Today is Veteran’s Day, a day when the pundits make Big Statements about Big Subjects. I’m not a pundit, but here’s mine: I believe that many of the freedoms that I enjoy today were secured by the very wars that I abhor and oppose.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. But neither does war, and neither does peace, and that is my point.
As I watched MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ today, I heard the heartfelt appeals to help the veterans of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our country, as we all know, has dropped the ball here. The men and women who fought in these wars suffer from an array of physical and mental problems, and unlike our World War II veterans, they are suffering alone and alienated, unintentionally quarantined by a country who has learned too much about the motivations that drove our leaders to enter these wars.
After all, who wants to be reminded of a mistake that is expensive, that creates widows and widowers, and fatherless and motherless children, and suffering, and trauma, and deformity, and homelessness, and exile that extend for decades into the future? Who wants to be held accountable for that?
Because we don't like to clean up our messes, and because these particular veterans from these particular wars remind us of those messes, we turn our backs on them. It's not pretty.
We identify the soldier with the war, and that’s a mistake. If we are to have a national defense, then we must have soldiers. Yet our soldiers are not to blame when our government deploys them in reprehensible ways. We must blame our elected leaders and those of us who elected them.
Remember: soldiers don’t have the luxury, or the desire, I suppose, to indulge just-war theory. They fight when they are told to fight. And so as citizens of a liberal democracy, and as compassionate citizens, we honor that principle because we have benefited from it, and we honor the soldiers who return from war, whether or not we approve of that war.
All veterans deserve the same care and treatment—we honor our soldiers by comprehensively healing our soldiers.
And yet as I was listening to the talking heads this morning, with their anxious and laudable concern about PTSD, drug abuse, and depression among our veterans, I heard nothing about treating the root cause of these symptoms.
I heard nothing about the logical and comprehensive prevention of war.
I heard nothing about nonviolence. Or peace. Or Mahatma Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or Gene Sharp. Or the Dalai Lama. Or Nelson Mandela. All I heard was the feverish language of triage, without a single word given to stopping the wars that impel the injuries that maim the soldiers that require the healing that’s quickly forgotten by a culture weary of war.
Because we will never rid the world of war, we must make certain that we never rid the world of peace. But here’s the problem. We must also match the vast resources that our government pours into war—and the preparation for war—with an endowment, if you will, for peace. This endowment will not be funded by the federal government, which is in the business of making war. A peace endowment must find its funding in human capital, in the wealth of energy and creativity that arise spontaneously when we remind ourselves that we do, in fact, revere life and that we will do what we can, in our daily lives, in our jobs, and in our families, to embody that reverence.
Exercise: Remind yourself as many times as you can today how deeply you revere the lives of those that are closest to you, and when you see a stranger on the street, tell yourself that he or she also has a similar compliment of loved ones, and then realize that this reverence should logically, and can finally, with practice, be extended to everyone that you see. This is a practice that bears results in real-time.
In fact, from that simple exercise have come the individuals who gave themselves and, at times, their lives to peace; the organizations that are formed to continue the spirit of these sacrifices; and in the best of times, those substantial victories when people, communities, and countries have chosen peace over war.
War happens, but so does peace. And neither will make sense to everyone all the time. But it is easier and better to live with the victims of peace than it is to live with the victims of war.
So prepare yourself to choose peace. It’s not a choice that will arise without work.
