Category: nonviolence

Will anyone stand for peace?

Photo © Nikolay Stoimenov | Dreamstime.com

My friend texted me with news of strife on U.S. campuses, knowing I don’t watch the morning news.

Here is a generation taking sides in an ancient hatred — choosing sides in an exchange of mass murder, as if one side or another in an exchange of mass murder could ever be righteous.

My generation at least had some people who protested the very idea of mass murder as a legitimate institution.

Remember the anti-war movement? Its symbols were the peace sign and the photo of the girl placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. 

This generation, born after 9/11, has grown up in a surveillance state where hatred is part of everyday life. Now coming of age, they are deciding whom to hate. All individuals are lumped into groups, and the hate is directed at those groups to save the trouble of getting to know the individuals.

Will anyone stand for peace?

We are awash with proclamations — “I stand with Israel. I stand with Ukraine. I stand with Gaza. I stand with You Name The Place Where People Are Killing and Being Killed.”

Will anyone stand for peace?

Where is this generation’s Mahatma Gandhi or Rev. King who will stand for a peaceful and nonviolent resolution? Where has reason fled? Where is “Love Your Neighbor”?

Where is the girl with the flower?

This world is weary of hate, division, violence, bombs and guns to settle our differences, body bags, and politicians with blood on their hands offering up political “solutions” that betray freedom and cause even more division.

Surely there is a voice, somewhere in this wilderness, crying out for peace. I swear I hear a vast throng crying for an end to the madness and an end to the killing. But …

Will anyone stand for peace?

Harnessing the wind chimes

Listen to the wind chimes play their melodic non-melody —

Melody in time with the breeze,

A constant reminder of unseen powers at play —

We see and hear the impact of those powers

But we never see the wind itself.

The wind chimes’ music soothes even when the wind is blowing at destructive levels, when the power blinks off and on or lightning and thunder accompanies the music. Why, I wonder?

Are the chimes a motherly assurance that everything is going to be all right? Or a wise example of how even this potentially destructive force of nature can be harnessed in the service of creating beauty? There’s a metaphor in there somewhere — this force capable of toppling trees or creating symphonies.

The wind has no choice, it is what is it, but we choose daily between beauty and destruction.

May we each harness our powerful energy in the name of beauty, with a goal of a better world, not a barren and bitter world.

A way out of the mess

We toiled for years under the illusion that the leaders of the U.S. government were good humans who wanted to preserve ideals of truth, justice, and liberty. Was it ever so? It certainly is not now.

The presidential candidates over the past 32 years have all either been very wealthy to begin with or slick con men who used the tools of politics and government to make themselves wealthy — and once wealth insulates you from the concerns of everyday humans, it’s easy to tax them into slavery and bully them into any sort of ghastly behavior, from waging war against strangers to submitting to bizarre medical experiments.

The U.S. government is a pathetic shadow parroting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence but refusing to live by even a shred of its meaning. In the absence of decency, the least we can do is refuse to participate in the charade. At a minimum I won’t vote for these people.

So much of this mess is out of the everyday human’s control that it seems hopeless to preserve truth, justice or liberty, but even the bloated and corrupt leviathan cannot be everywhere. What we CAN do is use what resources are left to us to be kind in the face of bullies, to live our lives as if we are free — that is to say, to be a living example of what a true and decent human looks like, living in peace and loving our neighbors.

I hesitate to mention the name of Jesus because that name has been misused and misrepresented by petty tyrants and narrow-minded bigots down through the ages, but Jesus and his apostles are the best example I have for what I mean. These were people who lived by the essential laws of love God and love your neighbors. These were people who believed that “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

Could we really build a peaceful world on that gentle but firm foundation? Why not? The bullies would howl and belittle the followers of such a path, and probably even maim and kill as many as they felt they could get away with — but they have a basic flaw, and that is their way of thinking is wrong, detrimental to humanity, and, well, simply indecent.

The bloated leviathan someday will collapse upon itself, and what is left could be as brutal and lawless as the leviathan itself — or it could be grounded in the fruit of the spirit, if we start building that gentle but firm foundation, today.

Cross purposes

And what about the big questions? Why am I here? What happens before we are born and after we die? What is our responsibility to others and to ourselves? What is the secret of the universe?

And where do we get the answers? We could spend hours and days mulling it all over or just live the best life we can muster. And what will it all mean in the end?

Ah, meaning. That’s what it all boils down to, isn’t it — What does it all mean? as if it had to mean anything at all. “Everything is meaningless,” cries the ecclesiastical poet, and yet we keep asking.

And as the Grim Reaper taps on our shoulder or we see him approaching, we wonder “What did it all mean? Did I accomplish my purpose?”

What if the fellow who called himself the Son of Man, and his followers, had it right — that our purpose is to love one another? Oh man, oh man, oh man, wouldn’t that be sad? Because we hate that purpose. We even have special programs — they’re called “newscasts” — that chronicle with glee all the different ways we don’t love one another, usually multiple ways just in the last 24 hours. It’s the human tragedy.

Some folks are firmly of the opposite opinion. They believe our purpose is to murder as many people who hold different beliefs from theirs as possible. In its purest form this practice is called “war,” and it’s terribly inefficient because you inevitably kill a bunch of people who hold the same beliefs as yours but happen to live in a country ruled by the people you disagree with. It’s an unspeakably stupid purpose to pursue.

Many people are too busy seeking food and shelter and raising the next generation to spend quality time pondering our purpose in life, although one might argue that without food, shelter and a future there’s not much call for meaning anyway.

I stare across the living room and see that two of the four pictures hanging on the wall are a tad off-center. One of my purposes today will be to nudge them back. But I digress. (Who, me?)

If those are the main choices — and I know there are more than two — I think I’d decide that loving my neighbors is a better choice than slaughtering them. It seems better to risk erring on the side of life.

The art of preaching to myself

My pastor friend Cory Dahl likes to tell us he preaches to himself and we are welcome to listen in — and he encourages us to preach to ourselves. Scott Alexander, author of Rhinoceros Success, has encouraged his readers to write the self-help book that we want or need to read.

I take their advice to heart. So much of what I write here is what I need to hear. When I encourage you, I’m often also giving myself a pep talk.

Seven years ago, a couple of weeks after being laid off from my dream job as editor of the Door County Advocate in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, I sat down on a bench near a wooden bridge at a park called Crossroads at Big Creek, and I wrote myself a little pep talk that became the title passage in my book A Bridge at Crossroads: 101 Encouragements. I was preaching to myself and inviting you to read along. It was the book of encouragement I needed to read.

I am close to completing two more short books that I need to read. One is tentatively called Write Anything Until You Write Something, a book of reflections about the creative process and how the secret to writing something important seems to be just to keep writing anything until something important comes out. You can’t write something important if you’re not writing at all, after all.

The other is called War IS the Crime, and I wish it was already published in light of recent world events. I’ve been writing a lot lately about how people are essentially peaceful creatures but we keep being pushed to join madmen in committing mass murder with them. I’ve been writing these things because I feel like someone needs to say it and so I will.

Would I like you to buy a bunch of these books so I can quit the day job because the books are another way to pay the bills? Of course I would. But mainly I’m making these books because I need to read what I’ve written, and I invite you to read along.

I think that’s how most books get written, actually — someone thinks, “Somebody needs to say this, so it may as well be me.”

2 quick thoughts on war and elections

With regard to war:

• I disagree with you when you say that war is a “necessary” evil, but at least we agree war is evil.

With regard to elections:

• “Which is the lesser of two evils?” is the wrong question. “When will we stop choosing evil?” is the right question.

No more bullies

When we are young, we are taught that the playground bully is wrong.

Adults punish the child who is caught pummeling his victims into submission.

Then we grow up and follow the bullies who enforce their will by means of greater weaponry.

The rule is that whoever kills the most others is the winner.

No more, we say.

Pummeling the most playground victims is not leadership.

It’s time to wage peace on this world. 

Subdue your adversaries with kindness.

See no human as your enemy, only as your neighbor. 

And love your neighbors.

Live, and love.

In peace.