peace in our time

wow. peace in our time. how could that statement be any more sweeping?

where does ideology begin? how does a person come to have beliefs? i think the best opinions are formed in a malleable mind, far after the forming events of childhood, when the individual is capable of critical thinking (which i think is mostly sadly absent these days). this pacifist person you read here used to be the worst kind of nationalist. i could repeat rhetoric like you wouldn’t believe, in an effort to entirely disregard anything that upset my worldview. how dare you suggest that i don’t live in the greatest country on earth dammit?

and it happened because i blog. and it happened because i read dissenting opinions from my own, from all over the world and all over the political spectrum, and was moved by them. i was moved away from some opinions, and toward others. the opinions that bothered me most, spoke in absolutes of good and evil, casting the US in the role of good, my country right or wrong.

and nothing, no thing, is absolute to me anymore. i read blogs in which the name of Noam Chomsky is invoked in the most scathing tone, as if he, and his ideas, were some great threat to life as we know it, and then i realize the man is brilliant, idealistic, and expresses our best hopes. yes he’s on the extreme, but without extreme visionaries, there will be no change. and right now the warmongers have the upper hand. if the warmongers win this one, we’re all fucking doomed. the only way this civilization will not collapse under the weight of its own power, is if the pacifists win. there’s no future for us if war is how we preserve peace. and when i say no future, i mean this: this thought i had today. that i may not be here to see it, but parts of me, my descendents, will suffer the end. i don’t want to send them into that, i want to protect them, and i feel i’m living in the times that could produce the cusp event that will save my great or great-great-grandbabies from the fall of the empire we’re under right now.

tangentially speaking, my point is this: those who would sacrifice freedom for security, deserve neither. freedom is by nature a delicate balance, fraught with peril. so i can comfort myself with the knowledge that this process is not supposed to be comfortable. i should be just as nervous as i am, posting this, admitting what a radical advocate for peace i’ve become, in this past year, watching my own country declare war on everything in the world which doesn’t agree with it. watching as my resident is handed unprecedented power, and millions of good citizens subscribe to the doctrine of rabid xenophobia.

i have to do this. i’m doing it for my kids. the struggle for peace will no doubt throw us into insecurity and fear, and this will not be easy. it is, however, at least in my mind, necessary.

now, go read Dru