What does peace mean to you?

The forums here haven't seen much action for a while, but I've just stumbled across this site and it seems a fitting place to put my own thoughts on the matter, relevant as they are, for someone else to stumble across. Ahem..

People ask how we can “create peace” in the middle east. This is a silly question.

Peace can not be ‘created’, only destroyed.

Peace is our natural state, where human endeavour is at rest, when conflicting enterprises cease, there is peace.

The United Nations, although founded on high ideals (like so many fallacies and modern facades) operates in utter ineffectiveness. One can not “keep peace” and especially not guns. We seem to think that a cease-fire is a peaceful situation; it is not.

Any time weapons are involved one can hardly say that a situation is “peaceful.” Acts of aggression end peace. As a modern sage once said…

You can not bomb the world to peace, but you can bomb the world to pieces.

When I was more politically active in my youth, I would go to anti-war rallies. Not because I felt that our protests, no matter how vast, would have any bearing on plans already in motion, but because it consoled me to see so many others distressed at our circumstances. We would discuss the vulgarities of world events and how powerless we seemed to stop them.

It is not our place to stop these events, I would say, because we can not.

And yet we are still here, filled with meaning like a great poem which has yet to find the right publication.

Our job, as I see it, is to teach forgiveness, to forgive, and to be forgiven. The collected Karma of the human experience is filling with hatred, so it is the role of those who are not inextricably drawn into such conflicts to do what we can to balance the equasion.