Pandora's Box

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-soldier-allegedly-spares-the-life-of-an-injured-adolf-hitler

“What if?”

It’s a short and simple question that panders into the deepest depths of our minds and inner-most folds of our souls.  It really is profound how a question of two words can have such application to an almost seemingly infinite range of topics.

-What if certain events within the creation and expansion of the cosmos not have transpired in the way it did?  Would the recipe have been just right for our planet to form, no less, form with conditions favorable to conspire our existence?

-What if the asteroid of the Chicxulub impact never hit Earth?  Were pre-historic animals (dinosaurs) and plant life to continue, unabated, would we be here in our present state?

-What if President Lincoln had not been shot and killed at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C., the night of April 14, 1865?  Would Reconstruction and the years to follow have sailed a smoother course?

-What if I had never fallen in love?  (Yes, let it sink in.  Almost all of us can plead the fifth on asking ourselves that.)

But a curious ‘What If’ that leads me to write this post is due to recently seeing a scene from the History Channel’s Series, “The World Wars.”  As the alleged story goes, were Private Henry Tandey to have killed Adolf Hitler during World War I, would the world be a different place today?  His refusal to do so could be seen as a unique moment of compassion in the context of war; compassion for a fellow man, vulnerable as a sitting target to be put down with only the tug of a finger.  Yet Private Tandey had chosen to let Hitler go.

The universe can be a strange place sometimes.  It may be naïve to think how the split second decision by a man left history to walk down either one of two paths. Were Tandey to have killed Adolf Hitler, would the events of World War II have occurred?  It may be wishful thinking to contemplate.  Skeptics may even have a field day arguing 2 of an infinite realm of possibilities:

1.    The world would have been a better place and the atrocities of World War II, and maybe even World War II itself, would have never taken place.

Or…

2.     World War II would have still taken place, with Hitler’s role under the guise of another man or woman, possibly even more sadistic and more evil than Hitler.  The world’s causalities would far exceed what the actual transpired World War II death toll was and possibly the world would be in far worse shape than it is now.

“What if?”

Asking this question will never give us a definitive answer. It will forever leave us with a gaping hole the moment we seek to clarify it.  Pure incompleteness. But I feel such a question can never attribute itself to an answer.  Nor was it meant to and nor will it ever.  ‘What if’ to us becomes our Pandora’s Box. It's a box that's never meant to be open, less it is, spews in this context nothing we could ever grasp, fathom, understand, or realize. But like the box in the myth, our box spills out one last thing indifferent to the rest before it too: Hope. 

To which case I'll gladly ask:

What if the world achieved a co-existing peace?

The Middle

"I prefer peace.  But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace."  - Thomas Paine

            As I look at history and the events that continue to unfold today, you almost spot recycled human tendencies.  This encompasses everything from conflicts, terrorism, to tyranny, in every sense of the word. 

Wars have happened throughout this planet’s history. Atrocities like genocide have taken place.  We know of them.  Many have stared these evils directly in the face.  We know events like these are wrong, and if men and women are inherently good at heart, no person would ever wish these events to their fellow human beings, whether in their current time or generations thereafter. 

History is the mother of all teachers.  But more often than not, her lessons fall upon deaf ears.

So with the world in its current state, the real question beckons us:  How far have we really come?  I personally refuse to believe that this planet is a broken record.  It may be naïve to think otherwise, especially when presented with the facts.  But it may also be naïve to think we can ever become a full utopian society.  So if we re-shift our thinking and our perspective, maybe we can understand a crucial idea.  Whether it is in the grand scheme of things or in our individual lives, it’s that we need to find the middle ground.

Sometimes we need to take 1 step back, in order to move 3 steps forward.  But the world need not take any additional un-needed steps back.  And those additional steps back would be following through with extremes as fighting, killing and war. The face of war is now capably violent, none as history has ever seen before, exponentially increasing the importance of mitigating the recklessness of potentially entering conflict.  Yes, it will never be a perfect world.  But that doesn’t mean it has to be a terrible world either.  Achieving the middle ground and sustaining it without destroying it, is the closest thing we’ll ever get to having heaven on earth. 

Re-shifting perspective will help towards ultimately achieving world peace.  Achievement will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Let’s not look at life as the ‘roses with the thorns,’ but rather in the lens of the ‘thorns with the roses.’

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis." - Virgil

"Be ashamed to die until you've scored some victory for humanity." - Horace Mann

     As you continue to read about history, you almost see war as some sort of “necessity.”  Going back to A.D. 101, Trajan, who ruled the Roman Empire for 19 years, defeating Dacia’s proud ruler Decebalus (and might I add twice, after Dacia promptly broke a treaty several years after the initial conflict).  Trajan would then plunder the country Dacia of its wealth, resources, and scribing the end of its history on a column portraying his conquest.  Jumping to the 18^th Century, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and many other notorious American revolutionaries took to arms to liberate the Americas of the “tyranny” of England’s King George III.  Jon Meacham points out in his book, “The Art of Power,” as the flames of evident war intensified, how the Continental congress did take pragmatic approaches towards reasoning and reconciling with their motherland.  One such act was a year before the Declaration of Independence. 

     “On Saturday, July 8, 1775, having made the case for armed resistance with [John] Dickinson and [Thomas] Jefferson’s Declaration of Causes, the [Continental] Congress extended its hand to the king, dispatching an “Olive Branch Petition” to London.

Nothing came of it.”

     And at the median of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared at Gettysburg, an address of profoundness on grounds then more recently painted in death and abhorrence:

     “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” – Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, November, 1863

     Often men and women see the world as it is.  And often accept that conflict will be the only way to achieve answers, to achieve goals, and to achieve victory. 

But it’s not.

     In regards to human nature, Plato believed that the most principled victory we can make in life is that of first conquering ourselves.  How then can we justify fighting and conquering others throughout all of human history, when most, if not all, of us have yet to fight the demons within ourselves?

The outer world is a reflection of our inner world. 

     In water, we often times can see our reflection.  And if Planet Earth covered in ¾ water, conveyed the world’s reflection as a whole towards the universe, who would want to meet with us in our present state?  What far-reaching civilization would want to share their advancements in medicine, technology and wonders we probably would consider no short of miracles, with us?  Humans' being able to live forever?  Were eternal life the cosmic rule, Earth seems to be the exception

We take advantage of each other. We lie to each other.  We belittle each other. We kill each other.

We stockpile weapons that have no other use than to kill and destroy. 

     And as bleak as it always seems...I always like to remember that when the sun goes down and the curtains close, most of us have the privilege to "go home."  Whether you are the leader of your country or the janitor of a school, when we exit the stage of our professions, we are just... people.  We are the fathers of children and the grand-daughters of good men and women.  We are the grandchildren of those who've strived and the children of those who've dreamed.  And living in peace preserves our stories while war will only take them away.

     But as gruesome as human history was and may still be, it is just that. It is history. We need just hold on a little bit longer and need try just a little harder, but achievement of peace is nothing short of beyond the mountains.  Our end story need not be bleak.  We can rewrite it because we are not defined by it.  

Oscar Wilde vividly puts our hope into perspective.

"Every saint has had a past and every sinner has a future."