Mark it down for the sake of history: 4:30 P.M. Tuesday December 23, 2008 and at this unusually early time I have done the last bit of my Christmas shopping: seems that everything I’m giving is either something to eat or something with which to cook. As the Checkers ads say, “you gotta eat” and those of us who have the wherewithal to do so will eat, and of course do what we can to facilitate the possibility of eating for everyone in the world.
Which brings me to the theme of this posting: the stereotyped yearning for peace on earth that is the inspiration of this season in whatever weird and convoluted ways that inspiration may be expressed. But if we define peace is simply the absence of warfare, we miss I think the message of Christ and of the exemplars of so many other faiths. This is expressed in the cliché “there can be no peace without justice.” Right now we are assessing the likelihood that a new Administration in Washington can bring us any closer to the cessation of warfare: will the de-surge of military activity in Iraq and the surge of same in Afghanistan bring peace to that part of the world? But how can this question even be asked if we don’t make a matter of the highest priority a concern for the sense of so many, throughout the world and in the United States and our local communities, that they are the unjust victims of the policies, both military and economic, of people at the centers of power? How can we appeal to a common devotion of citizenship in our communities, states, nations and the international community when the fruits of our common actions benefit the wealthy and the privileged at the expense of the poor and the deprived?
To be more specific about it, how can our President-elect address the sense and the reality of injustices visited on a race of people, those of African origins, who are deprived of equality with their peers in practically every conceivable way….when that President-elect was elected on a platform of pretending that we have already moved “beyond race” in this country? And to be specific in another way, how can this new Administration hope to bring justice and peace to all the peoples of the Middle East when the President-elect has announced—and confirmed by his staff and cabinet appointments—that he is going to support the actions of our staunch ally, Israel, be those actions right or wrong, be they productive of peace and justice, or be they productive of conflict and injustice?
In raising these questions, I hope they are not totally rhetorical, with a pre-ordained answer that these things cannot be done. That word hope again: what a resilient human emotion, existing when reality batters at the hoped-for walls of peace and justice; and maybe we need these annual seasons of hope and best wishes to retain our Sisyphus-like human tendency to continue to roll to the top of the hill those stones that we know (and yet hope not) will roll down the hill again. We elected our next President, as we always should do, on the basis of our best realistic hope that world and local peace and justice can be accomplished.
As principled progressives our “new year’s resolution” should be the resolution of every day of our lives: to “so live” (if I can remember the poem), “that when thy summons comes to join that innumerable caravan where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death, thou go not like the quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon, but soothed and sustained by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant sleep.” The earnest search for peace and justice in all the phases of our public and private lives may never bring that stone to rest atop that hill of human recalcitrance, but at least we may earn thereby the nirvana of a pleasant sleep.
Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist
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