... and let it begin with me

Since I posted Let there be peace on earth ... yesterday, I've been asking myself what can make people want peace so badly they'll set aside the ordinary reasons they have for supporting a war such as the war in Iraq.

The answer, I think, is identification.

When I watched the PBS telecast of the Memorial Day celebration on the Mall, I identified with the soldiers and their wives whose letters to one another were reenacted on the stage. One of the men died of combat wounds in an American hospital after having helped evacuate the other man, seriously hurt in a previous battle. They were best war buddies, and their wives were too. When one of the wives finally lost her shot-up husband just days before her first child was born, the other wife was by her side — even though it was touch-and-go for her husband at that point, in a hospital far from home. He had told his wife to go where she was most needed, which meant she couldn't be with him.

When one identifies with one's fellow Americans — an infant who will never know her father and a wife whose husband breathes no more — one is apt to become an instant pacifist.

This is separate from questions of whether the war is "worth it." No war is worth it, not if it can be avoided with honor and safety intact.

This war could have been avoided with America's safety and honor intact. But that is a caluclation we may make — or not — and it has nothing at first to do with identification. We can calculate the rightfulness or wrongfulness of a war until the cows come home, and that baby will still not have a father.

When will we adopt the attitude that war is just plain bad, no matter its "justification"?

For when we do that, we will seek alternatives to war — not all of which are necessarily craven or defeatist. There are ways of neutralizing threats that do not involve bombs or bullets.


Nor is the real point whether we ought to identify with those who pay the ultimate price on our behalf, but rather whether we do identify. Of course we ought to feel their pain, as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. But how hard it is to actually do so, most of the time! It takes a special set of circumstances to trigger true empathy.

Mine was triggered because the Memorial Day concert was clearly not a peace demonstration. I knew that, and so when that tableau of heroic sacrifice and personal pain was presented on stage, I could not duck its impact by imagining that someone was trying to indoctrinate me.

And so I identified with people who I was aware probably would not have wanted me to not support the war. For that widow to oppose the war now that her husband has given his life in it would be to have his — their — sacrifice be in vain. Identification is not the same thing as agreeing with the person identified with.

At some point, reason has to chime in and say the best thing one can do for somebody with whom one disagrees fundamentally, but with whom one nonetheless identifies totally, is to respectfully continue to disagree.

At some point, reason has to generalize the individual identification and conclude that war is just plain bad.

It starts with identification, but it ends with reason.