Peace in the Year of the Tiger

I am sitting here sipping a hot cup of skim latte and my nose and fingers are still freezing. It is 8C in Hong Kong today. With 87% humidity, the cold just creeps into the bones and feels much colder than subzero temperatures in NYC. Then, my mind wanders to warm and sunny Basra where my brother and sister-in-law have just arrived for their assignment. They are both officers in the US Army.

Here in Hong Kong, it's the first week of the Chinese New Year of the Tiger. I've been wishing everyone health & happiness, love & luck, peace & prosperity. Sitting here, it's easy to take "peace" for granted. Hong Kong does not have armed forces of its own. China is not involved in any wars (that I know of, at least). But in so many other parts of the world, Iraq being just one, armed conflict is a fact of life and mere survival a luxury. It's so difficult to fathom what that reality is like. I think back to a dinner I had with my brother and his wife and their Army friends. I was the only non-Army person. They were all speaking English, but I felt like I needed a translator. My brother would act as my translator for Army acronyms, but even then, their experiences seemed so remote, so foreign, like trying to explain colour to a blind person.

We all want a world without war, but for many of us who, thankfully, have never experienced the horrors of war, we take peace for granted and assume that it is the default state of life and that it takes effort to wage war. In fact, I think the opposite is true. It takes conscious effort, hard work and difficult choices to keep the peace, whether on the individual, organizational or national level. President Obama seems to understand that peace is actually much more complicated an endeavour than we care to admit. In President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said:

I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

I share his sense of internal conflict. I have nothing but admiration for my brother and his wife. Theirs cannot be an easy job. They are not people who believe in the "business of war" or in simplistic "it's either us or them" rationales for war. As someone who does not believe war is moral, I accept with great difficulty our rationalizations for war. Every person has a right to defend him or herself from threats, both real and perceived. The question is, can we do so without paying the price of our humanity for it. That is a choice that should not rest solely on the shoulders of any one man or even the men and women in our armed forces. Peace is a state (and a very precarious one at that) in which every single person has a personal stake. It should be a responsibility that each of us bears. It seems paradoxical to make soldiers (i.e. other nameless, faceless people) our proxies for peace.

So heading into this Year of the Tiger, with family in a war zone, I'm reflecting upon the true meaning of peace and what it takes to achieve it. My wish for peace is really a personal wish that I might have the strength, courage and perseverance to strive towards peace, especially since I am fortunate enough to be living in a place like Hong Kong where my greatest discomfort at the moment is how cold it is. But most of all, I wish everyone in warm and sunny Basra (and by extension, everyone around the world) that their greatest complaint be the weather.

Some links that have inspired me:
Peace One Day


Charter for Compassion



Fetzer Institute

Arbinger Institute -- A discussion on forgiveness