Readers…this one took a strange twist at the end that I could not have anticipated.  I appreciate your forbearance.  If this post doesn’t turn you off to the rest of the project, remember that you can subscribe to my blog and get emails each time I post something new.  The signup is to your right, and you will receive an email requesting confirmation.  You may have to check your spam folder.    

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Is peace something that can be achieved?

I am not asking this from a place of depression or disgust with the world.  I ask this as one who feels he is on the verge of a revelation.  Can peace be achieved?

I can graduate from high school, hence graduation can be achieved.  I can choose to get married, it logically follows that marriage can be achieved.  I can purchase a car, and by this I know that debt can be achieved.  If I left on a 2,100 mile hike through thirteen states on the Appalachian Trail, I would taste sweet achievement from the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine.  There are millions of achievements I could put my energy and passion towards, and many of them will have a distinct moment to which I can point and say “I completed this achievement at this time”.  It will be undeniable.

Some would say that we could point to August 14^th as the day that we achieved peace with Japan to end World War II.  Unfortunately we know that this is not true.  In fact, there were incredible but confirmed reports of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender until 1974!  If we write those soldiers off as outliers, as the exception to the rule, we are still faced with the occupation of Japan until 1952.  Why would a country we are at peace with need to be occupied by a military force?

Perhaps we should choose another example.  If we look at the civil rights movement in the 1960’s we see that after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed, all discrimination became illegal resulting in peace across the United States.   Except that isn’t what actually happened.  The legislative process was complete, the legal framework for peace was in place, but we are still waiting on actual inter-racial peace over 50 years later.

If anyone knows of an example contrary to the ones I have put forth, I welcome its mention in the comments of this little essay.  Until such evidence comes to my attention however, I am choosing to think about peace as something that can not be attained in the same way a diploma or a car payment can be.  Try as I might, I will never open the mail one day to find a certificate certifying my attainment of peace.  (Although a Nobel Peace Prize might change my mind on this one…if anyone wants to send me one I’ll let you know if my mind does change!)

So this narrows my thought down to two more possibilities.  The first is that perhaps peace is something that can be attained personally, but not in a larger community sense.  I find that the problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really mean anything for the real world.  For example, I can choose to be at peace with you, but if you insist on continually punching me in the face, am I really at peace with you?  At what point does this internal peace I have with you stop being real?  When you think about punching me?  When you actually punch me?  When I am in the hospital with a broken nose?   We can think about this in global sense by asking if we are at peace with North Korea.  We have not had any actual physical conflict with North Korea since the mid to late 1950’s, but we are not at peace with them.  Their viewpoints and policies are at odds with our own.  We are not at peace.

(Readers, please forgive me for the remainder of this post…)

The second possibility can best be illustrated by asking the following question.  Was Alderaan really a peaceful world when it was destroyed by the Death Star?  Alderaan was a world with no weapons, but it was destroyed by a government intent on doing it harm.  From my previous paragraph, we could argue that while they were at peace with the Empire, the Empire was not at peace with Alderaan.   The Empire insisted on punching Alderaan in the face (with a superlaser) and Alderaan could not respond.  So was Alderaan really a peaceful world when it was destroyed?

I believe that it was.

I say that because I believe the Alderaanians had come to realize long ago, what I have just realized today.  Peace is not necessarily a goal to be attained (although if it were possible peace would be an excellent goal) but rather a method of interacting with what is around you.  The Alderaanians chose to react peacefully to all situations.

If you are still reading this essay, you might be thinking “Wait, what?  You just said that we aren’t at peace with the North Koreans, but that the Alderaanians were a peaceful world?  It is the exact same thing!”

Respectfully, it is not the same.

We are not at peace with North Korea because peace is not a goal to be attained.  It is a method of interacting with the world around us.  When we interact with North Korea (or Iran, or Russia or any number of other countries) we do not interact with them peacefully.  We may be using soft weapons like economic or political sanctions, but we are on some level fighting the efforts of the governments of those countries.  We are not at peace, because we do not use peaceful methods in seeking to attain our goals.

The Alderaanians were at peace with the Empire, and died a peaceful planet because they responded to outside force with peaceful actions.   If we reframe our thoughts about peace to treat it as a method and not a goal, we can remain peaceful, even when we are being punched in the nose.

It still sucks to get punched in the nose.

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25 Days of Peace (An Introduction)