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Peace on Earth
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News arrived of yet another mass shooting, this one barely an hour away at an elementary school in rural Western Connecticut. Twenty children and six adults were gunned down by a disturbed young man armed with a modified assault rifle, two semi-automatic pistols and a shotgun. The children, all six or seven years old, were in the first grade – the same grade as my granddaughter. The president, himself the father of two young daughters, was unable to contain his grief on national television. The school had just instituted stricter security measures with locked exterior doors and procedures to screen visitors. Predictably, some policymakers suggested the tragedy in Newtown could have been averted if school personnel had been armed.
There is a certain logic to the use of violence to combat violence, and it can be compelling. Local draft boards during the Vietnam era were fond of confronting would-be conscientious objectors with the question, “What would you do if someone tried to rape your sister?” Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis flubbed a similar question during a presidential debate in 1988 when he refused to endorse capital punishment even in the event his wife was raped and murdered. And how would Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics have fared if his opponent were Adolph Hitler rather than the British Raj in India?
Yet the logic of violence only gets you so far – or rather, it gets you farther than any sane person would want to go. Sooner or later you find yourself -- as John Kennedy did during the Cuban missle crisis in 1962 -- with a situation in which many of his own advisers were arguing for preemptive airstrikes that might well have triggered a nuclear response by the Russians. The utter madness of such thinking was perhaps best captured by Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr. Strangelove, which was released two years later. The movie’s plot revolved around a deranged Air Force general named Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, who ordered a bomber squadron to attack Russia because he believed the commies were polluting Americans’ “precious bodily fluids” with flouridated drinking water. The Russians, as it turned out, had rigged up a doomsday machine that would blow the world to kingdom come if they were attacked.
By rough estimate, some 120 million people have died in armed conflicts since the end of World War I, which was supposed to be the war to end all wars. This despite the best efforts of the League of Nations, the United Nations, various nonagression pacts and alliances intended to keep the peace. Failure comes again and again because we rely on political or military solutions to solve a problem that resides in the human heart. Such expedients may be necessary, but they are usually less successful in preventing violence than in cleaning up the mess afterwards -- and too often they merely lay the groundwork for future hostilities.
If the problem of violence ultimately resides in the human heart, we must narrow our focus from the global to the personal in order to fully understand it. With war as its global manifestation, its personal expression may be best exemplified by the ownership of guns. Here I will make a distinction between hunting rifles and weapons designed to do harm to other people. Since it is a crime to harm other people without justifiable cause, the right to bear arms presumably extends only to those seeking to defend themselves against the harmful acts of others. Every mass shooting renews calls for stricter gun controls, but more often than not the result is quite the reverse. In recent years there has been a marked trend toward the enactment of laws permitting gun owners to carry concealed weapons, even in bars, in churches and on college campuses. The same day as the shootings in Newtown, Michigan’s legislature passed a measure (later vetoed by the governor) permitting the carrying of concealed weapons in so-called “gun-free zones,” including schools and daycare centers. The justification always is to defend oneself against wanton acts of violence. However, the logic now threatens to take us farther than any sane person would want to go.
We arm ourselves because we are afraid of what others might do to us or to those we love. Fear is at the root of the violence that resides in the human heart. This is equally true of those whose violent acts cause us to be afraid and to arm ourselves. They probably acted out of fear caused by violence that was once done to them. Fear feeds upon itself. Is there an antidote? Certainly not by the logic of violence or by any other external expedient. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” In matters of the heart we must look within.
Peace works from the inside out, summoning a peaceful correspondence from our surroundings. However, there is not a perfect correspondence between the personal and the global. The world is a mirror of all humanty, not just ourselves. Our peaceful purposes may be misunderstood, if not profoundly threatening to those who are ruled by fear. Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolent protest was met by an assassin’s bullet, as was Martin Luther King’s. Jesus of Nazareth, whose own life ended violently, cautioned his disciples, "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” It is useful to remember that serpents are God’s creatures, too, and they were to be found even in the Garden of Eden. The biblical prophecies are vague as to when exactly swords will be beaten into ploughshares. In the meantime, we can only hope the logic of violence will yield to common sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Of Self Reliance”
Matthew 10:16
Isaiah 2:4
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