leave this planet.  Robert Baden-Powell once said, “Leave this world a little better than you found it.”

But why isn’t this more commonplace?  Why does something like this seem so far-fetched?  Anyone in their right mind knows that Lego create their masterpieces or their depiction by placing blocks together, not tearing them apart.  Even more so, the world peace I seek is not one where we are an eternal utopia.  I choose not to seek a world where we don’t argue with one another or where we are all alike.  One of the essences of life is in our differences and celebrating them. 

The world peace I seek is more of the functioning co-existence.  And living in a world where an entire city, more importantly the lives (and the generations that may come after that) could be destroyed and shattered within a matter of seconds, exponentially adds to the importance of this crusade.  The weapons humans have created and continue to create will never do anything else apart from killing and ending. 

Maybe too often we accept this idea that we need to compete with one another.  

-         To succeed

-         To get ahead

-         To win

-         To survive

But there are far more letters in the word “together” than there are in the word “me.”  There is 1 more letter in the word, “us,” rather than when one says, “I.” 

And when Ernest Hemingway pointed out that the world breaks “every one,” that includes you and me.  The world broke your grandfather, your grandmother, your father, and your mother.  It will break you, your wife or husband, your children, and your children’s children.  It has broken the generation before you and it will break the generation after you.  It has broken you and it broken me.

And as it has broken, it breaks without bias.  It breaks without regard to your color, race, or creed.  And it breaks not just the “I,” but rather the “us.”  We are all in this together.  Let’s not destroy our neighbors over the petty nothings.  They say where one has fallen, one has leaped.  So our co-existence and togetherness can help us succeed together when the commonality continues to be the divide.

And so after you read this, just think for a couple of minutes how far you have come individually.  Think about your ‘highest of highs’ and your ‘lowest of lows.’  Think about the family you’ve had, the family you have, and the family you might continue to have.  Think about why life is worth living and the life you’ve built.

     And now think about how war and weapons can take all that away in a heartbeat.

Let us share the passion of existence and continue to re-examine how we may achieve peace not just for our time, but for all time.

The Lever

"But we must remember a crucial fact; east and west do not mistrust each other because we're armed. We're armed because we mistrust each other."
-President Ronald Regan's Address at the Brandenburg Gate, 1987

As we progress through these blogs together, I would like to do my best linking them in both the obvious theme, as well as the material presented.  To paraphrase President Kennedy again in his American University Speech, a lot of the problems of the world are man-made, and thus, can be solved by men.  Too often we are held back in doing what we need to do because of perhaps pride, or a personal vendetta against one another, that instead of swimming toward the solutions, we are back-peddling from them.  I always point out to people that this idea of “war” is a man-made concept. 

Do we see factions of beavers going to war with one another?

Do we see the pigeons of Manhattan arming themselves to the teeth to fight off the seagulls flying in from Long Beach?

It is an extreme that does not need to be crossed but often is because we lack understanding of the situation in question.  The hawks chime in for war often not knowing the journey walked in the moccasins of our neighbors and believing that war will always be the sole justification for resolution of any conflict. 

How easy it is to tell our fellow brothers and sisters to go to war, but refuse ourselves to jump in with them.

How easy it is to tell our fellow brothers or sisters to promote the peace, and more often than not, observe no hesitation.

War ultimately establishes a “winner” and a “loser.”  Yet, peace establishes a “winner” of everyone.

Archimedes, a Greek Philosopher and mathematician, once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”  The mission of this blog is ultimately to end this blog.  To foster a future world that will have finally found an everlasting peace.  And for the future children, who dare to question within that world ever the absence of peace, becomes as ludicrous as us now living in a world continually tempered with war. 

That “lever” serves as the metaphor for “peace.”  Our journey is to create that lever to lift the world.   And without succumbing to either a defeatist attitude or to this daunting task that seems far-fetched and unrealistic, let us remember that nothing is impossible if we put our hearts and mind to it. 

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Not Merely Peace in Our Time, but Peace in All Time

"What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace -- the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living -- and the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace in all time." - President John F. Kennedy, American University Speech, June 10, 1963

It has been 51 years since President Kennedy echoed that passage in what many consider to be one of the President's greatest speeches.  His ability to blend poetry with meaning in his speeches contributes to the reason why, even decades later and with the limited speeches we have from the President, how they continue to invoke inspiration within us.  But let us look at today. Half-a-century since President Kennedy, half that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with the state of the world now considered 3 minutes to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock.  Where is the “Peace”?

I have dedicated my time and efforts, starting today, to write about this idea of “Peace;” a word so small that we don’t fully appreciate, and an idea so big that the world’s failed to apply. 

To state from the onset, I am no scholar or expert in the field.  But what I can present is a curiosity and a desire to attain the understanding of peace and how we, together, can find a way to achieve this.  The belief of achieving peace that so many have desired, and that so few have achieved. 

As President Kennedy stated in his Inaugural Address, and which is as true today as ever before, we live “…in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace.”  But let us change that.  Let us enlighten each other.  Let us re-examine ourselves and first find the peace within us.  Let us plant the peace of ourselves within the pot that is considered the world.  Let those roots be the growth of kindness and peace that is shared with our parents, our siblings, and our children.  Let that peace grow in all directions.  Let that love continually grow outward until it bears the grounded roots far below and the flowers that reach towards the heavens.   And let those bearings of that pot be the “peace”, being a word we can one day truly correlate with the word, “world.”

To quote President Kennedy one last time: 

“With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking [His] blessing and [His] help, but knowing that here on earth [God's] work must truly be our own. “