If you don't want war, prepare for peace

These are my reflections on the Dennis Prager and Michael Lerner interview I watched on Larry King, as well as Jon Stewart's "This Week in God" on Monday night.

Dennis and Michael are both Jewish men who were weighing in and discussing the current Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah war. Dennis was advocating for a peace-through-superior-firepower solution, and Michael was advocating for a longer-term solution driven by Israelis and Palestinians respecting each others' humanity.

The Daily Show's "This Week in God" featured a video of three extreme examples of children being "educated" in Christian, Muslim, and Judaic cultures. The people who created the Left Behind series created a violent video game for children based on their books. The Hezbollah have a summer camp for youngsters with a militant theme (weapons-training included). Israeli children were shown writing on bombs that were going to be sent to destroy Hezbollah soldiers.

I was pretty much sickened by that dark humor. I have a difficult time accepting the violence as it exists, but even worse, I can't believe that adults are teaching their children hatred and violence. "Gee, war is such a great use of our time and energies, let's be sure to teach our kids."

Anyways, I thought about a good title for the blog entry this morning as I wanted to fold and spindle the old adage "If you want peace, you must prepare for war." We as humans have more than adequately prepared ourselves for war, but it sure seems that we really haven't done enough to prepare for peace. Finding real peace is difficult. I certainly am not a student of political science nor military policy, and I don't have any useful advice for the current situation.

I just feel the pain of the Israeli people defending themselves and both the Lebanese people and Israelis who have lost family members and friends to the violence. It greatly saddens me. I get angry at the Hezbollah who set up camp in Lebanese-civilian territories. They don't love the Israelis, and they certainly don't love the Lebanese people.

Peace is a state of being beyond ideology and politics. I don't go to peace rallies because I still see division driven by ideology. Rather, I find it more valuable to be communicating with people through blogging, listening to music together, playing chess, or one of my favorite activities, being with my wife and my sister- and brother-in-law watching South Park and being lovable idiots together. (Deb, Keith--you know I'm a drum-circle hippie and not a college know-it-all hippie!)