blogging for peace

today is guy fawkes day, as well as blogblast for peace day and the juxtaposition of these two events makes me wonder what message the people who chose today of all days to blog about peace might really be sending.

one of the more interesting - to my mind, anyways, - movies of recent years that's been largely overlooked is the film V. set in some bleak near-future britain, it's about a guy who's so disfigured by what the government has done to him and so furious about the living conditions, he decides to finish what guy fawkes started in the seventeenth century - blowing up parliament. by the end of the movie, the audience understands this to be not an act of civil disobedience but one absolutely called for and justified.

no one riots as old ben comes down - they just watch in silence as the walls come tumbling down.

and no, i dont think the way to peace is to blow the government, ours or anyone else's. i think we have to be willing to change our beliefs, our worldviews and our mindsets in such a radical way that most can't even imagine how such a thing could be possible. trained to believe that we should only be sure of what we can see with our five senses, how can we trust our imaginations to lead us into places we have not gone before?

and yet, despite the results of tuesday's election, i believe peace is possible. i believe peace is achievable, on both a personal and global scale. i believe that in order to do that, we must be willing to "blow up" all about the past we have been told to believe in but is patently showing itself to be outdated at the least and toxic to children and other living creatures at its worst.

and i don't believe this has to involve explosives and other dangerous accoutrements.

what i do believe it involves connections, a lot of imagination, and the willingness to turn all that we collectively agree is "good" on its side and see if it really, really is, or if it is because people have told us for so long they expect us to agree.

i believe that peace will be a reality when there's enough of a critical mass of a new world vision, one that might not even yet exist, but that i believe is struggling to be born. i refuse to allow the voices of the hatemongers and the fearmongers - the Lush Limpballs and the Phlegm Flecks of this world - to color or to cast what i can begin to imagine as anything other than what i know it can be. i believe that some day there will be enough who share my vision and my belief to tip the scales. if there are enough of us who believe in peaceful cooperation and coexistence, perhaps eventually the others will simply Go Away.

however, if we dont and we manage to create the Armageddon so many of us appear to want to believe in, i personally believe that world peace will someday be achieved.

in a hundred million millenia after humanity has blasted itself and the planet into a nuclear wasteland, consciousness will rise again in the form of sentient cockroaches. i think we're going to thank ourselves some day, as we munch our way peacefully through the mounds of garbage we're so thoughtfully creating. we're going to admire the ability of humanity to not only obliterate itself with the thoroughness of the dinosaurs, but to leave behind such fertile soil from which the mighty cockroach - made invincible by exposure to generations of our chemicals - at last arises to take its rightful place upon the trash heaps of the world.

so in a way, i guess you could say im crazy enough to believe that peace is not only possible, but inevitable. which is why i say with such confidence that someday, the war WILL end. blessed, blessed be.