Talking Peace

…..Is it still okay to talk about peace or has it become unpatriotic to do so? Is refusal to follow our leaders blindly into whatever war they initiate showing disrespect to our fighting men and women? These are questions that I ask quite honestly and without any sarcasm intended. I ask these questions because I often feel that when I mention the word peace that I am somehow doing something controversial, that many feel I should probably keep silent and say nothing. Sure, it may be easy for you who are on the side of the majority, who are on the same side as the media. It is easier to speak your mind when you are on the side that has the support of all of the powerful institutions, all of the big money. Whether we care to admit it or not, there are trillions of dollars to be made by selling arms and virtually nothing to be gained by supporting peace.

…..So let me ask one more time, is it okay if I share my thoughts about peace, about peace being something that should be supported and worked towards by all of humanity?

…..I’ll admit, I’ve never been the biggest patriot. I’ve never wrapped myself up in a flag, was never one to unquestioningly obey orders. You see, when I was growing up, I was told that what was so special about my country was that it allowed you the opportunity to do things the way you wanted to do them. You were allowed to think what you wanted to think, do what you wanted to do. And I believed that, I really did. Not only did I believe that my country gave to me a freedom that no other country on earth gave, I also accepted the idea that freedom was a very special right. Not only a right, but a responsibility. I had a responsibility to act freely, to oppose any kind of oppression, whether it be overt oppression or the more hidden oppression that comes from public opinion. I considered it to be a sacred duty to think for myself and resist any temptation to conform, to think the way I was supposed to think.

…..Mind you, I didn’t just say whatever came into my mind. I never said or did things merely because I could. I’ve always been rather conservative when it came to speaking my mind. Because freedom was a sacred thing, I did not wish to abuse it. But I nurtured that idea of freedom, tried to cultivate inside myself the idea that whatever thoughts I grew inside of my own mind had a certain value precisely because they were not dictated to me by some outside force. I had a notion, given to me not only by the founding fathers of my country, not only by my religion, but also by everything I had read of the great thinkers of history. I had a notion that if we are given enough freedom, as well as a proper environment in which to grow, that we would in this fashion make the best possible world.

…..Is it a crime against our nation, our government, our fighting men and women, against freedom itself? Is it okay to talk about peace?

Seven Stones (Another Tidbit)

Here is a sample of today's writing:

     “Ah, Doug, I do need your help. I could not do this without your help. Not to put things too unkindly, but you are the walking stick I need to aid me on my travels. You help to keep me balanced and on the right path. But failure and success are labels placed upon people’s lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board on step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.”

     “So we’re all pawns in some giant game played by powers beyond our imagining?”

     “Our bodies, perhaps, but we are all a part of that will which moves the pieces on the board. Once we get beyond the idea that we are nothing more than the physical pieces, we realize we are forces, each and every one of us.”

     “I’ll be honest with you, Ashavan. It scares me when you talk like this. I don’t think I want to be some vague force without shape or substance.”

     Ashavan laughed. “Fear is what keeps you a block of wood on a piece of cardboard. Once you see, then fear is left behind in the game piece you used to think was you.”

     “What is it you hope to accomplish, then?”

     “To be myself, to follow my desires to the best of my abilities. That’s the only end worth shooting for. Success and failure lie beyond us, they may be signposts that direct us, but they are foolish goals in themselves. To truly be who I have been made to be, made myself to be, ah, that is the only mission worthy of all the life that flows within.”

     Doug could not stay too long in the ideas that appeared to now be Ashavan’s native climate. And too, he wondered if it were not his purpose to keep Ashavan’s thoughts closer to the ground.

“But what do we do now? What’s our next move?”

“The jewel of Europe has been found. And within it is the accumulated selfishness and corruption of the stones. It alone lies as a barrier to the possibility of a world united. Not the Pangea which I had earlier imagined. That was the foolish perceptions of a man who understood little. No it is a unity of purpose, not of geography. It is what your friend Catherine was searching for in her own little way. It is what Evangeline was trying to accomplish in a divided way, what all the stones divided have been attempting. But each facet sees but a little, and in attempting to unify what lies within its grasp, stretches the greater whole. Think of it, we are a globe of little nations, each of them grasping as organisms trying to strengthen themselves. Each of them sees itself as an idealized state. The United States sees its manifest destiny is to stretch from sea to shining sea, believe it is God himself who has ordained it. Where we go now, we see a Serbia whose ideal boundaries spill over into the perceived boundaries of many other nations. Each nation overlaps the other in its vain perception of itself. Each sees unity within itself, each member believes himself part of something larger. But in their division they tear at the larger fabric. It is only in the unity that they will find the answers to their longings, only then that they will truly understand what it means to be part of something larger than themselves.”

     For a moment Doug could almost sense the stone that lie somewhere within the folds of Ashavan’s jacket. He could almost imagine he could see it in his breast pocket and suddenly he fancied he saw it not in Ashavan’s pocket but in his chest, a glowing light that pumped the life through him. And there was a glimpse, just a glimpse, of understanding.

     The glimpse of understanding seemed to open up something inside Doug, created a vent in whatever it was that differentiated who he was and everything that was outside of him. A door was opened—just a crack—and through it he could see an outside, a whole universe that was new to him. And even as the door closed he knew there was something out there, that he would never quite see things in the same way ever again. And that was okay. The world had not changed, he had. He was now just a little older, a little wiser. He had sacrificed nothing of himself in the deal. He had merely grown.

     From thoughts that were high in the air, he gradually returned to thoughts of his immediate surroundings, of the sound of rail cars endlessly turning again and again, too often to worry about, too steady to be of interest. They turned unendingly in the same circles but in their seemingly pointless revolutions that only brought themselves back to where they had begun, they managed to move the train across a continent.

The Metric System And American Exceptionalism

     Back when I was in grade school, sometime in the 70’s, they decided it would be a good idea to start to teach children the metric system in anticipation that we would soon be switching over to it. We were taught that it was based on common sense and logic rather than on the lengths of the king’s body parts or the quantity of liquid his bladder could hold.

     For example, the meter was 1/10,000,000^th of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Pretty neat, right? There would be no arguments about exactly how long some long-dead king’s foot was when we had a constant scientific measurement that would be for all times provable. And then there is the measurement of area. Rather than the acre, which corresponds to I don’t know what, you have the are, which is simply 100 meters squared. And here’s the beauty of this, not only units of distance and area but also volume and mass and temperature are based on the simple meter. Because a liter is simply ten centimeters cubed. And the gram is the weight of the cube of a hundredth of a meter. And best of all, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Genius!

     And tens, everything was broken down into tens. Being young, I found it infinitely easier to learn than having sixteen ounces to a pint, two pints to a quart and four quarts to an American and five quarts to an Imperial Gallon. If that’s right: I’m still not sure how the Imperial Gallon worked.

     But beyond the fact that it was easier, it was universal. People all over the world were using it and it only made sense for the good old U.S. of A. to use it as well. Using an antiquated system of measurements that wasn’t even of our own design was an embarrassment. Even our own scientific community had long been using metric since it was practical when comparing studies in the world.

     So it made sense that we were switching over. We were told that there would be a certain amount of resistance from those who had been doing things differently their whole lives, that was understandable. But the change would take place and we’d all be better off because of it.

     The switch was taking place in Canada at about the same time. I remember one year visiting relatives in Canada and the older ones complaining about it. But when I visited them the next year, everybody was already adjusted to it. Suddenly, instead of measuring the speed limit in miles they were now doing it in kilometers and everybody was okay with that. In the course of a year, Canada joined the rest of the world and acquired a vastly superior system of measurements.

     But we here in the U.S. couldn’t do it. We just didn’t have the will it took to accomplish such a basic task.

     Perhaps it was because of the bicentennial. Right about then we started getting downright patriotic again. And looking around us we realized how well we had done as a nation and how we had everything we needed. And being patriotic and contented is only a short step from being arrogant and demanding. Somehow we got the attitude that we didn’t have to change for nobody, and that the rest of the world could just suck it. If they wanted to sell their goods in America (yeah, I know Canada is in America too, but dammit, we’re AMERICANS), then they would have to measure things in ounces and feet. Of course, other countries were glad to be selling their products and were only slightly put out having to convert things to our system of measurements, as long as our currency was profitably converting.

     Another reason, perhaps, that we could not manage to make the change was that we had an instinctive dislike of someone telling us what to do. We were Americans, and we were nothing if not free. How did we know? Because that’s what had been drilled into our skulls every day on television and in cigarette ads. We didn’t mind being told what to do by advertising, but by golly, we weren’t going to have our government doing it. At some point, we got it into our thoughts that any attempt our government made to gravitate us towards something was just a sinister move towards socialism.

     And so today we are one of the few countries in the world that has a system of measurements different from the rest of the world. Only Myanmar and Liberia now stand with us.

     I write this not to suggest that it is high time America switches to the metric system, although it is, if only to save money for mechanics who have to buy two sets of wrenches. I mention our failure to convert to the metric system as a symptom of a deeper problem. It seems that Americans today cannot come together on ANY problem, no matter how much of a no-brainer it is. We have lost the ability to unite in any kind of cause at all. During the Second World War, patriotism meant having paper drives, tin drives, and victory gardens. We knew that we as Americans, whatever divided us, were united in many ways. We knew that we had built something pretty good and that we would have to occasionally work together in order to preserve our way of life.

     That’s a long way from where we are today. After September 11, 2001, our president did not ask for us to come together to sacrifice for the common good, but instead implored us to continue our daily routine and go shopping. And in the ensuing years, it has only gotten worse. Today, there is no sense of unity, no sense that sometimes the only solution is to pull together and make the necessary—and often vastly preferable—changes that should be made.

     It’s not just our failure to commit to the metric system, which was and is a no brainer. Add to that our inability to wean ourselves from fossil fuels, from inefficient forms of transportation, from an addiction to foreign produced consumer goods that we simply don’t need, and a mass of other problems we have no heart to tackle. We have become frozen, unable to act to confront the problems that can only be confronted as a group. Not as individual consumers, but as a unified front. We have become like the old world that we once mocked for the way they clung to outmoded ideas.

     When I was young and my dad tried to tell me what to do, I always asserted my burgeoning age by telling him experience was the best teacher. His reply was that experience was not the best teacher but the most expensive one. I hope that we as a nation can learn our lesson before harsh reality hits, but if that’s what it takes, at least we will learn a lesson that will hopefully stick.