To Peter...........And to every Adam and Eve

(this Peter:-)

http://just-one-day-of-peace.blogspot.com/

You invited me; the least – in fact, in my circumstances which are mine alone, also the most – I can do is respond. It will be a rambling, unstructured, unpreconceived response. It will appear, however, here on my “home territory”. And it will be the first thing I publish that is not accompanied with images, although my head is full of images that I might publish, if I had any. However, it suffices to say that all of us who, according to the latest UNO report on global private wealth, are all among the rich enough half of the population to communicate in this way, have also seen those images, if not at first hand, then via one of the ‘cold’ media.

It is not private, confidential. I authorise you to do with it as you wish.
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Respond to whom? For what? About What? (I am much better at asking questions than answering them).
I wish to say, to a Peter, and to every Adam and Eve/Eva who add up to something approaching 7 billion living souls:
PRESUME NOTHING!
About me,
About any of us;
About yourselves.
Neither over-estimate or under-estimate
ANYBODY.
Please stop judging, prejudging, moralising.
Live and let live.
Try to do the right thing (acknowledgement to Terry)
Try to make a positive difference (a beautiful cliché that actually does good!)
And read those words of John Dos Passos and absorb them (they appear at the top of my post on 16 August 06).

I said it was unstructured.

Like what this is supposed to be about. If “peace” is an abstract, then what is war? War is NOT the contrary; conflict/aggression is.
We can ask many questions, if we can find the time & if we are inclined, because ‘peace’ is the goal; there are so many questions.
We can search for the answers and find them, but will this knowledge give us peace of any real or lasting kind? I do not believe so.
Knowledge in itself achieves nothing.

Peace is as many different things as its antithesis.
And both are made of motion – colliding, overlapping motions of diverse dimensions, happeneing in time and space in multiple simultaneities, like the tiny fragments of coloured matter in a vast kaleidoscope.
This would actually imply that there IS peace, but I know that is not what you mean.
What peace? For whom? For what?

I know nothing;
I am an infinitessimally small cell on the back of a fly that lives on, and from, an elephant that inhabits a vast plain inhabited by many more elephants.
I am, seemingly, of no importance.
But I am here, a temporary nano-fragment in this scheme, like you and every other Peter, Adam & Eve.
Peace is as much a way of being as conflict in all its forms.

Lennon said a simple, startling thing: “War is over, IF you want it”. Not bad.
So, if it isn’t over, it follows that we should infer that it is because we do not want it to be over. Is it really so simple?
Or is it that beyond and beneath the simple, there is a deep, vast ocean of complexity?
I have recently been giving a lot of thought to that verb “Want”. It seems to me that there is more power in it than maybe any other verb in any of our languages.
We can ‘like’; we can even ‘love’, yes. We can like & love the notions of liking and loving. We can also ‘hate’ the notion of hating. So what?

“Want”, however, is something else; it is a fundamental level on our hierarchy of drives and motivations. It is higher up that hierarchy than its older, more basic sibling, “Need”.
I am going to move towards terminating this rambling, random set of thoughts by suggesting to those who fancy the idea of peace/a life of peace/a planet of peace to consider carefully “want” and “need” in relation to achieving the goal (if, indeed, there is, or can even be, one universal goal.
And if any of you can find one homogeneous set of “wants” and “needs” by which Man, the animal can be recognisably defined, and which MOREOVER, explain the aggressivity in every one of its forms – from the millions of daily incidences that occur (between acquantainces, relatives, friends, as well as strangers) on roads, in bars, shops, public transport, sports stadiums, streets, parliaments, towns cities, countryside and NOT LEAST in our own homes, to the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Srebrenica, Bagdad, Basra, Beirut, Bali, Madrid, Manhattan – you might then be able to know if there can ever be something abstract and ill-defined attainable for all called PEACE.

I have seen too much of the antithesis, conflict and its consequences, that I do not understand. It did not immobilise me and I did not run away from it. Peace I understand, but that is personal.

I wish you well, I wish you peace in your actions and in you hearts.
That is my NEED;
That is my WANT.
That is all. For now.