Peace Cranes and Peace Elusive

Below photo of English Club: "Peace Cranes," colonel.korn flickr photostream.

We made peace cranes at the English Club once to thank Judy’s class in Virginia for contributing to a Peace Corps Partnership Grant that helped the Starobelsk Library build it’s first English books collection. My Peace Corps service is ending, but those books will last forever, a legacy made possible by American friends who care.

Now I’m thinking we need these peace cranes for the huge idea they symbolize: peace in the world. Dreamers have long tried to end wars, to find substitutes for war, to no avail. Perhaps there’s something about aggressive human nature that makes war unavoidable. Perhaps war is a prelude to peace, showing how worthless violence and killing are. But at what a cost? And what have we learned?

My brother Loren thought it had to do with patriarchy. Where strong men rule, where cultures worship them, make them heads of state, leaders, heroes and warriors, there also wars take place. Loren believed the dominance of patriarchy needed to be balanced with the presence of the goddess, with female spirituality. Without this balance, violence and war are inevitable. It’s looking that way now.

Moammar Gadhafi’s hold on power in Libya, long after the Lockerbee disaster, many UN resolutions, and a rebel uprising against his rule, is one of several contemporary examples of senseless ruthlessness and violence in the face of the people’s yearnings for self-determination. Bombing defenseless people in the streets? Killing innocent civilians? Unbelievable, yet he did it. Ruling with an iron fist and lining his own pockets with millions of dollars while the majority of people live in poverty? Yes, he is guilty, just like the former dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, all dictators we once supported in our long-established, woefully misguided foreign policy. Same with other dictators we support in Yemen, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia.

Should we be in Libya, a third war? Fact is we are in there, big time, hoping other western nations, and also the Arab League, in an unprecedented action, will support it, and take the lead. This sounds implausible, but who knows? It started with a UN resolution 1973, according to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It's about "stopping Gadhafi from killing his own people" we are hearing, over and over.

But what is the political, economic and social situation in Libya, the historical context? Who ARE the supporters of Gadhafi? Who are the rebels? Is it a tribal situation, or religious sectarianism, like in Iraq? Why is Libya different from Yemen and Bahrain, where the people are also exploding against their despots, and confronting brutal repression.

Regime change? No-fly zone? US cruise missiles hitting key cities and sites along the Libyan coast? Is this international intervention? What mission are these tactics supporting? Where will this lead? Where will it end? What is our appropriate role?

Loren would say we need some balancing force to emerge. But what might that be? Without Loren's take on this, I can only imagine. I imagine the best hope is for a quick end to this new war, which for the US should be neither an "odyssey" nor a "dawn"(an unfortunate and rather tortuous name for this supposedly quick operation that we will turn over to others soon).

I imagine some balance coming from a limited form of human intervention and a large form of divine intervention, mostly the later. I imagine the rebels getting organized to take over their own country. I imagine Gadhafi fleeing, soon, into dictator purgatory, pursued by over 1,000 peace cranes.

For a story about the origins of peace cranes see : http://www.buddhistcouncil.org/bodhitree/Books/Story_of_the_Peace_Crane.pdf

For a Buddhist peace site, The Bodhi Tree: http://www.buddhistcouncil.org/bodhitree/Introduction.htm#_top