notes of a non-combatant

peace and justice

Peace and justice are not words written in letters and on blogospheres, dotted across newspaper articles and bandied about at conferences or over cups of coffee. These values do not manifest increasingly with each time the words are thrown about, as they are solid entities that are created through action and not words. Peace is the absence of violence and the discomfort and detriment that violent action brings. Peace is not gained through the discussion of ending warfare, but through actually ending warfare. Similarly, it is not attained by mulling over options to cease violent conflict, but by taking solid action to secure the end of such conflict. Although every process has its component parts, no process is complete until it is acted upon in its entirety. Simply put, peace is not made of words, a construction of echoed speech and stale breath hanging in the air between two peoples; it is the action of establishing the means to end a conflict between two peoples, and actually doing it.

Peace and justice are not ideas to be enforced through violent action. They are not malleable entities to be transformed into military doctrine, distorted and transformed in the hopes of achieving their true selves through false manifestations. Peace and justice are not these results, war and atrocity; but rather the opposite, disarmament and the rule of law. These are values of proportionality, where every action has a naturally just and fair result, where entities are essentially balanced against one another, where equality exists not only in words, but in actions as well. Justice is the institution of equality, where one man, woman, or child’s life is equally worth any other, where nobody is held protected from fair law, with unethical indemnity for unjust actions, as this squanders all hope and possibility of justice and the peace that could follow in its wake. Peace is the calm in our hearts, the stillness of our hands, the laughs that fill the air. To distort justice and the peace it paves the way for is to ask for racing hearts, trembling hands, and the explosions and bloodshed that punctuate those moments.

Yet the world we live in is one where peace and justice are words scrawled across torn pages, or are proclamations etched in monumental stone slabs. Peace and justice have become the backdrop and even the false justification for the propagation of arms, armies, and weapons of mass devastation. They are words muttered for a quiet eternity by political prisoners in cramped, cold cells, the words and their stolen meanings reverberating against the thick, steel bars that compliment dark and bare prison walls around the world. Peace and justice are screamed about as mothers scramble down streets, shrieking over the rubble of blasted buildings and homes, tripping over the dirt- and blood-stained corpses of their children.

For much of this world, proper justice and lasting peace simply do not exist.