When All Else Fails: Peace
Peace is a temporary aberration in human relations. It breaks out accountably, when all other avenues have been exhausted. Before peace, needless to say, comes war. Before war there was a state of peace, but matters of state, of human desires and failings, throwbacks to primeval urgings of survival by territorial imperative, (that kind of thing), intervenes to cause belligerence, counter-belligerence, and war. After which comes peace. Circuitous, never-ending.Collaboration, empathy, co-operation, kindness may be hard-wired into the human psyche, but these impulses are easily overriden by other emotions like suspicion, selfishness, apathy, indecision, greed, envy, hostility, xenophobia, tribalism. Pity. We could be so much more than we are.
In time before written history the animal that is man survived by cunning and brute force in a harsh landscape that promised survival to those who were assertive and demanding and took what they wished. Our naturally-endowed attributes weigh more heavily in favour of neighbourly dispute than open and fair discussion leading to peaceful solutions.
We're in another time, another space, but those elemental instincts still grasp our better natures and swamp them in the miasma of disorder and distemper. We can aspire to become far more than the beasts we too often succumb to, and many of us sincerely strive to do so. Still, we cannot seem to be able to overcome the worst in us, despite the best intentions of the best in us.
Where once thousands of combatants died on a battlefield of conventional warfare, and thousands more civilians perished in the offensive pursuit of victory and also in the defensive pursuit of same, now no country, no geographic region can be immune to an assault of an entirely different nature. We're still wedded to convention, although we have in hand weapons of far greater destruction.
The thing of it is, those nations to date who have succeeded in mastering the successful splitting of the atom keep listening to that inner voice that warns of doom. That is the civilized world within our midst. What then, of the world still inhabited by tribalism, religious intolerance, vengeance and bloodlust, one that celebrates battle and mass murder and sacrificing one's enemies to the greater glory of god? One that, furthermore, celebrates the apocalyptic finale introducing their entry to Paradise, where virgins uncountable are ready and eager to service the fallen heroes?
They too now have access and potential access to this single most destructive device the world has yet unveiled. What then? Where lies elusive peace. Remember, in the past peace has followed the grisly footprint of war.
After the nightmare of a nuclear detonation repeated again and again, Armaggedon! a different type of peace will reign; silent and cold.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 06, 2006
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