Red Room Where the Writers Are

Peace is something most of us claim to want yet thinking about it I realized the difficulty in defining peace.

My thoughts roamed across the “lack of” spectrum – lack of anxiety, of war, danger, strife, and fear.

If I assume humans want peace, then their quest for danger (smoke jumpers, NASCAR drivers), anxiety (query letters, lotteries), fear (roller coasters, horror movies), and aggression (capitalism, sports) is puzzling.

If peace were the absence of war, then how could I explain volunteer armies, career warriors, history’s global conquest attempters, and the ease with which nations slide into war?

How would I explain gang wars?

So what is peace, I wonder. Could it be Thomas Gray’s “ignorance is bliss” in Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College?

I thought of my formative years. Dad added indoor plumbing, or more accurately, a modern bathroom to our home when I was eight years old. The phone company, not Ma Bell, replaced our hand-crank phones with dial telephones during the summer of my sophomore year. I tasted my first pizza while on a senior trip.

It’s easy to make conclusions about poverty or need but are these conclusions based upon root level definitions or upon knowledge that I didn’t possess during those years?

Do the children born into decades-long wars define peace as we might? Or would they see peace as continuance of the status quo? If they weren’t aware of a non-war lifestyle would they be any less at peace than the gazelle on the plains, prey to the cheetah?

Would a suicide bomber and I agree on the definition of peace?

Finally, could peace be the obliviousness of the stereotypical stoner - always mellow, always buzzed, always apathetic, always at peace?  I think not because I see little difference between the stoner and someone asleep.

Evolution doesn’t appear to have favored the peace-lovers over the war-mongers. To the contrary, throughout history, the peaceniks have been prey.

Peace is a construct of the over-informed mind.

(Photo courtesy of LinderRox)