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.

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."

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.