Peace is a radical proposition because we’ve been conditioned to fear and learned to accept violence in our lives. We follow our animal instincts in order to survive and when our gut tells us we are in danger we are naturally prepared to respond. As we grow through life, we acquire certain sensibilities that can show us a different way; a way of peace, reason and dialogue.
Unfortunately, there’s a tendency to become comfortable in the skin of survival so much so that we allow the demons of our conscience to take over. Too many people are comfortable in selfish ways and means, digging themselves deeper into the trenches of race hating, sexism, agism and throwing reason out the window to afford a protective stance that gives a false sense of security. In the meantime, society suffers, poverty grows, and such indecency delivers a mesmerism and incubates a complacency to lies and undermines our quest for truth.
Throughout history we’ve seen masses of people lulled into the daze where political propositions of survival of the fittest and strength through the projection of power has undermined our world. The Nazis mastered manipulation of the masses through undermining media and institutions, banning books, and propagating the belief of an us vs. them mentality to divide and conquer. They exploited the dignity of humans, capitalized on ignorance and taking the lead through righteous indignation rather than the fundamental call to reason and higher order thinking. In fact, they murdered the best and brightest.
The biggest offenders of this are autocratic governments like Russia, China and North Korea. Leaders who oppress their own people for the sake of maintaining power are all too often demonstrating that fear-based thinking and reinforcing it to keep control. Leaders who incite followers to riot and violence when an outcome hasn’t suited their opinions wreaks more havoc and chaos in a society and encourages more vitriol. Those who enable through their unwillingness to address these actions perpetuate indecency and undermine the ability to govern and weakens a nation.
Tapping the primal urges of followers can elicit psychological advantages and make it that much easier to control populations. Mark Twain once wrote, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Political violence, in particular, has become part of our culture and the assassination attempt on former President Trump is no exception. Since the first assassination of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War right up to the present, there have been multiple accounts of violent attacks against civil servants and their families.
In recent years multiple congressmen were shot by a gun wielding assassin at a baseball field. Representative Gabby Giffords was shot and nearly lost her life while campaigning at a shopping mall in Arizona. Judge Esther Salas, from New York, lost her only son to political violence and her husband was wounded. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked at their home by an assailant who was looking for her. The January 6th insurrection was one of the most extraordinary expressions of political violence on a grand scale. Trump has spoken from the podium to encourage political violence. It begins with him fomenting violence from the bully pulpit.
We examine the laws of nature and see what works for animals, but in doing so we lose sight of the intrinsic nature of power that comes from an ability to approach situations from points of reason. The more educated a group of people are, the more likely they are to elicit different ways to approach a situation rather than just responding to the stimuli presented.
Most sacred scriptures are inclined to teach us the way of higher consciousness and detachment. This higher order thinking allows for us to differentiate between the emotions of fear and the prospects of progress through love and creative solutions.
In the desert Jesus was tempted but refused to take the bait of all-consuming political power, economic power and spiritual power to use for his own need and gain. He chose to bring people together to work for a common good, inspired them to see the virtues of decency and abundance through partnerships and collaborations “rendering unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s and unto God that which is God’s.”
In kind, the Buddha also refused to be tempted by the lusts of this world and bow to the evils of division through vanity choosing instead to resist evil through peaceful means and rising above the folly of the world. Both individuals were considered radicals in their practice of peace.
The peace we seek is in our hearts and minds is one that “surpasses all understanding.” The biproduct of this peace is the vigilance of partnerships and prospects of shared interests and common values, working for the common good. Seeking peace within quiets the mind to realize the greatness that is inherent in us all and inspires a positive energy to direct one’s energies for good and we need this now more than ever as we face the challenges of poverty and disenfranchisement and civil unrest.
In the words of Robert Kennedy after the assassination of MLK: “For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”
There’s work to be done and it begins with changing our violent rhetoric and seeking the radical nature of peace in our own hearts. It’s the only hope we have for open dialogue and a safer world that taps the solemn vestiges of freedom.
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