For the 10 minutes proceeding the writing of this entry, I questioned whether I have lost my mind.  For no apparent reason (other than I had to work this morning) I did not sleep well last night, and decided to catch a quick nap before I attempted to write this entry today.  Which would have been great if I hadn’t spent the last 40 minutes of my nap in a pseudo sleep state that lead me to question the very foundations of the universe.  I can’t really describe what I saw, because what I saw made no sense, but I had a deep impression of sinking forever into a boundless eternity.  The world dissolved around me because there was nothing to hold it together.  Pieces of our universe slid frictionlessly away from each other, expanding outward forever.  Uncontained, and therefore meaningless.  For the last few minutes, I questioned if I would ever return from where my mind had wandered.

What I saw resembled these crystals, but there were more and they were all enveloping.  They were also detached from each other…more on that later though.

I seriously questioned my sanity.  I am STILL questioning my sanity.

I have been trying to assemble cogent thought on what I just experienced (dreamed? hallucinated?) and my first attempt at doing so follows.

I begin to ask myself, why do we pursue peace?  I understand that we feel like peace is a noble goal, that peace is a shining diadem in the crown of accomplishment for our world.  Philosophers and laymen alike have striven for it, implored those around them to sacrifice their personal desires to it.  Peace stands at the peak of the mountain of enlightenment and beckons us to climb to the summit.

But why?

Everything is meaningless.

What makes peace more desirable than war?  What makes it the ideal we strive for and not something else?  When we look at the sacrifices that must be made in the name of peace, when we count the cost of what must be surrendered by some to ensure peace, what makes it so worth pursuing?  Can pleasure only be attained from the hand of peace?  If that were so, crime would cease to exist, war would cease to exist, and our hatred would cease to exist.  Pleasure can be derived from twisted pursuits as well as noble ones.  Our pursuit of peace is not derived from a pursuit of pleasure.

Yet many of us pursue peace instead of those easier twisted pursuits, at great cost to ourselves.  Our carnal nature shows no disposition towards peace, our very nature seems to speak of the undesirability of peace.  We are the most like ourselves when we are the most selfish.  We are most ourselves when we do not care for others.  So again I ask you, why peace?

Everything is meaningless.

Or at least everything is meaningless in an unbounded universe.  The clearest impression I had from my little sleep deprivation fueled vision was that there was nothing holding everything together.  There was no jar to hold the sand, and as a result, the sand scattered in all directions.  The sand became so spread apart that you could no longer identify it as sand.  In a way that I can not communicate, what I felt that I saw was more than this.  Ideas no longer had a basis, because there was no foundation to set them on.  If I had created a castle from the sand, its meaning would have been lost as the sand drifted apart.  Peace, and the pursuit of peace becomes meaningless when we remove its foundation.

Until now I have done little more than drop veiled hints at a higher power directing our pursuit of peace.  References to ideas found in the Bible (ie. ”treat others as you would like to be treated”) were quick and provided without drawing attention to the source of the material.  I felt that by purposefully eliminating references to a higher power, I was advancing the cause of peace more effectively.  I assumed I was reducing the risk of stumbling over theology to those who do not believe as I do.

I was foolish to do so.

Without a boundary, without a force outside of ourselves holding the universe together, everything is meaningless.  God is the glass jar holding the sand in and giving it the ability to have structure.  God is the glass jar in which peace is preferred to madness.  There is no structure outside of him, and peace is worth pursuing because the shape he confines us to demands that it be so.  To remove that structure or attempt to ignore it results in meaningless pursuit, focused on nothing, capable of attaining nothing.  No ideas can be formed by boundless sand.  No mountain of enlightenment can arise without the pressure of the jar holding the sides in.

Without the structure given by the jar, our attempts to climb the mountain of enlightenment would only serve to hasten its destruction.

Everything is meaningless, unless it is bounded.  We and all of our pursuits amount to nothing, if we attempt them from outside of the jar.

We may only pursue peace inside of the bounds of the universe that God holds us in.

Anything else is meaningless.

Don’t let the goal intimidate you, every penny we raise makes a difference. Whether our goal is reached or not!

#25 Days of Peace (An Introduction)

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.    

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?

Lieutenant Onoda who surrendered in 1974.

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?

That’s no Earth…it’s a fictional planet!

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.

So far 10 people will now have access to clean water for life because of our efforts! You guys ROCK! Join the effort by donating here!

25 Days of Peace (An Introduction)

I’m a bit of a recreational conspiracy theorist.  Since I think I have made up that term, I will take the liberty of describing it.  It basically means that I like to look for conspiracies in everything.  What makes me different than other conspiracy theorists is that I do it for fun.  As a result I’m never really quite sure how much of a conspiracy theory I believe.  I find amusement in creating outlandish connections and then trying to make them sound plausible to the people around me.  Sometimes I completely believe what I am saying, and other times I am just having a bit of fun.

So I have made an effort to stay far away from anything you could call a conspiracy theory in this little project.  Yesterday, I may have toed the line a little bit, but I actually heard a political analyst on the radio confirming some of the statements I made yesterday, so I feel confident that I have stayed on the “reality” side of that imaginary line.  I preface today’s short post with this because what I am about to share may seem to be a conspiracy theory.  I assure you, I believe what I am writing in this post, and I do not think that it is a conspiracy theory.

With all of that being said, we can continue.

There is a cost to pursuing peace.

When we go out of our way to be peaceful we find that we have to give up parts of ourselves in order fully pursue peace.  This can mean that we have to tear out our own desire for revenge when we have been wronged, or it could mean we commit our own resources to help correct a situation for someone else.  If you have been robbed, bringing peace into the situation could mean facing the person who has stolen from you, and offering them forgiveness.  Or perhaps someone has been stolen from, and while you can not bring the thief to justice, you have it in your power to restore what was stolen by sacrificing something of your own.

In small things, people do this often, and the world does not take much note of them.  We accept family members who have hurt us back into our lives, even though it would be easier to stay mad at them.  Sometimes the person who has hurt us doesn’t even know that we have been hurt, but we release those feelings to accept them back.  We accept the pain, and accept the possibility of more pain to welcome them back into relationship with us.

(I want to be clear that I am not encouraging us to stay in a situation that repeatedly results in physical or emotional harm.  There is a difference between relational pain and abusive pain.  While both may continue or reoccur over long periods of time, they are different and should be treated as such. The true intent of the person causing the pain should be considered.)

In larger things, we as people are less likely to extend the hand of peace when we have been wronged.  There are not many of us who can imagine a suicide bomber being forgiven by the living victims of his crime.  It is almost as if we see certain acts as outside of the realm of forgiveness because of their brutality.  We see some offenses as being unforgiveable.  Perhaps your whole family was unjustly imprisoned and died in captivity.  Many of us would consider that unforgivable and would demand justice for those who carried out the act.

Unfortunately we have examples of people who have lived through this exact situation.  Corrie Ten Boom was part of a Dutch family who had hidden Jews fleeing from persecution and imprisonment in Germany.  Her family was caught, and imprisoned for their “crime”.  Corrie and her sister Betsy were sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where Betsy died.  Corrie was released (because of a clerical error apparently) and returned to Holland to start a rehabilitation center for concentration camp survivors.  While giving a speech in Germany 2 years after the end of the war, Corrie was approached by one of her former guards who asked her for forgiveness.  After a brief internal battle, Corrie decided that she must forgive him for his crimes.  You can read the whole story here.

We do not like to accept that in order to pursue peace, we have to make sacrifices of our own.

I’d like to share the following video with you.  It is an audio recording from a radio show called “This American Life” and in its brief 4 minutes it makes clear the extents to which pursuing peace can take us.

Now ask yourself, is the pursuit of peace worth the potential cost?

I think we both know the answer.

So far 10 people will now have access to clean water for life because of our efforts! You guys ROCK! Join the effort by donating here!

25 Days of Peace (An Introduction)

The Power for Peace

If you will hang with me through the whole article, there are some actual concrete steps we can take as individuals to promote global peace, I just have to get through some background stuff first.  Hold on!

The title, as are many of mine, is slightly misleading, but also entirely truthful!

Today I would like to talk about the importance of energy independence.  You have likely heard this term batted around a lot in the last 5 to 10 years.  Energy independence has a few very clear and immediate benefits; the first and most recognizable of which is a lower domestic energy cost.  The other major benefit of energy independence is found in our ability to resist political pressure from foreign energy producers who are able to manipulate the global price of energy.  When you know that the United States has a certain energy need daily, it is easy to apply economic pressure by raising energy costs to encourage the political outcome you are seeking.

You have no doubt noticed the amazingly low fuel prices we are experiencing at the moment.  Have you stopped to ask yourself why these prices are so low?  Like most markets, price is set primarily by two factors, supply and demand.  We can look at those two factors to determine what has changed.

Has consumption of fuel in the United States been drastically reduced?   Recent statistics suggest that holiday travel this year will rise for the 5^th straight year, and while vehicles have become more fuel efficient, oil use is up from a low point in 2012.  Since we know that fuel prices are lower now than they were in 2012, we can conclude that fuel prices are falling because of an increased supply.

Some of this supply is coming from our domestic efforts at energy independence.  Hydraulic Fracturing is a new oil recovery technique that has opened up oil reserves in the United States that were previously inaccessible to us.  By pumping a mixture of liquid chemicals into oil beds, oil producers break up rock below the surface, resulting in the release of previously trapped oil reserves.  Hydraulic Fracturing (or “fracking”) has taken off in the last year, and has resulted in an increased supply of gasoline being available to the consumer in the United States.

Fracking Cylons…

If we ignore the unknown environmental impacts of fracking, we can see this situation as a win.  Lower gas prices mean lower prices on anything that must be shipped, resulting in lower food, clothing, and other costs.  Unfortunately there does not seem to be clear scientific evidence that fracking is environmentally friendly or harmful.  This leaves us in a situation where we may be selling our children’s future to satisfy our current needs.

The other large factor in our currently low fuel price is the recent decision by OPEC to sustain oil production at current levels.  OPEC stands for the Organization of Petroleum (Oil) Producing Countries and is an oil cartel that includes many of the world’s largest oil producing companies.  By making decisions regarding the production levels of oil products, OPEC has the ability to change the market price.  When OPEC cuts production, the price of fuel rises.  If OPEC chose to dramatically increase production, we would enjoy reduced fuel costs at the pump.  It is the influence of OPEC that energy independence seeks to avoid.

It seems like OPEC choosing to continue producing oil at “pre-fracking” levels is a good thing for everyone.  Lower fuel costs around the world could potentially kick start the stagnant global economy.  Right?

Unfortunately it is not so simple.

OPEC has essentially declared a market war on the production of oil and energy outside of the members of its cartel.  By artificially forcing the price of oil lower, American companies make less profit on each barrel of oil recovered from our own country.  As profits decrease, so do the incentives to develop additional energy capacity in the United States.   One of the goals of keeping the price low is to limit future competition.

Why doesn’t the United States call OPEC on its market manipulation?  Well, it is playing to our advantage as well.  To understand how OPECs decision is benefiting us, we have to take a quick trip to the Black Sea region.  Many of us will remember the seizing of Crimea from the country of Ukraine by the Russians.  This action is the result of pro-western demonstrations in Ukraine that led to the ouster of the Russian backed President Viktor Yanukovych.  The Russian President Vldamir Putin didn’t like the loss of his access to the Black Sea, and annexed Crimea to ensure access to the sea and the economic benefits it provides.

What does this all of this have to do with oil you ask?   Well, not much.  However natural gas is a large percentage of the Russian export market.  OPEC is also a large exporter of natural gas.  By keeping supplies of natural gas available, OPEC is destabilizing the price of Russian natural gas, resulting in serious economic impacts in an already struggling economy.

While the United States may not have encouraged OPEC to do this, it is enjoying the pressure being put on the Russian economy by lower gas prices.  By allowing these “market sanctions” the United States hopes to be able to put enough pressure on President Putin to win concessions for the restoration of disputed parts of Ukraine to the Ukrainian government.   The flip side to that coin is the danger of unexpected action from Russia.  If too much pressure is applied, President Putin may feel that his only recourse involves military or economic action against a target of opportunity.   We do not need to look far for a likely target.  The European Union currently imports nearly 80% of its natural gas from Russia.  So if Russia decides it is getting squeezed to hard, it could be a very cold winter for many in Eastern Europe.

Crazy right?

By now you are probably asking why we should care, since there is little that we can do to change the mind of OPEC or reduce the pressure being put on countries all over the world by fluctuating energy prices.  While it is true that we may not be able to exert much pressure on the global energy market right now, it is important for us to consider the future.  What happens if coal prices rise dramatically in the near future, increasing our electricity costs?  If fracking is deemed harmful to the environment and hydraulic fracturing operations are outlawed, will OPEC again set high fuel prices and squeeze our economy again?

We need energy independence.

This time when I say energy independence, I don’t mean on a national level, I mean on an individual level.  Now it will still be a few years before we can pop into Walmart and pick up a Mr. Fusion, but we are closer than ever before to having the tools for real energy independence.  Advances in sustainable and alternative energy are starting to add up, and as more people adopt these alternative energy sources, advancement will come more and more quickly.  At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I think it will become important for our upcoming generations to seriously consider “going off the grid”.

Solar Energy is one of many renewable energy options.

By reducing our “on the grid” energy footprint as much as possible, we limit the power of governments, both foreign and domestic to effect the costs of our everyday life.  By reducing the ability of others to influence us, we increase our own ability to think soberly and critically in the face of potentially adverse situations.  By having our own energy resources, we reduce the risk of war over manipulative market fluctuations.

Readers who live in the United States may not be familiar with rolling blackouts, but I have experienced them in other countries and know that the disruption that is normal there, could probably provoke rioting in our energy obsessed culture.  Why wait while energy production is used as a tool against us to prepare a back-up plan?  Many of us own our own homes, and do not have the capital to invest in a sustainable and renewable energy system, but we can all have conversations with future generations about the importance of energy.

Energy independence will not happen overnight, but it is achievable.

It is also important.

So far 10 people will now have access to clean water for life because of our efforts! You guys ROCK! Join the effort by donating here!

25 Days of Peace (An Introduction) 

Peace

noun

• Freedom from disturbance; quiet and tranquility.
  • Synonyms: tranquility, calm, restfulness, quietness
• Freedom from or the cessation of war or violence.
  • Synonyms: law and order, lawfulness, order, peacefulness, harmony

 For some reason when we started this project, I never took the time to actually look up the definition of the word peace.  I was struggling to pick a topic to write on today, so in my struggle, I decided to see what Google had to say on the subject.  I typed in the word peace, and the definition was the top result.  I read through the definition, but still had no direction.  I almost posted my “ace in the hole” which is a 15 minute video that I have been holding for a day when I have no inspiration.  On my way to posting the video, I glanced at the definition again, and in one of those eureka moments, caught a nuance that I had missed in my first reading.

The first definition is primarily related to peace on the individual level.  Tranquility, calm, restfulness are all words that I feel apply more directly to an individual than a governmental agency.  I think when I began this project, this is the peace I thought we would be looking for in the spirit of the holidays.  I have been troubled by the lack of personal application and introspection in this little project so far, but I knew that all of the things I had written were important things that I felt needed to be said.  I have been struggling to recognize this month as anything other than a month when it is cold, and frankly felt that I was missing the point in many ways.

A bit of snowy tranquility from last year.

The second definition appears to be specifically related to peace on a societal level.  We look to society to orchestrate law and order, and we look to society to bring an end to war.  An individual can be involved in the pursuit of law and order or peace from war, but bringing those results about on their own is unlikely.  The second definition of peace requires that we work together with others who share our goals and desires for justice and harmony.  This is the peace that I have been primarily writing about.

An occupied society (the example that comes to mind is the French during World War II) can have individuals in it who retain their individual peace, although the society at large lacks the same peace the individual enjoys.  At the same time, a society at peace can have individuals who lack a personal sense of tranquility and calm.  Laws can be enforced while individuals are restless.  The lack of one type of peace does not preclude or guarantee the presence of the other.

In fact, I would suggest that many times we cling to our own sense of individual peace at the cost of societal peace.

This is evidenced in my life currently by a desire to stay at home and read, watch a few episodes of Star Trek, and sleep in my own comfortable bed at night.  Avoiding personal contact is a way of preserving that sought after individual peace, a way to insulate myself from the troubles around me in the world.  As I flip the next page of my book, or start the next episode of Star Trek, I protect myself from the discomfort I may find if I sought out a source of lawlessness or disharmony and lent my efforts to its eradication.  I have felt drawn to the conflict in Syria, but I remain at home because the alternative requires that I sacrifice activities that I find restful.  Essentially, I sacrifice the contribution I could make to efforts of peace in the region, because I hold tightly to my own personal peace.

I suspect that many of us are in the same place.  We are afraid of the personal cost we would pay in our attempt to bring peace to a larger segment of society.  We avoid the homeless on the side of the road because we are afraid of them.  We don’t serve in a soup kitchen because it would take time away from our friends and family.  We do not volunteer in conflict zones because of a fear for our own lives.

In this way the two types of peace are fighting a war of their own inside of us.

I do not suggest that we all run off to Syria, but I do suggest that we become aware of our desire for preservation of our individual peace.  The stories we hear from those who have set aside their personal comforts for the sake of others, seldom includes a strong sense of regret attached to the decision.   They can tell us horror stories of bathrooms without plumbing, or rats climbing over them in their sleep, but they often do it with a sense of wistfulness in their voices.  There is a loneliness for their families and friends, but a new circle of friends who become like family to them in their new situations.  It is as if they find a peace that transcends understanding in their willingness to sacrifice their comforts for others.

Thanks to ANOTHER anonymous donation, we have reached $350 towards our $5000 goal! You guys seriously ROCK! Today I even have the link working!

If you have tried everything in search of personal peace this season and still find yourself lacking, might I suggest a foray into the world of pursuing societal peace?  You may find that you discover a part of yourself you never knew existed, and a peace that you can not explain.

25 Days of Peace (An Introduction)