Living With Shades of Gray

An old high school friend came home from Iraq last month. I talked to him last night for the first time in a year, anxious to hear how he made it through and if he was the person who left a year ago.

Of course he isn’t. Neither am I.

He spent a lot of time rebuilding schools and restoring or creating electrical grids, and generally cleaning up the community where he was stationed. He told me about carrying in his arms a child who’d been shot critically, while they found her medical care. More like FEMA than war, except, you know, all those bombs and guns and stuff.

He told me about how most of the insurgents aren’t from Iraq, and how they are Really Bad Guys. He said if it weren’t for his family that he’d go back.

Just like that, all those clean black and white lines I’ve been drawing lately around the notion of nonviolence and War Is Bad got all smudged and gray. It’s funny how often that happens to those finite judgments like “bad”. Good things can come out of bad things. Bad things can come out of good things. Who’s to say which is which, then? I guess life is just too complicated for black and white.

So how do I incorporate the reality of this smart friend of mine who felt like he was making a real difference in a place that needed him and was largely grateful for his presence into my growing belief that there has to be another way than violence?

Is it that the Powers That Be manipulate their soldiers with alternate reasons they can rally behind so that they are fighting for ideals and not for corporate bosses? Is it like my friend says, that the media’s reporting is so skewed and inaccurate that we are misled? Is it only in safety that we can judge with such high ideals?

Or is it that I have to separate the humanitarian work that’s achieved there, which is constructive, from the fighting, which is destructive? In the end, some variation on cords of black and white that appear incurably tangled.

War is a solution, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best one. It’s easy to say that War Is Bad, but there sure is a dearth of alternatives.

The SO says that in order to dissolve violence with nonviolence, a lot of the non-violent would probably have to die, and have to be content with that, before there were any sea change. Are there enough Ghandis out there to make that happen?

I am torn between feeling that working for non-violence is infinitely worthwhile, and wondering if we’re not just floating in a vast abyss, spinning on a watery rock that will be swallowed by its own energy source in a few million years, thus rendering the entire effort pointless in the infinite perspective.

But if it is pointless in the end, then there is no harm in acting like it matters. And the fact is, it matters to me that a bunch of strangers in far away places are hobbling through their short lives with souls more wounded than necessary for motives that never cease to be questionable if you think about it for very long.

Maybe I'm crazy for wanting peace. I can sure think of less futile things to do than ponder a way out of this maze. But whether I like it or not, I can't let it go. So please excuse me while I go pound my head against this wall over here...