Veteran’s Day is upon us, at a time when the number of war veterans has been increasing astronomically, with no end in sight. Which brings up this troubling thought: Could it be that the reason the United States—even under an avowedly antiwar President—has done such a miserable job of “winning the peace” in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as opposed to its earlier and far more successful initiating of wars is that our leaders just aren’t really very invested in peace? More disturbing yet: Insofar as those in power find violence especially compelling, perhaps they aren’t that different from the rest of us.
In short, is peace boring? Most people certainly find it less interesting than war. Nearly all countries, for example, set aside their own Veterans’ Days to honor military victories; by contrast, there are precious few “Peace Days.” War Colleges greatly outnumber Institutes of Peace.
It has been said—although disputed—that the Inuit (“Eskimos”) have about a dozen words for “snow” (distinguishing between blowing snow, drifted, wet, powder, icy, etc.) and that among the Bedouin, there are more than a hundred words for “camel” (ornery, pregnant, easy-to-ride, male or female, and so forth). Similarly, in English—and most other languages—there are numerous terms referring to specific wars. We distinguish between, for example, the Vietnam War, Korean War, World Wars I and II, etc., but have only one word for “peace.”
It’s as though wars are so important and interesting that we pick them out for special attention, like a gourmet selecting a rum-soaked raisin from a cake, or a Bedouin contemplating his heterogeneous camels, whereas peace consists merely of a boring, homogeneous matrix, not worth naming. Although the peace that obtained, say, between World Wars I and II was quite different from that between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, we don’t even have a word for either. Unlike wars, no one speaks of “peaces.”
Considering the supposedly positive connotations of “peace” as opposed to “war,” it is only fair to ask why it is even necessary to assert, often with a touch of desperation, that “peace is patriotic”? To be sure, most people give lip service to the former, but maybe at some level, they haven’t really desired it as whole-heartedly as they claim.
Thus, there are lots of war movies, but precious few “peace movies,” lots of martial music but only a handful of peace songs (and most of them actually “anti-war”). As with rubber-necking at a traffic accident, or daily television programming, attention is drawn to situations of violence, where exciting things happen. Those who complain, for example, about the news media focusing only on “bad news” must confront the fact that whereas people are likely to pay attention to a massacre or other outrage, they would be less than fascinated by a headline blaring “Peru and Ecuador did not go to war today.” As journalists well know, “if it bleeds, it leads”—not because of them, but because of us.
Maybe when—or if—peace becomes as important to English-speaking people as snow is to the Inuit or camels are to the Bedouin, we’ll distinguish as carefully among the different varieties of peace as we now do when it comes to wars. And maybe we’ll even give honor to our peace veterans comparable to that granted to war veterans.
The upshot of all this? The Bush Administration in particular cannot be too strongly criticized for having been much better at destroying countries than rebuilding them, and – worse yet - for showing much more eagerness when it came to the former than the latter. But it isn’t clear to me that the United States has ever had a government that paid more attention to peace than to war.
“Nature …” said Katherine Hepburn’s character in The African Queen, “is what we were put on earth to rise above.” It may be asking a lot for any Administration to rise above the “natural” human tendency to affirm the virtues of peace while secretly adoring war. But even as we honor those who have served and fallen, that is precisely what we must ask—indeed, demand—that all governments do.
