What a past it is that an entire generation is eager not to repeat history, nor to relive the bygone years. Conflicting ideas evolved into conflicts. Disputes into battles. And differences into cold wars. This generation, for this reason, more than any other, must redesign the present so that the future may feel that feeling that we have never felt – nostalgia.
Peace is not elusive. It is not in the character of peace to be difficult to be achieved. Peace is as simple as not raising those arms. As simple as not emerging on to battle fields and not drawing borders.
Why get so hell-bent on being ordained to those dark pages of history about which is remembered that the rich augmented their treasures over the graves of martyred soldiers, castles were built and huts set on fire in the fuel of prejudice and the cold uncaringness of elitism. It is not that hard to be writ as pages that shared and let live. So why do I fail to discover such pages even as I gaze down into many millennia of history?
Gold to ashes and peace to dust and an entire generation of leaders that seems to read history books blindfold. These are blindfolds of security that give vent only to a greed cushioned and cottoned by a distance to loss. Those who order conflict, war and terror are never the ones on the battlefields and on the front. And yet, young souls with blood on their minds never question why these lurking shadows never bloody their hands. So, generations eager never to repeat history, not only endure an age of resurrecting terror, they catalyse its unfolding, misled and blindfolded. But these are not blindfolds of security. These are even more dangerous masks which we wear merely because our ears are closed to voices outside of ourselves.
Peace is as simple as listening to the smallest, merest voice of them all. As simple as listening.
This generation is often found on self constructed pedestals, eye to eye, barbed wires between them, asserting identities, differences, cultures, conventions, belongings, pasts, presents, attachments and unique self righteousness. Never listening. Speaking into endless voids that run parallel and don’t intersect. Guided by victory alone.
What a past it is that many millennia have no era to offer that we do not dread to relive. The demands of evolution have not made us frantic. These are the compulsions of past and present disasters of greed and the irrationality of injury.
Peace is as simple as healing. As simple as looking at human beings and the families of human beings and the lives of all human beings as if they were your own. As simple as seeing the reflection of you and your humanity in those not of your views, your region, your colour, your faith, your varied ways of belonging to whatever you belong.
Does all this talk of peace and the simplicity of peace make you uncomfortable, self appointed, and like all others, valid representative of this entire generation? Does it sound repetitive and clichéd and whimsical? Abstract? Done many times over? Doesn’t it frighten and disturb you more that something as oft repeated and idealized has not ever found a place in our many millennia of history texts?
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