Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

In 1989, working with the British and Irish governments, arts councils and their art museums, my local art museum exhibited work by Irish Catholic and Protestant artists from Belfast. It was a statement of peace, with the knowledge that 300 years of war had passed and left its mark on the people and their history. We established a Peace Symposium where anyone could attend and participate from the Central Texas community. These are some thoughts and outcomes from On The Balcony of the Nation exhibition and our symposium.     

Thoughts On Peace

       Did you ever feel, as Yogi Berra once said, "Deja vu all over again"?

       It began with a Peace Symposium at The Art Center, held with the exhibition of five Belfast artists, called On The Balcony of the Nation. These artists tried to show how it felt to live under the specter of constant and insane violence. As one of the artists remarked, "This is a state that Ireland has known for over 300 years."

     The panel talked about peace as an alternative to war. At the end, one young man stood up and said, "I was not alive in the sixties when the nation was torn apart by the war in Vietnam. I do not know about peace marches, Peace Links or teaching. I have thought about peace and walked through this exhibit where the population of Ireland is depicted as domestic cows. I do not see peace as an alternative to war. It is more of equilibrium between passive cows and vicious sharks. If there are too many cows in the world, the sharks take over. We have to fight the sharks and we have to, in a more civilized manner, fight the cows."

     On January 16^th, the war in the Gulf began.  This was a world action against one more menacing shark, Saddam Hussein.

     Filled with war news glued to the television for each nuance of change is the on-going battle, concerned for the young men and women who must fight for this country against other young men and women who fight for their government, and trying to make sense out of this war (war never makes sense since it is not a civilized action so my thoughts were futile), I turned to Sunday Monday.  A commentator was discussing Making Sense of the Sixties, a WETA six-hour documentary on PBS. He said, at the end of his review, "I am less sure now about everything that I was back then about anything." Deja vu again.

     I turned from the war news for three nights to watch Making Sense of the Sixties and while I watched my youthful times unfold feelings locked away rushed into the present. We had thought then in simplistic terms of war and peace. That young man from Baylor University was right: it is more an equilibrium between passive numbness and aggressive violence: the cows and the sharks. I remember sitting on Camelback Mountain in Arizona in 1963, alone with others spaced apart in their aloneness, grieving the death of Jack Kennedy. A generation of many ages pinned their dreams of a fair, open, just American society on a collective dream of "reaching out, doing for others." Idealism was rampant in the society. By 1968, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered by the faceless "those" who did not want a new world, "those" opposed to the fulfillment of the American dream.

     In the seventies, teaching at the University of Guam, I remember the black shapes of the super bombers flying out as the sun came up and ominously returning at sunset as the reds and oranges dropped into the sea with one last flash of green. The bombers became a haunting, lasting image of a war that was fought at a distance. Only television brought the war into my living room, as it does now with the war in the Gulf.

     But although the feelings are the same and the cry is similar, "Can't we find a peaceful solution to capturing the sharks?” it is not the same. America did learn from the sixties, did understand something after the Vietnamese War. Policy, whether you agree or disagree with it, is not the same as the men and women who have to fight a war. Those individuals who go to defend our country, on the orders of our government, are to be honored and respected. They are all there in the Gulf to do their job of defending a way of life.

     There are sharks in the world and nations who feel that those predators are taking over must fight in some way: embargoes, diplomacy, or war. War has to be the last option to keep the equilibrium that is the essence of peace. In this war, I feel that it has been that: a last option. President Bush says, "This will not be another Vietnam." I believe him, not because his policy is right, not because we will try to make this a short war, but because individual American citizens have learned that the war and the warriors are not the same thing. The warriors are victims of war too.

     President Johnson thought of himself as the education president with his great society (the war on poverty) and President Bush called himself the education president with his kinder, gentler society. Deja vu again. Each president found or will find that running a war pulls all the funds from the real war at home against illiteracy, drugs, poverty, etc. What may happen, I hope, is that the idealism of America is not lost this time in a war abroad as it was in the late 60's and 70's. Maybe, just maybe, this war will be won at home so that we can truly live the American dream.          As Wintley Phipps sang so brilliantly at the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce dinner, "God bless America... stand beside her and guide her".   No deja vu again.