No More War?

 

The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
'What are those?'
'Soldiers.'
'What are soldiers?'
'They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.'
The girl held still and studied.
'Do you know . . . I know something?'
'Yes, what is it you know?'
'Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.'

- Carl Sandburg from his poem The People, Yes

Wouldn't it be nice if that little girl was right? Sadly, with our current global mindset, I fear that it is just a pipe dream.

Surely, if enough people decided not to participate in war, then we might see an end to these senseless large-scale conflicts. But how do we go about creating this widespread acceptance of peace over war?

In a Remembrance Day post of mine, I stated that if I am to mourn those who died due to the madness of war, then I mourn every soldier who died; regardless of which “side” they were on.

I refuse to support “our” troops or to take place in a military ceremony commemorating “our” fallen comrades, lest “we” forget. I refuse to oppose those dirty rotten “others”. This “us” vs. “them” mentality is what brings about war in the first place. Is it not obvious that this is the source of all conflict?

As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, "When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."

On the other hand, the poem  In Flanders Fields exhorts us to “Take up our quarrel with the foe...”

What foe?

All persons on this planet are my brothers and sisters. We are undeniably tied to everyone and everything. When we fight someone else, we fight ourselves. We create enemies that don’t really exist.

To put an end to war forever, we need a new direction. But where do we go? Who do we turn to? The UN? NATO? Our elected “leaders”? Organized religion? (God help us). No. None of these have ever demonstrated the ability to bring about lasting peace, and they never will.

We need to realize our connection to each other; and not just realize it intellectually, but actually feel it and live it. It must be a full time occupation. We must abandon our egocentric thoughts and behavior in favor of an identity with the Whole of existence. This is the only thing that will prevent large scale conflicts altogether. Only you, the individual — who, in reality, is not an individual but a part of the Whole — can create peace. It must come from within.

Only peaceful souls can effect a peaceful world.