I have had some pretty high minded ideas throughout my life, as I imagine you have, too. I wanted to win a Nobel Peace Prize when I was about 8, because, well, duh... PEACE for crying out loud. I could feel it inside my soul with absolute certainty, absolute clarity, I knew that everyone could feel it, the truth of it. I knew that shared belief could overcome anything. I still believe that. What I don't know, is the word for that most obvious fact. "Peace," is a hippy word. The "peace sign" does not evoke that most obvious inner knowledge, it evokes a strung out, unbathed, menace dancing badly.
At about 15 years old, I started reading about inhumanity. I particularly remember reading John Hershey's Hiroshima, and books about the Holocaust. I wanted my eyes opened up very wide. I had a reason in mind for this reading. The reason was, "in case something like this happens again, I don't want to be a person who passively allows it to go on around me. I want to be very familiar with the signs and symptoms."
Two thoughts recently went through this mind that made me remember this project. These thoughts put me on alert, in case I might passively allow things to happen to my neighbors that in the clarity of hindsight would look a lot like everything I had tried to know better than. Wouldn't I have known better than to inter Japanese Americans if I had been alive in the 1940s? Or, if in Germany, wouldn't I have known better than to ghettoize my Jewish neighbors? Wouldn't I have known better than to dislocate American Indians if I had been alive during the Andrew Jackson administration? Or would I have been relieved that "someone" was "doing something" to "protect me" from a "threat?"
Someone whose thinking I respect recently said he believes we are in a religious war. Maybe so. What thoughts this war, whether it is economic, religious, political, or national, evokes in me will tell me a lot about my deep attachments, my deep identifications. Identifying "them" will tell me who I still, erroneously, believe "I" am. It will show me the distance I must travel to my Peace Prize.
