If You Despair of Peace By Deepak Chopra
huffingtonpost.com
08/29/2005
After my recent post on the war in Iraq, I got the expected responses about my political naiveté. I guess the reasoning here is that if politics is the art of the possible, only the lowest form of behavior is possible. Actually, I am fairly resigned to wars ending however they end.
Once the war mentality gets into the saddle, the course of conflict must run itself out.
I rely not on the current political parties but solely on people waking up, which isn't an ephemeral or trivial or imaginary phenomenon. Right now more than half the American public has lost faith in the Iraq war. This opening can be widened. Instead of despairing over the chances for peace in the Middle East, consider aligning your own awareness with peace a bit more each day.
You might begin in the following way: If you have been dragged emotionally into the issue of Islam versus America, pause for a moment and ask a really fundamental question:
"Do I want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?"
In my experience, someone who is part of the problem exhibits the following qualities:
1. They identify with tribalism either in religion or politics or both.
2. They demonize the enemy.
3. They divide the issue into "Us versus Them."
4. They countenance violence, even if they do not perform the violent acts themselves.
5. They accept anger as a positive force when backed by their own self-righteousness but condemn it on the other side.
6. They believe that winning is more important than peace.
7. They place a higher value on political victory than on compromise, forgiveness, or understanding.
8. They don't look in the mirror and pay attention to what they see.
9. They follow the dictates of fear.
People who are part of the solution exhibit the opposite characteristics.
1. They see tribalism as a primitive holdover from the past and a major force for ignorance.
2. They refuse to demonize their opponents, keeping in mind that to do so is to invite demonizing from the other side.
3. They realize that "Us versus Them" is political propaganda of the worst kind.
4. They work toward ending violence on both sides.
5. They feel anger and outrage at atrocities but do not take the next step, which is to listen to anger as a replacement for reason.
6. They realize that no one wins in non-peaceful situations. Both sides are losers in that the cycle of violence has moved forward.
7. They take the hard road toward forgiveness and understanding, realizing that these are human qualities worth any effort.
8. They look inside to see if the seeds of conflict begin with themselves.
9. They consider fear an emotional reaction, not a reliable guide to reality.
To begin with, this list applies to your own awareness, not to military policy or diplomacy, areas that we ordinary citizens have no power over. What we have power over is ourselves.
No matter how right you think you are, how justified in your anger, how totally righteous your side is in any conflict, you will never escape the vicious net of war until you see, right here and now, that your every impulse is felt by people on the other side.
I fully expect to read responses that exhibit all the qualities of the first list, and in proportion to their vehemence, these responders would be the last to consider themselves part of the problem. But they are. War-making is a personal issue that gets amplified to a national issue.
Countries that manage to stay out of the majority of wars include the Scandinavian bloc, most of South America, many Asian countries, and so on. The U.S. has entered into or caused almost every international conflict since the Spanish Civil War in 1898.
This implies several generations of citizens utterly conditioned to accept war as a national habit. I don't know what it takes for the U.S. to break the habit of war, but it seems reasonable, as with any addiction, that we first consider the habit a problem, then try to get at why we cling to it.
I also expect that the bugaboo of Hitler will be thrown at me, along with the bugaboo of terrorism. These issues have been rehashed a thousand times, and all I can say is that crime is manageable on the social level, and should be manageable on the international level, without thinking that the only solution is to kill everyone who looks bad in our eyes. International policing has worked, more or less, in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Terrorism is too amorphous to pin down in limited geographical areas, hence the influx of terrorists into Iraq from Islamic regions around the world.
But that is all the more reason not to invade other nations, since we know in advance that terrorism is endemic and pandemic at the same time.
As for peace being lily-livered compared to the tough, realistic solution of war, I realize that after a certain point the police must shoot at criminals. We seem to be the only country where the cops shoot tens and hundreds of times more often than in other societies, and that needs to be addressed. Even so, in certain situations--Bosnia is a prime example--there is sometimes a limited need for using violence to curb worse violence. To say that unconditional surrender and obliteration of civilian populations are necessary in order to "save American lives," however, is to commit the inhumane act of counting one of our dead as the equal of dozens, or hundreds, of theirs.
Finally, if you think peace is an utterly impossible goal, I only ask if you have taken any steps in that direction yourself.
Click: intentblog.com
P.S. I noticed the comments by another blogger about The Alliance for the New Humanity. Not withstanding his criticism, I urge you to visit www.anhglobal.org . The Alliance is made up of well respected people, economists, sociologists, conflict resolution, social justice, ecology and those who are looking at economic disparities of the world. Former Vice President Al Gore gave a keynote speech at the first conference and a number of Nobel Peace Laureates have joined the Alliance. |
