Prize of international competition

VALUES FOR LIFE International Essay Contest


The Peace We’ve Never Known

by Mr. Bhuwan Giri
Grade 12, Motithang Higher Secondary School
Thimphu, Bhutan

"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war." - Maria Montessori

I sit down in front of the television as the newsreader starts with a pleasant smile. The next half an hour she some how keeps that smile going as she reports over wars, sensational cold-blooded murderers and people dying from cancer to cat-scratch infection. I look at my grandfather who sits beside me on the sofa with prayer beads on his palms. I hear him mumbling away prayers as he sees starving, skeletal children and famine struck families in countries he does not even know exists. I look at my grandfather and then at the newsreader. My grandfather was a villager coming to live with his son; the newsreader might have been a Stanford graduate. I get confused between the two of them so I change the channel hurriedly.

Today we find these kinds of people making up our homes and offices. A myriad of views (or in many cases the absence of one) for a problem that concerns all of us in one way or the other. And for most of us with our own lives tangled up in the struggle for existence, World Peace seems like one of the last things we would be concerned about.

Yet our ignorance or indifference makes the problem only uglier and perhaps one day we will realize that all the while we were responsible. Take for example the number of people who died today of hunger in Ethiopia has a profound connection with the amount of food each of us wasted yesterday. Or, the guilt of having displaced hundreds of families by flood just because some of us wanted a few extra chairs. The fact that there is not the “Peace” that we have read in fairy tales is because there are very few people who are concerned about it; very few people for whom there is more to people dying from civil wars and famines than just another feature program on Discovery Channel.

The values concerning peace and social justice in a society, though more or less the same throughout the world become very difficult to define and categorize into specific terms. First thing is that there is not anything sensational or new in it. We all have dozed over it countless times in sermons and lectures all our lives. Firstly, I have taken care that these values are practical enough, taking into account human fallacies and errors rather than just being morally and ideally right. The notion of brotherly love in a community marred by communal disharmony should come out of its scholarly ideals and be practical enough to have any effect. In addition to whatever one might preach about love, the values of tolerance and mutual respect for each other automatically have an important role to play. So in this way I’ve found that any moral values that make or break a society has an intimate and almost an unalterable relationship with the other, making it almost impossible for me to segregate it into separate components.

Most of the conflict in the world today is more because of our two major failings. First, in our ethical and humanitarian commitments, and then in our economic obligations. Violence and blood shed today results, I feel, when people fail to respect and understand each other. For nobody is right or wrong, it’s just how we are taught to interpret it.
I strongly believe that a society which does not respect the so called “deviated ideals” finds itself sitting on a potentially explosive recipe for communal clashes. A society needs to have enough self-belief to know that other people doing whatever they want to or holding different perceptions is in no way going to affect our well-being. No one else has to think the same way, or believe in the same thing, as long as one gives the utmost respect to others and their right to do as they will.

We would all have to trust each other, and not need to enforce our own rules on people to 'be sure' that they are going to do what's right. For example, in the medieval Mughal Empire of India, Hindus and the Muslims lived in exemplary harmony. Many of the great Mughal Architecture like the magnificence of the Taj Mahal and the forts at Agra and Delhi testify to the Mughal affluence in terms of art, cultural richness and social harmony. In fact the Mughal Empire showed us what mutual tolerance and respect can achieve during its 300 years of rise, expansion and decline. When emperors like Aurangzeb started persecuting Non-Muslims and abandoned the age old policy of tolerance pursued so keenly by his predecessors, the Mughal Empire started falling on the hands of his weak successors and the outraged Non-Muslim Community.

The menace of terrorism today grows on the same feeling of hatred and suspicion that perhaps all of us have felt sometime or the other. Whether it is your anger at your corrupt boss at office or the envy towards your more successful neighbor next door, it all adds up in small pieces to the frustration and tension that ultimately gives way to the various acts of malice that we see today. Sectarian violence and terrorism without a doubt should be condemned; but before that, I feel that we should correct the schools and the streets from where the so called ‘terrorists’ have emerged. As we have heard it so many times before, “Heroes are not born, they are made;” the same applies for the ‘villains’ of our society too.

The other value I suppose is less moralistic and perhaps more socialist. I believe economics can create better humans. Take for example when there are large economic insufficiencies in a society then the feelings of frustration, dissatisfaction and revolt automatically creeps in. Poverty is a crime that very few own up; while we are running after the Osamas of the world we have ignored the place where they find their victims. All of us are painfully aware that the most terrible acts of terrorism often affect the poor and economically vulnerable.

When there is equitable economic growth in a society, whether it is through capitalism or socialism, studies have shown that crimes such as theft, robbery, vandalism and corruption are less frequent. These things of course do not guarantee a peaceful society but if these bases are secured then we can perhaps say that we have at least made a beginning.

Social justice, on the other hand, is a lot harder to classify because each country and culture has its own ideas about justice, and one cannot really extrapolate what a world of social justice would be like. Martin Luther King Jr. said “Peace isn’t the absence of violence, it’s the presence of social justice.” Regardless of its definition, peace and social justice one may agree are two sides of the same coin.

The first answer to social justice may be the establishment of a strong judiciary. A good legislative or a judicial structure does not in any case guarantee social justice. Law books and court rooms certainly facilitate it but the main responsibility I feel again lies on each and every one of us. If we teach ourselves to respect all men irrespective of their color and the depth of their pocket, then we might just find ourselves living in a more humane society. Great strivers for social justice, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., have always maintained that a society is dead where men are not treated as men.

I have wondered a few times during the course of this essay, is peace and social justice in a society really achievable? Or, are they like mirages haunting a traveler dying of thirst? There is a great irony when I open the news paper and see people dying of hunger in one page and the sumptuous wedding of Tom Cruise in another. Do these small acts of ‘concern’ have any effect at all, or are they just too small in practicality and fall flat on their faces when they are pitted in against the inherent greed driving us for ages. I take the example of my own country, Bhutan, I can not say Bhutan is the epitome of peace nor can I say that social justice here is upheld in its truest sense (and I doubt if ever there was one). I can not judge a nation, I can not judge the people of a nation, but I can judge myself and what I have done to make my home, my school and my street a better place to live in.

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