The most important thing in the world we could wish for is a lasting and widespread peace--between nations, factions, peoples and within ourselves. We do not need a perfect paradise, only a relative lack of violence and its threat. The violence we confront in our world today is not the violence of uncontrolled personal aggression. It has become "civilized," impersonal, controlled, mechanical, and even rational in its execution. It is no longer necessary to hate, or even to have any emotion or sentiment, in order to push a button. Nor does becoming a devoted pacifist mean not ever allowing oneself to become frustrated or angry with the world. Violence in the world has long been of the "mass" civilized sort rather than the "primitive" form of instinctual individual aggression. But civilized violence only means we can be mean, vicious and cruel without ever having to get our hands dirty or our egos tainted by feelings of guilt or a sense of fundamental irresponsibility for our own parts or our acts in the overall theater of organized destruction. But such a form of unnatural violence is a social disease that always begets more and greater levels of violence.

Civilized violence in the world has grown to grand proportions of lethality, destructiveness and slaughter. It has become today the single greatest threat to both the ecology and survival of the earth. Such violence tends toward totality of destructiveness and in the process becomes ever more virulent, infectious and vicious. The totalization of civilized violence is ultimately beyond control--no nation, no group of nations, no President or Premier, no Dictator or Democracy, should be entrusted with the exclusive responsibility for deciding upon such acts of violence. Humankind simply can no longer afford to allow the unpredictable possibility for such totalization of organized aggression to come to pass.

Complete prohibition against civilized violence, and it's threatened possibility, is the only absolute taboo that humankind must strictly obey. And the single most important thing we can now do in the world is to cultivate pacifistic values, habits and practices promoting and protecting peace of all forms, at all levels, and in all kinds in the world. This ranges from intra-psychic and interpersonal patterns of abuse, to stepping on bugs or hunting rabbits for sport, all the way up the violence scale to the deterrent use of nuclear weapons. The taboo of violence is without exception: we cannot allow it in one form and prevent it in another. This includes especially and increasingly violence and destruction to our natural environments on the earth.

It is healthy and inevitable to suffer personal frustration, to experience injustice and unfairness, to feel aggression, hatred, anger, or to have conflict with others. What is of utmost importance is how we learn to express and deal with these feelings and problems such that they do not eventuate in violence or its threat.

Of all life on earth, only humankind has the capacity for wanton and needless violence. Our violence is indeed a perversity of nature. It is a paradox that this perversion comes from the same source of our being as does creativity and the possibility for its control and the need for its rejection. Both violence and non-violence stem from the human capacity for sentience and symbolic empathy for the sentience of other living beings. The perversion of violence comes from the nonbeingness of its frustrated expression in ourselves. Its vicarious and dependency is based upon pathological fear of death and motivation that leads to destructiveness in the world. The inability to love leads to hate. Frustrated constructiveness in relations in the world results in violence.

Only through the cultivation of a natural sense of being in the world, a sense of identity that is not dependent upon other entities or identities in the environment, can the proclivity toward violence become controlled and the sensitivity of nonviolence be cultivated. It is only through learning and cultivating habits and behaviors of nonviolence and passive resistance to violence and active pacifism in place of possible violence, that such an attitude and awareness of the being of nonviolence becomes recognized and developed. This source comes from personal identification of the possibility of one's own pain, suffering, loss, rejection, and violence with the suffering, pain and loss of other victims.

In learning how to accept and live with the fact and act of natural death, in setting aside the fear, the fascination, the mourning and morbidness about death, we also learn how to accept and appreciate life and living in a peaceful and nonviolent way as the most efficacious, natural and healthy solution to most of our existential problems.

For most people, nonviolence and pacifism does not come easily. It never comes naturally. They are difficult values and attitudes to be learned, and their application in our everyday worlds and their cultivation in the world around us are even more difficult. But they are worthy of the effort, and repay in kindness, respect and well being what they cost in time, energy, frustration and patience. We have few role models, few symbol systems, few tests, few cultural examples, and no schools to teach pacifism and nonviolence as a part of its normal curriculum, and these are what our modern world society desperately needs most.

The values associated with pacifism and nonviolence include a "love and let live" ethos, humility, charity, equality of all life, appreciation of universal being in the world, humanitarianism and humaneness, passive non-involvement with any acts or threats of violence that threaten to destroy the way things are, tolerance for differences, appreciation of diversity, subtlety, sublimity, complexity and interconnectedness of contextuality. It entails a respect for nature and a willingness to follow the way of nature. Finally, and most importantly, it entails the spirit and capacity for compromise, negotiation, transaction, mutual agreement by "wheeling and dealing" and by seeking always the middle course of action.

Promoting pacifism and nonviolence in the world entails also the understanding, recognition and living up to of one's personal responsibility in the world for one's own actions, decisions, involvement and parts that one might play, however small, and determined from above, or however grand and powerful. Even if we are but one link in a long chain of command and control of violence, we are ultimately responsible for our own small connection to the whole. 

Most modern violence is organized. The organization of violence is necessary for the diffusion of the ethical responsibility and symbolic justification for its perpetration and participation. Most participants pass the buck up or down the ladder of organization, in whichever direction seems most convenient. The foot soldier is ultimately responsible for his finger pulling the trigger, the bomber for releasing the bombs, the commander for giving the orders, the President for authorizing the action, and the people for mandating the President. It all goes around in a big circle of deceit and blame. It starts at the individual's back door and ends back upon his front door.

The last people to blame for acts of organized violence are the victims of the violence. However imputed as villains and enemies of the state they may be, they, as victims, are innocent in a way that the perpetrators of the violence can never be. It is a paradox that organizations of violence must always scapegoat and blame the victim for their own actions and deeds. "You made me do it." is the common rationalization for violence. We thereby become our own worst enemies. "Who's responsible?" We are all responsible for our own parts, however small, in the organization of mass violence, and we all cast our own votes to participate or to resist participation. Peace begins in our own back yards.

Recognition and living up to such responsibilities entails that we combat the coercion of authority wherever it rears its ugly head. This includes the threat of punishment, and the ultimate diffusion of responsibility and the projection of hate upon conveniently targeted out-groups. It requires a groundswell organization of political pacifism dedicated to active nonviolence and passive resistance to acts or threats of violence. Saying "no" to authorities that demand participation in violence requires a dedicated devotion of a mass movement. Even more, it requires the cultivation of a "culture of pacifism" that puts values of peace and nonviolence first and foremost in human being and relation.

There is thus collusion between the organization of violence and authoritarian power structure. Authoritarianism is the character complex of group-minded conformity based ultimately upon fear and the threat of violence. It exists in many different forms in every walk of life, wherever there is a "problem of authority" and a "need to deal with the problem." We must learn that in a self-organizing world, there is little need for either "authority" or "attitudes toward authority." Authority is often only an excuse for violence, even when it is disguised in hypocritical fronts of benevolence, peace, enlightenment, reform, science or whatever other system of ideological rationalization it may adopt.

Violence doesn't always have to be overt, destructive, and forceful. It can be hidden, invidious, corrosive, constrained, symbolic, etc. But whatever its form, its results are always the same. There is even intellectual violence in academic authority.

A genuine morality of nonviolence must see acts of unnatural violence as essentially pornographic, not necessarily to be censored, but to be viewed, labeled, and branded as such. To recognize the pornography of violence on television and in the communications media is one step loser to the devaluation and demotion of violence in the world, rather than its promotion and glorification. It is one step closer to creating a more peaceful world. And we must teach these differences to our children.

Nonviolence and pacifism are the closest humankind can come to a natural ethic. The pleasure principle of utilitarianism is based upon the principle of carrying things to their extreme. Values of peace depend upon maintaining reasonable limits, cultivating the middle ground, and avoiding the consequences of extremes. It is in excess and in the values and attitudes promoting excess that the beginning of violence and the temperament leading to violence can be found. We live in a rational world based upon the balancing of extremes and the exclusion of the middle ground. In the natural world there are no rights and wrongs, no good or evil, or no black or white. There are only more or less, balance and imbalance, center and margin. Learning to avoid excess entails learning to appreciate the subtlety of limitations. There can be no order, no world, without limits, however self-organizing.

Even pacifism and nonviolence can be carried to an extreme. There is a critical difference between relatively natural acts of violence within an evolutionary framework and the unnatural and perverted acts of violence that do not fit any evolutionary context except the rise of humanity in the world. 

The natural world is replete with acts of violence--lions killing baby gazelles, sharks killing baby whales, hawks killing doves. It is a natural response to swat a fly with a newspaper after it has been buzzing around one's head for more than a few minutes. Killing insects and vermin invading your food supply is also a natural act, as is shooting a mad dog. A rural family that regularly kills a deer or bear for subsistence is behaving in a natural way, but a suburban family who sits down to a meal of venison bought from a butcher appears a little less natural, as are a pair of bear claw paper weights or ashtray's sitting upon one's coffee table. It is better to catch a fish with a hook and line and eat it, than to cut a chicken's head off and pluck its feathers for Sunday dinner, but it is better to do this even than to contribute to the profits of systematically slaughtering dolphins or horses for dog meat. The lower down the trophic totem pole we all regularly feed upon, the better off the earth will be, which makes a daily chicken or fish much more natural than a weekly cow or pig. Why kill the chicken if we can eat the egg, and why slaughter the cow if we can drink the milk.

We must all learn how to draw our own lines at what fits us best, while being aware of the possibilities of the organized violence that we regularly engage in or contribute to, however indirectly. Everyday, in many different ways, we are casting our votes for peace or for greater violence in the world.

Cultivating peace does not only mean its actualization in the world, but also its realization within ourselves. To learn how to live with ourselves and with our own natural sense of being without undue violence or harm or unnecessary preoccupation with such violence is a necessary and inevitable step to our ethical and intellectual growth in the world. 

This requires coming to self-realization of the possible ways that violence may be expressed directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, in our daily lives, and excoriating the emotions and reasons for its being. Personal, psychological hygiene of nonviolence does not entail its repression, as repression only results in its sublimation into other, less direct forms of expression. It entails finding the sources of it in our own daily being, in our environment and lives, and then trying to figure out a better, less violent way for resolving these conflicts or problems. We must learn to recognize and act upon these needs, and do whatever it takes to resolve them.

The ways of peace lead along the middle ground, between the mountains and the valleys, neither too high nor too low, neither too crowded nor too lonely. Learning the middle way of compromise and negotiation is perhaps the most natural but the most difficult for those of us who've been caught up upon the extremes. It requires a different sense of balance, of keeping a center rather than weighing extremes. Along the middle way, there is never "either-or" or this or that. There is always only this and that, or both or neither. For every mountain, there is a valley, and for every pair there is a middle way.

With the middle way we can speak about living or dying and still be talking about the same thing, or when talking of light or darkness, white or black, really to be referring to the inbetween grayness. Never yes nor no, but always maybe so. The inbetweenness of the middle way sees both sides of the coin at the same time, and touches the entire elephant, no matter how blind we may be.

Experiencing domestic violence teaches one of its unnecessary and unhealthy way of life. We wish to see domestic peace for the whole earth just as we wish for our own domestic peace at home. When we speak of the earth as our home and as a precious resource, we are implying that we do not wish to see any more violence in the world.

When we cast our small votes for peace, we are buying more and more time for ourselves and our earth home. And we know that the only way to make peace is to listen to both sides at the same time.

Nothing is weaker than water

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.

Everyone knows this, that weakness prevails

Over strength and that gentleness conquers

The adamant hindrance of men, but that

Nobody demonstrates how it is so.

Because of this the Wise Man says

That only one who bears the nation's shame

Is fit to be its hallowed lord;

That only one who takes upon him self

The evils of the world may be its king,

This is paradox.

(Lao Tzu--Tao Te Ching)

DEAD SNAKE

Walking back along a five mile nature trail

Winding along the edge of a big river

In the sun of a hot afternoon

Seeking escape from the heat waves

Rising off the earth

I come upon the corpse of a large gopher snake

Strung out in the shade of a tree

Along the edge of the path

Its head had been smashed

By three adolescent boys walking a little ways ahead

I admired its harmless and lifeless body

The beautiful pattern of its scales

And the strong girth of its entire length

An oddity of nature rarely found in the open

Grown a full four feet long over its several years

Earlier I had seen the boys picking it up by the end of a stick

Too afraid of touching it

Drooping from the end of the stick

Its tail could be seen still twisting and slowly coiling

The nervous spasms of its last dying energies

It is saddening

To see these results

Of the fear of not knowing the difference

Between a harmless colubrid growing old

And lethal young vipers growing up

A PIECE of PEACE

Trying to buy

A small piece of peace

At the corner drugstore

Like an ice cream cone

Or a Popsicle

A candy bar

Or a six pack

To wash my tears away

To waste my years away

To temporarily turn my fears away

But just barely had enough change

The prices have all gone up

I can no longer afford

Anything in a bigger size

My little piece

Won't last for very long

Before it's all gone

In fact, it won't even last

Until I get home

Returning with my tears

Greeted by my fears

Whiling away my years

And now I can't afford

Another piece of peace

The piece was too little

The peace was too brief

All I can do now

Is to wait until I get

Another couple of dollars

FINDING PEACE

Finding peace

In the silliest of places

Finding contentment

In private spaces

Under the shade of a big tree

Upon the edge of a small stream

In the bath tub

On the bed early in the morning

Somewhere off the beaten track

Away from the roads

And the parking lots

Along which all the strangers come

And go

Finding happiness

In small things

An old bicycle

A few odd poems

A painting or two

A nice meal

My little girl's smile

A bird that sings to me

While I'm alone

Happiness without spending money

Freedom without hassles

No strings attached

Peace without too many people

WATCHING the PEACE on TV

The President appealed, explained, exhorted, demanded

The voice of the will of the people

His advisors rationalized, defended, elaborated and advised

The Secretary of State went for several secret negotiations

The Secretary of Defense was busy at the Pentagon

Congress convened and debated and voted and supported

The President's decisions

The reporter's asked questions, cajoled, badgered, reported and filled in the details

The people were out parading, protesting and praying for peace and support

The Television News Rooms set up special maps and keys and had twenty-four hour coverage

The action news teams were at every probable spot on the earth

The troops were well trained, rehearsed, tried and ready for action

The planes were poised, the bombs were armed, the missiles mounted in position

Ex-Generals and Commanders dressed in business suits and ties

Gave Kindler and Gentler, fatherly talks to small groups of children

Blood donation trailers set up on all the campuses across the country

New blood for old, good blood for bad

The reservists were all mobilized and reported for duty

The wives cried and had babies with the fathers far from home

Short haircuts came back into style

The whole nation was glued to the television screen

A single, well coordinated, mass mind

It was all well explained, all clearly understood

We were going to war, again

We were going to protect the peace in the region

It was not the oil that really counted

It was a question of Freedom and Justice

American is strong again and can win again

This is not like Vietnam

The whole world supports us

The villain is another Hitler, another Stalin

Nobody wanted war, they said

But all wanted victory if war began

Besides, the blockade wasn't working fast enough

And we must go and fight to save the Jews

And the rich oil Sheiks

We were there in such strong military presence

To protect the Peace in the region

Another war to end all wars

Another war to preserve the balance of peace in the world

Our country fights for Peace, not Power

Our country fights for Freedom, not Control

Our country fights for Human Rights, not fossil reserves

Everyone said they wanted peace,

But we had our principles to defend

The bombs fell with unbelievable accuracy and lethality

Right down a factory Chimney at twenty-thousand feet

And exploded with frightening voracity

Consuming entire buildings in a cloud of pulverized rubble

The bombs rained down over Mesopotamia

For more than forty days and forty nights

Our boys were tired but proud

The news reported the tragedy of each single set of American casualties

A bomb explodes an underground bunker full of small children

The President declares it was the devil that made him do it

The villain put them there on purpose

Why should they try to protect their children

When we are so right

When everything seems so black and white

The news reporters tell it like its been told to them

The Scuds raining down over Jerusalem

The ever patient Israelis

So good to put up with such a barrage

Everyone running around with gas masks on

Like some old late night Sci-Fi flick

Then the ground actions started

Everything went right on schedule

Without a hitch, without a casualty

The evil army crumbles and flees in terror

A good little war

Keeping a secure, lasting peace

A holy crusade

Of Christian against evil Moslem

Keeping the Peace

On TV

A SIDEWINDER and THE TANK

A cooling desert wind

In the evening of the plain

Cast in the shadows of the mountain ridge

Stretching across the clear blue skies

The sidewinder

Moving across the desert sands

Leaving behind his peculiar tracks

The tank moves slowly along the road

Out upon a one-tank manoeuvre

The driver sees the sidewinder

And veers off course to run it over

He misses but just clips its tail

The sidewinder coils in anger

In the middle of the road

Rearing its head

Poised threatening to strike

It shakes its tail but nothing sounds

The tank slowly steers around

Returning to finish the job

Stopping before the snake

The snake is hissing and strikes out

Then the commander gives the signal

And the tank track slowly rolls over the snake

The crew get down

To inspect their work well done

The coiled snake is flattened like a pancake

Squashed lifeless like a dirty bug

The sergeant wanted the rattle

The driver wanted the fangs

For his children to play with

They climb back on board

And rumble off down the road

Looking for more snakes

BUILDING BRIDGES

Building bridges

Spanning the chasm

Separating both sides

Crossing over the waters

Flowing between

Building bridges

On firm foundations

With strong building blocks

And big beams of timber

Building upon a common ground

It takes time

Building bridges

To continue the way

Through the forests

Between the mountains

Allowing easy crossing

To the other side

Building bridges

Beginning on both sides

At the same time

Slowly meeting in the middle

Over the deepest part

The way it's always done

Working together

Building bridges

Between different lands

So to come together

Somewhere in the middle

Across the vast empty spaces

And to cross freely

From side to side

A CASE of MISTAKEN IDENTITY

Young man hunting

Pheasants in the peach orchard

With a long single barreled shotgun

Great for long distance flying ducks

But unable to hit anything off the swing

Shell after shell

And the game just runs away

With the hunter running after them

Finally a bird flies up into a nearby tree

It is evening and the shadows are growing darker

Making it more difficult to see

A single lucky shot and something falls from the tree

The hunter runs to find his prize

Only to discover not a pheasant

But some strange looking exotic bird

Like a blue stork

Something he'd never seen before

Like a crane

A funny, queasy feeling rises in his gut

The long leg is banded

He looks around

Of course there is no one else

Standing in the middle of the orchard

He finds a spot under the tree

And there with the stock of the gun

Digs a hole and quietly buries the bird

The young man gives his shotgun away to his best friend

And never goes pheasant hunting again

EYE of the STORM

Peace dwells at the hub of the wheel

The center of the spokes that keep turning around

Living at peace with oneself

Is like living in the eye of a storm

Where the world nearby is calm

When the times all about are trying and turbulent

It is not an easy feat

Learning to live within the eye of the storm

When new events are always threatening

To knock you off your feet

One must dance with the shifting directions

Of the mighty winds

And move with the grace of a deer

Upon a mountain slope

It requires a keen sense of inner balance

And to always be able to look

And easily find the center

To know when the ever changing storms

Are going to shift directions

It requires being able to look into the gray darkening skies

And know that a storm is on the rise

We all have a center where peace can be found

While it is storming all around