I’d Like a Piece of that Peace

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peace, SoCs

Ya ever wonder how two words end up sounding alike yet have nothing to do with one another? I mean, a piece is a part of a whole, a unit unto itself. It is a “something” that together with some more somethings makes another thing.

Yet it also means having sex with someone “a piece” or giving some of your thoughts to another as in “piece of my mind”, which is not literal as in a piece of pie would be, but rather an idea conveyed, which still remains with the thinker. I can also demand a “piece of the action” claiming that for some reasons I’m entitled so share in certain activities or profits.

Confusing?

How does a word get to mean so many diverse things?

Now peace means no war. It means tranquility and freedom from turmoil. It relates to countries, groups within a country, families, or even the individual. Wherever there is upheaval one desires cessation. Calmness is desired.

I am not sure why we crave peace, but we certainly do. We say we do all the time, while we of course war. We say our aim in war is peace, but we curiously think that comes at the end of a gun rather than at the end of a string of sentences.

To want a piece of peace is to lay claim to some place physical or otherwise where we impose peace. Our island in the midst of chaos. It’s often our home, our castle as we construe it.

While it seems for there to be peace there must be all peace, we insist that if we can’t get real peace, we will settle for this semblance of it. We will have a cabin in the woods. We will meditate into our piece of peace.

It will be contained within our minds. No matter what you say or do in front of me, I won’t give it up. This piece of peace I have established. I’ll fight pretty hard to maintain its perimeter. But somehow that is not violence, since I’m preserving my peace.

People say, I won’t talk to you about politics or religion; it will disturb my peace. There are rules to peace so it seems.

I will sit and watch all around me go to hell, but it will not disturb my peace. That is something isn’t it?

I’ve got my peace, screw you buddy.

I’ll not only take no responsibility for this fine mess, I won’t lift a finger to fix it, cuz it ain’t my mess.

They gotta meme for that.

Catchy huh?

Yeah, I know.

Climb into your blanket fort and pretend it ain’t yours.

Peace at any price?

Now that will start a row.

Neville Chamberlain is reputed to have desired peace so much that any peace would do. Not yours or theirs, but England’s was enough.

That didn’t work, because Hitler wanted to his fantasy at any price.

It is your mess.

You can’t avoid it.

You can only look the other way.

So that means peace can be really fake.

It can be a pretence for peace, one imposed on an ungrateful world which refuses to go away, or at least just keep it’s horrors to itself.

I wanna get a hold of some peace, but my heart keeps looking around and seeing injustice, and I can’t get my piece of peace until I can wipe those images from my brain.

And I can’t do that, until I change the world.

Imagine that.

Talk politics and talk religion and stand forth against the raging tide of ennui and lies and speak truth to whom ever is standing in front of me. Imagine that.

If they gave a war and nobody came would there be war any more?

If we don’t care enough to learn how to tell a liar from a saint are we seeking peace, or only a piece?

It’s Earth Day.

The earth would like some peace. It needs a lot of pieces of peace these days.

Whales need a lot of peace. Not only are their seas and oceans being polluted, but they are still incarcerated and forced to perform for humans.

Women need a lot of peace. In a lot of places for a lot of things.

The list would be long. All the shit that needs some peace.

God probably needs peace too. I bet She never figured that this particular human sentience would be such a pain in the ass. We write books and then claim that God wrote them, and then we tell each other what they mean, and we all disagree, and we call each interpretation “being the real church”.

We all need peace from politics, so we say. As I said, some say they won’t talk to people who mention that stuff. I guess that’s why we got a House and Senate full of morons and when you travel around the states and cities, you find even more of them.

They say, that to achieve peace, you have to be peace. I guess that might be true. You are becoming a piece of peace, and when there are enough pieces, that makes a whole peace.

But it’s not enough to be peace. It’s not like seeping into the fabric of evil and suddenly it’s not evil any more.

You gotta actually speak up and speak out and call it what it is. Name it.

When it ain’t fair, you gotta spit out that it’s unfair, and how it can be fair. That’s transforming. Because it’s all too clear a whole lot of folks have no clue what is fair.

So are you gonna do peace today?

Are you gonna take your piece and go out and explain truth to the world?

Or are you gonna stay in the blanket fort, and pretend you got it all by yourself?

Brought to you by SoCs

Willing Love

Tags

God, peace, psychology, sociology, War, world politics

If you ask a peace advocate how they create peace in such a troubled world, most will state the obvious–be peaceful.

That is both a practical and a spiritual directive. Peaceful people are quiet in their speech, conciliatory, not prone to loudness or demands. They are solicitous of others, courteous, and kind.

They are clear about what they believe, never waivering in their commitment, stoic in the face of adversity, and always seeing the positive. They are firm.

One cannot be these things outwardly, it seems to me without feeling them inwardly. And since so many of us who yearn for peace are a cauldron of anger and frustration inside, we neither are peaceful ourselves nor do we accomplish much toward changing the hearts of others.

So peace does start with each of us. This is true whether we are actively spiritual or not. Whether we believe in a God or not. For, God, I believe uses all his children who exhibit a willingness to do his will, whether they are in active partnership or not. God takes what he can get, as long as it is offered willingly. The atheist who works for peace is as welcomed as the practicing Hindu who does the same.

And it is God’s will that there be peace. If we believe either on the basis of some scripture or because nature is a beautiful  harmony the result of evolution only, it is good. It deserves our attention and care. That should be whether we speak of people or animals or plants, or our oceans.

Words that signify peace are tranquility, repose, quietude and concord, order. There is a rightness that exudes from these words. A sense that they reflect goodness, that which should be. They are the “absence of mental strain or anxiety.” There is a congruity of parts. All work for the betterment of the whole.

Whether directly from God or through the agency of evolution, life clearly works together. We cannot evolve without being in some kind of symbiosis with our surroundings. We cannot continue without relational quietude among ourselves.

War with its attendant greeds, jealousies, fears, and anxieties is the antithesis of harmonious living. It solves nothing but the briefest of issues, and sets into motion inexorably, the series of issues that will erupt again in violence.

Not even the most hardened biblical literalist, can believe that God wills the polluting of stream and river and ocean, the fouling of our air. The most cruel arms dealer knows in his heart that he does evil for filthy lucre that will not serve him when he breathes his last.

Common sense leads us all to the only clear conclusion–that peace makes for a better life for all of us. Short term gains are eaten in the vast maw of history. We are plunging head long over the cliff collectively. The rich sit upon their estates, but the weight of the billions of humanity will drag them off too. They will just be the last to go. Or not. For those billions may rise up and destroy their torturers.

But this will solve little. For if we don’t evolve from violence, from within the billions will arise a new ruling class who will do it all again.

I can but cite the obvious. Those who “protest” not with signs and shouting, but with silent witness are the most powerful advocates we have. Gandhi and King were our models, along with brilliant martyrs for the faith in many and various religions. Men and women who chose to simple be peaceful in the face of hate and aggression.

It is better to be for rather than against. That is why “war’s on drugs” don’t work. We must be for healthy people who have lives that give meaning without resort to destroying agents. We were, I believe, meant to be happy, meant to be joyful, meant for laughter. We were meant to enjoy good food and drink, good music and art, good conversation.

We are meant for loving and friendship. We seek it, and we mourn its loss. We are naturally empathetic and compassionate. It has just been pushed down in some of us so far that we no longer feel it. We are so awash in the need to be here and there, doing, making, counting. We have lost our way.

But in moments of quiet, we remember. We remember who and what we are, whether we conclude ourselves to be spiritual beings or an amazing evolutionary creation, we are so much better than we let ourselves be.

 We know who we are.

Let us be it today.

Peace starts with one step, one choice, one issue. Be peace. And then, be peace again.

Related Articles

• Dona Nobis Pacem (daisythecurlycat.blogspot.com)
• When People are Most at Peace (socyberty.com)
• Anne Naylor: Nourishment for a Peaceful Mind and Body (huffingtonpost.com)
• Peaceful Easy Feeling added 2 discussions to the group Raising Your Vibration and Ascension Symptoms Support (humanityhealing.ning.com)

What She Said

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"just say no", Franken, GOP, John McCain, Jon Stewart, net neutrality, peace, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Susie Essman, UN, War

The GOP has been using some version of “just say no” for some time now. One is tempted to ask, “how’s that workin’ for ya?”

From Pumas on, they’ve been banking on the “nope, no way” constituency to materialize into a real force. So far, it’s been a wash. The Pumas as you recall, were all those women who were Hillary supporters who were supposed to flock to the GOP once McCain chose that woman for all seasons, Sarah Palin as his running liar.

The Pumas of course never materialized, and Sarah soon grew wearisome to a thinking public.

Since the election last year, it has been the unmitigated decision of the Rethug leadership to simply oppose everything. And it seems, like Nancy Reagan’s anti drug program, not to be making much difference, other than to make them look clearly what they are: crybabies and bad sports who trade public welfare for being contrary.

They oppose the extension of hate crimes legislation,  although we have had it for decades now without the world coming to an end. Some Rethugs found themselves opposing legislation proposed by Franken which would eliminate a contractual prohibition to sue rapists who worked for the company. I mean do you really want to be publicly on the wrong side of that one? “NO, I think Haliburton should be able to keep women from suing Haliburton employees who rape them. After all, profits must prevail!”

Similarly, when you look at net neutrality legislation, what do you find? Yep, you guessed it, the Rethugs are against it. As someone said, all you need do is look who subsidizes the Republican by way of contributions to know whose side he or she is on. I mean who doesn’t want the Internet free of priority speeds for certain companies?

And then there is my favorite of all, posts on Facebook. One of our less than stellar brains posted a report on how many wars and deaths had occurred since the United Nations had been instituted. The lead headline for the piece was something like “How’s that peace doing for ya?” Well, first of all, dumbed down, the UN has not started any wars and has not aggressively set out to kill anyone. They try to STOP wars and aggression. Not exactly their fault that they are not internationally supported by the member nations in peacekeeping. I mean, seriously, are you not for peace? I thought that was kinda a Christian thing as well as a mature human thing. Maybe I’m wrong.

Then we have the utter slimy behavior of the right wing pundits. I mean, the rank and file, the middle of the road, read SANE Republicans can’t even complain about the insulting load of bull that is barfed out upon the great illiterate uneducated tiny tots of the electorate. Lindsay Graham, who admittedly seldom comes up for air by pulling his head out of McCain’s backside, tried to complain about Beck, only to be booed off the floor at the next town hall meeting he attended. The crazy minority, most of which are holding up their bibles as pitchforks, won’t allow any criticism of the idiot brigade.

So, of course they feed them the swill they wish and damned be the facts. This has been demonstrated again and again with Hannity. He cuts comments and re-pastes them to say what he wants, even though the speaker clearly meant otherwise and said so DIRECTLY. Now we have Rush, quoting from a “paper” allegedly written by Barack Obama in college. The paper was critical of the constitution and was leaning toward socialism. Of course Rush was near orgasmic in his outrage. When a sycophant whispered in his ear that the paper was a hoax, he refused to apologize, but merely said, “well, we know he really believes this stuff anyway.” And the folks who listen to Rush, not being educated or even mentally average, lap it up in their unknowing bewildered world.

Finally we were watching Jon Stewart last night, hands down the best actual pundit in the business these days. He had on Susie Essman, of Curb your Enthusiasm. Susie suggested, and I had said the same, that Sarah Palin and folks like her, who continue to insist that dinosaurs and man walked hand in hand in our not so distant past, against ALL the evidence, should be prevented from using technology.

I agree wholeheartedly. Now I know that the illogical nut case can’t understand the hypocrisy of being okay with some science and vilifying other science, sometimes even when they overlap, as in medicine (which they like) and evolutionary biology (which they don’t) but the rest of us can. You can’t pick science as “good” when it transports you across town, allows you to call other countries, lets you surf the net, and cook dinner in minutes instead of hours, but then claim that science is some monstrous behemoth of atheistic mumbo jumbo designed to hate God and his Word. We know you are being disingenuous, but at least we do admit, you don’t get it, because you don’t have the smarts to get it.

All this being said, it’s not really a complaint. It’s really a  big thank you Republicans. You continue to satisfy your extraordinarily weird collection of misfit followers, but you totally turn off the middle and the left. Having five percent of the electorate in your pocket doesn’t win elections. So keep up the usual swill. I hear Bachmann and King and others of the “crazier than any loon” brigade has introduced legislation to commend and honor all those who marched against taxes. Good luck. Those two are good for another ten votes every time they open their mouths.

And so it goes. Just sayin.’