For myself, for most of my life, male archetypes of both peace and violence have pitched their ongoing battles inside of me.
Any honest self-analysis would have to accept that my thoughts and behaviors can't be neatly put on one side of a coin.
So my world view is one that sees the human animal in a similar light. Complex and not terribly classifiable, people can somehow manage to be their own worst enemies, individually and collectively.
When George W. Bush started the "pre-emptive" war in Iraq against the largest public anti-war protests in world history, he polarized the Warrior and the Pacifist mentalities in the hearts of most Americans, and many around the world.
Remember the phrase, "You are either with us, or you are a terrorist"?
That phrase was meant to end the conversation.
And it was only one of many, many major cultural moments that feed this ongoing and deeply polarized public debate: between those that elevate and encourage war on one extreme, and those that are absolutist in their non-violent perspectives on the other extreme.
In my own experience, I'm fortunate to have stumbled into the Peace Corps as a young man, and that gave me the opportunity to travel a bit and to see Africa and some of Europe before coming home to the west coast of the U.S. When I was younger I nearly ended up in the military, but in a twist of fate it ended up being the Peace Corps instead. Sometimes I wonder where my values would have ended up if I had become a soldier.
When I have conversations with friends or family members who've seen active duty during a war, I can clearly see that the intensity of their experience, whether or not they saw an actual combat zone, is held closely and becomes a part of that person's identity.
Something similar happened to me to in the Peace Corps. The people and the experiences left memories so indelible that the thought of a loose bomb taking out a village of my friends would be absolutely unbearable. I also saw their complete indifference to their own nation's political figures, so the thought that they may be bombed for the sins of their government, in my reality, would make the person dropping the bomb into the terrorist, not the other way around,
All of us are only shaped by the images we've seen and the experiences we hold in our memories.
Maybe that is one fortunate aspect of our current economy: everyone can experience together the reality of losing a trillion dollars in a war effort and then we can decide if the outcome was worth the expense. War and peace won't be such an intellectual armchair debate, when the house is foreclosed, the job is lost, the inlaws move in, and individual and collective bankruptcy looms.
I don't know about you, but bankruptcy does not make me feel "free".
