A Possible Peace?

A Possible Peace?

Lately the world has found itself in violent disruption again. Ethnic, government, economic, and religious disputes now seem to have swelled beyond control with a death count to give it credibility. We, the American people, find the turmoil in the Middle East to be such a shock, that fighting for so long is something new. Numerous people have tried to conceive ways of regaining peace.

Regaining peace. An interesting statement. I look back on human history, scanning the notes of eras past, and I cannot find one moment of "peace" throughout the world. The Athenians constantly rivaled the Spartans, Japan was in continuous civil war between shoguns, the Spanish Inquisition made their beheadings, and Cortez caused the deaths of thousands of Native Americans. It seems that "peace," while it maybe a human conceived ideal and moral, isn't a part of human nature. If there was never really peace to begin with, then what is there to regain?

There are peaceful people in the world, this I know, but in order to find this true peace takes a lot of self-discipline and resolve; a feat that the practitioners of Buddhism strive to achieve. The ideas of stripping away all worldly possessions- why drive when I can walk? Why type when I can write?–seems to be a great solution to create peace, unfortunately it won’t work for everyone. However, even if there was a way to make everyone in the world convert to Buddhism, and it was carried through, the breath of the fresh air of peace wouldn’t last forever. Someone somewhere, in the same generation or in another that follows, will say “I don’t like this” and will do something about it. Whoever this is will express his or her feelings and reasoning, and eventually others will follow. Positive and negative does not make positive, and the same goes in areas such as religion, government, economy, and ethnicity. Theoretically, if everyone isn’t the same, then there is no real “peace”.

However, should mankind really want peace? Imagine a world with no fighting, no rivalry, no judgment; what would be interesting? What would be the headlines of the newspapers? If people want to find a world of peace, a perfect place that everyone agrees openly and isn’t volatile, I suspect that they would find a similar world towards the city that the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin describes in the novel We. The One State, as the city is called, is run off the ideology that everyone is working for the benefit of others and each person desires nothing other than to benefit the One State. No human desires anything for themselves. This led to the utopian city’s problems. The only solution to these obstacles is to rid the human mind of one main factor, imagination, the originality of the mind.

I understand if this essay makes me seem pessimistic and that I don’t want violence to stop. That’s not correct. I wish the wars in the Middle East would seize and the massacres in Africa would disappear, but I haven’t blinded myself with the concept that the world can live in complete harmony. There will always be something. The only advice that I have to offer the world is for everyone to learn about one another and be accepting. If you don’t understand a person’s point of view, ask questions and try to understand, not immediately say it’s wrong. Open-mindedness is the key. The well-being of the world, not in perfect harmony but close enough, I believe is in the hands of the individual, not entirely on the whole.