Let us be children of Peace.
On the Rails to Trails in Mt. Herbert yesterday morning, my son and youngest daughter and I met up with a gentleman, likely in his fifties, who clearly wanted to talk. He was positively beaming and burst into a proclamation to us about the need to remember past wars and the sacrifices made therein, with hearts of gratitude.
There were no simple greetings. He had a lot on his mind.
After politely admonishing both himself and the three of us for not having poppies on, he told us he was going to be going to the Cenotaph in Charlottetown at 5pm today, after he got off work, to pay his dues. I am sure if we were to go in at that time we would see him there and he would likely, once again, be keen to talk.
He spoke primarily about the age of the young recruits in WW1 and WW2, no doubt looking at my two teens and thinking they would be of the age now that many of those young people were.
I said I could not begin to imagine the family's grief at their children's leaving.
Our son wondered why the man looked so happy when talking about such an awful topic as war but then answered his own question--he concluded he was beaming in gratitude for what he believed those young service men and women did.
Whatever your personal take on Remembrance Day, I think we all can agree that war is abhorrent and should be avoided at all costs.
Please take a few minutes today to read this powerful article from the American publication, YES! Magazine on Veteran's personal takes on the ravages of war and its ultimate goals.
What might avoiding war look like? What would it demand of us personally? Culturally?
On whom does war always take its greatest toll?
Can a war ever truly be won, when the costs of human lives and whole scale destruction are so incredibly high?
I have been a pacifist since before I knew what the word meant. I wished for world peace on every birthday candle I blew out in my childhood. My first oral presentation I gave in juniour high school was about pacifism. No violent video games have ever been played by anyone in my house.
I cannot abide the idea of warfare nor its glorification.
I also think of all the violence that is taking place and claiming lives the world over, today. Gang violence, gun violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, ethnic cleansing, environmental destruction.
Violence is violence and it is the most grievous expression of othering that can exist.
Can you extinguish violence with more violence or must it always be extinguished with love?
My great grandfather on my mother's side, fought in WW1. He came home to PEI a different person than when he left. He, along with my great grandmother, led quiet, albeit busy lives as parents of twelve and keepers of the lighthouse in Naufrage, PEI. My mom's mom was the fourth of their children. Given my profound distaste for war, I also wonder about the epigenetics of battle trauma and its generational expression.
(note--I also cannot abide animal testing as described in the above hyperlink of an interesting article on the epigenetics of trauma.)
We have long been a species of bloodshed. Can we become a species of peace?
In closing, I offer you a brief excerpt and link to an article in Scientific American exploring whether the tendency to warfare is innate in human nature. (Bold is my own.)
"Complex hunter-gatherers, in contrast, live in fixed settlements with populations in the hundreds. They maintain social rankings of kin groups and individuals, restrict access to food resources by lines of descent and have more developed political leadership. Signs of such social complexity first appeared during the Mesolithic. The appearance of complex hunter-gatherers can sometimes but not always mark a transitional stage to agriculture, the basis for the development of political states. These groups, moreover, often waged war. The preconditions for war are only part of the story, however, and by themselves, they may not suffice to predict outbreaks of collective conflicts. In the Southern Levant, for instance, those preconditions existed for thousands of years without evidence of war. Why, though, was there an absence of conflict? It turns out that many societies also have distinct preconditions for peace. Many social arrangements impede war, such as cross-group ties of kinship and marriage; cooperation in hunting, agriculture or food sharing; flexibility in social arrangements that allow individuals to move to other groups; norms that value peace and stigmatize killing; and recognized means for conflict resolution. These mechanisms do not eliminate serious conflict, but they do channel it in ways that either prevent killing or keep it confined among a limited number of individuals. If this is so, why then are later archaeological findings, along with explorers' and anthropologists' reports, so full of deadly warfare? "
In Peace,
Jill