Let there be peace on earth ...

... and let it begin with me!

It's Memorial Day 2008, and oldstyleliberal (that's me) feels a positive hunger for peace.

Last night I watched the Memorial Day celebration at the National Mall, at the U.S. Capitol, thanks to the Public Broadcasting System. In one segment, three actors read from letters written by three of the honored guests. Two were the wives of soldiers formerly stationed in Iraq, and the third was the first of the two soldiers. The second soldier is dead, having died in combat only days after helping evacuate the first, his best buddy who had been shot and grievously wounded in a firefight, and who is yet only a hairsbreadth away from having to have a leg amputated.

The soldier who died took several days in the hospital, back in the U.S.A., to lose his struggle for life, leaving behind an oh-so-young wife who was days away from giving birth to a daughter, a first child who will never know her father. The other wife was there beside her at the hospital, of course, lending support to her own best "war buddy" in an hour of danger and despair ... even though her own husband remained hospitalized in Germany and she knew he might not pull through.

After that presentation, Gladys Knight sang "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." The audience, even if it was a military pageant, sang earnestly along. Then Sarah Brightman and a children's choir sang Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu." Sweet Lord Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them [the fallen in America's wars] rest everlasting. Not a dry eye in the crowd.

Why can't we have peace on earth? Why can't we have no more fallen?

I want to work for peace.

I was a young man in the 1960s when there was a peace movement opposing the Vietnam War. I was part of it. Why isn't there a peace movement today, opposing the Iraq War?

What would be a constructive way to work for peace now?

It seems to this observer that a peace movement, to be successful, would have to bring a lot of people together. It's no good making a peace movement out of the tiny minority of folks who are naturally disposed to pacifism. Their arguments may be good ones, but they're conceptual, intellectual, high-minded, and based on assumptions that average people don't subscribe to.

Average people are patriots first. They feel a deep connection to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a horror of repeating the Vietnam aftermath, when returning soldiers were spat upon, ridiculed, and, worse, ignored.

Average people have a difficult time converging the facts that Saddam Hussein wasn't really an al Qaeda facilitator, wasn't really on the verge of getting weapons of mass destruction, with what seems to be the right attitude after 9/11. God bless America. Support the troops. Shoot first and ask questions later. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

The facts seem to suggest that the Iraq War, and even the more broadly supported conflict in Afghanistan, aren't working.

The attitude seems to require us to have infinite patience anyway.

The indisputable facts are that there are terrorist organizations and whole societies out there that want to do us dirty.

The attitude tells us to arm ourselves and fight.

Yet there is another attitude that is latent in all of us even now: Let there be peace on earth.

How do we bring that attitude to the fore?

It might be the case that we can succeed in ending the terrorist threat only if, however paradoxically, we make peace today and not war. Peace, not just as a far off hope but as something lived here and now, is the only real answer to conflict.