Why is peace so boring?

By James Brooks

Our dear Francette Cerulli asked, “Why is peace so boring?” (Nov. 7). Perhaps because people do not generally regard peace as a dynamic process requiring work and commitment, the active pursuit of just solutions among competing interests. The love of justice is the wellspring of peace, but it also sounds a call to battle against injustice and the use of force. Here is some of the glory that Ms. Cerulli senses missing in our common response to the word “peace.”

Because the United States has been waging more or less continuous military and/or paramilitary action and nuclear terror since World War II, the “peace” we Americans knew before 9/11 was a false and hollow state, more like a “security zone” in the midst of a larger conflict. Maybe subconscious recognition of this fact leaves us strangely ambivalent about the word “peace.”

Today, more than ever, peace requires nations to seek economic justice and limit their actions to the rule of international law. Our own country dominates world affairs but conspicuously lacks commitment to these principles. This situation can only lead to more injustice and war. Isn’t it our responsibility as citizens of this global giant to do something about that? We retain our (curtailed) freedoms of speech and assembly and our (corrupted) powers at law and the ballot box, and we still own the streets. To what extent were the German people responsible for the crimes of Nazism? We might double or triple that estimate to calculate our own responsibility for supporting the endless oppression of the Palestinians, or the coming wave of “pre-emptive” wars that will be based on the new, debased American standards for international conduct.

When we see that our tax dollars are being used to rule the world by military and economic might, is there a sense of horror and unacceptable injustice in our hearts? If we are patriots of the Constitution, can we greet this news and not also hear an urgent, crying call to return America to its ideals of justice, law and democracy, to the ways of peace?

Where is the glory? In our ideals and the way we pursue them. Why does the word “peace” feel empty to many of us, while “war” throbs with possibility? It is a disturbing question indeed.

James Brooks
Worcester, VT

Photo credits: Photos courtesy Ben Scribner, International Solidarity Movement