by Bill Shein
September 20, 2006
At a time when candidates win more votes by stoking fear than by nurturing hope, and the awful sound of permanent war has become the blaring soundtrack of modern life, along comes a naive proposition that may not, upon reflection, be so naive after all.
What if, for just one day, people around the world joined together with imagination, hope and wisdom to suggest that maybe — just maybe — it doesn’t have to be this way?
What if, for that 24-hour period, we filled our streets and houses of worship and community centers and college campuses with a resounding call for a new direction?
And what if, for a single day among each year’s 365, guns were silenced so aid workers could reach civilians in war zones with food and medicine, and parties to conflict could pause to consider the impact of war and violence on their families, themselves, and the Earth?
Tomorrow, it turns out, is just such a day. Sept. 21 is the International Day of Peace, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2001 as an annual day of cease-fire and nonviolence, and, encouragingly, a day that is honored more widely every year.
Thousands of events are planned around the world: prayer vigils, rock concerts, moments of silence, teach-ins, school assemblies, and other activities in an astounding 181 countries. From the Berkshires to Sri Lanka, London to Tokyo, millions will join together, in ways large and small, to advance our most important shared goal: A world in which disputes between people and nations are resolved without violence.
To some, it seems ridiculous to think a few minutes of quiet meditation or an hour-long school assembly can slow a global war apparatus that marches onward in perpetual motion. Or that the day’s hopeful message will find its way to the heart of a terrorist convinced that evil acts are the path to eternal life.
Perhaps that’s true. But isn’t it equally ridiculous that with all of our ingenuity and resources and compassion, we still haven’t found a way to create lasting peace? That instead of deploying more of our nation’s unprecedented wealth to build healthy, sustainable communities here and abroad — the foundation for peace — we invest unthinkable sums in ever-more-efficient ways to take human life?
At minimum, tomorrow’s International Day of Peace demands that we ask hard questions about our role, however unintentional, in supporting the war machine. For example, shouldn’t we think twice before cheering the arrival of lucrative weapons contracts in our communities — contracts that buy our complacency at great moral cost? Or should we continue to respond with a shrug, saying, “Someone’s going to build these weapons, so it might as well be us”?
Should we withhold our tax dollars — and face the consequences — so they won’t pay for torture experts who perform “alternative interrogation techniques” in hidden CIA prisons or be used to fund the construction of “precision weapons” that aren’t so precise?
Should we finally heed President Eisenhower’s prescient warning that a massive and permanent armaments industry poses a grave danger to democracy? Or should we take Wall Street’s view that our “defense” establishment is doing quite well, and not make the connection?
The International Day of Peace is a reminder that to change course, and create a new and peaceful and sustainable society from within the crumbling shell of the old, we can’t ignore these difficult moral choices. We must begin to think and act differently.
As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” his 1962 book published widely for the first time in 2004, “The whole world faces a momentous choice. Either our frenzy of desperation will lead to destruction, or our loyalty to truth, to God and to our fellow man will enable us to perform the patient, heroic task of building a world that will eventually thrive in unity, order and peace.”
Forty-four years later, we still face that choice. Tomorrow, on the International Day of Peace, let’s choose wisely.