Breathe deep, sigh, embrace the next word: W-A-R.

It doesn’t go away. I write about it far too often, and every time I do I feel torn inside... even though I remain personally safe from it (at least for now). Words can so easily turn the actions and consequences of war into abstractions, while failing to question why it exists at all. War is simply who we are. This is a hard certainty to shatter. But...

“Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.”

So wrote Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail recently in The Nation. Their words start opening a deeper level of understanding, one that I’m groping for. They go on:

It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.

The logical conclusion, as far as I can tell, is to declare victory and then start looking for the next enemy... the next evil that threatens us. This is “peace”: that brief moment of silence while everyone reloads, as someone once put it. In other words, war is inevitable and ongoing. It solves nothing. It changes nothing, except to intensify people’s hatred, toward “someone,” and their desire for revenge. It shatters connection. It shatters healing.

War’s primary function is to perpetuate itself. It’s a collective addiction to power: power over others, not with them. The enemy is always present and always dehumanized. And war doesn’t always manifest itself through militarism. Consider the criminal justice system, aka the prison system, for instance.

So let me restart this column. The word I want to embrace is: P-E-A-C-E.

Peace equals evolution. Peace means power with others, not over them. And it manifests in numerous, and often unnoticed, ways. Peace is complex and rarely produces great headlines. Over the years I’ve written about many different peace organizations, which exist in many different contexts.

In essence, peace means embracing conflict, understanding it—through non-judgmental communication between everyone involved—and looking for ways to heal, rather than punish, any harm that has occurred.

Here’s part of a column I wrote about 10 years ago, after I had attended a conference on “soul repair” in Des Moines, Iowa:

The community was out of control—the children, oh my God, the children, were sniffing gasoline and pretty much abandoning any pretense of a future—and the social and criminal-justice systems were just adding to the problem. Nothing was working.“Our children........

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