Nature of the beast

I don't expect you guys to share my faith. 

But I do expect you guys to share my fears. 

Do you ever stop and wonder, how fragile this thing we call "life" really is?  My father put it into perspective for me long ago, when he said "we're all just passing by this world." It always baffled me how perplexed this statement was, coming from such a simple man. Not to sell him short as a person, my father achieved much for a man who was given little, and who wasn't expected of much long ago. But as celebrated as ingenuity, intelligence, and innovation are, so are courage, competence, and creed. He dared and succeeded where many dared and succumbed. I celebrate my father for resembling what it takes to achieve peace. Sometimes we need to dare ourselves to believe that peace is truly attainable in a world always full of strife.  We can certainly ask ourselves; "when wasn't the world a dangerous place to live in?" 

But we can also ask ourselves, “Why can’t we make the world a safer place to live in?”

It often times starts with you. With me. With us.  Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘you must be the change you wish to see in the world.’ 

Easier said than done? 

Certainly not. 

All it takes is one act of courage or one act of kindness for us to start changing the world.  It needs to be a grass roots moment in order to be successful.  Was the empire of Rome built in a day?  It certainly wasn’t.  It was constructed over years, expanded (not through the most virtuous’ ways, but for purpose of argument, let’s leave it in the context of growth and prosperity) and built into what the world considers one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.  Its success and time of prosperity in history has been coined in Latin, ‘Pax Romana,’ or ‘Roman Peace.”

Acts of kindness and acts of good deeds can be spread like wildfire. 

But we must first light the flames within ourselves.  To make the effort. To do good and to be good.

Buddha once stated:

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."

Peace breeds happiness.  And happiness fosters lives worth living.  We may not always have happiness.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t always give it.

"We're all just passing by this world." Why do we choose to leave it a more wretched place than how we found it? Why choose to kill? Destroy? Break a heart? Break a family?  

We have to do as much as we can with what little the world gives us. 

Go out and do something nice for someone today.  Little acts of kindness go a long way.

And it starts with you.

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. “