Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Making Peace

image Below is a passage from pattrice jones’ excellent book Aftershock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World—A Guide for Activists and Their Allies. Throughout the book, jones tries to show the reader how they are not alone in their activism. Millions of microorganisms accompany us wherever we go, she writes. Whatever we are working on, whatever kind of activism we do, others are with us in spirit and wishing us well.

What type of activist is jones hoping to reach in her book? The activist who is fighting “the real war against terror,” a struggle for a world in which nobody—neither Iraqi children nor Iowan chickens—lives in fear of atrocities perpetrated by human beings.

In this passage, jones explains how “making peace” ultimately will provide us with a necessary tool in this war against terror:

I think it’s no accident that we use the phrase “make peace” for two seemingly different activities: ending conflicts and facing facts. Two parties stop fighting when they make peace. We make peace with unpleasant realities. Perhaps the two are related. Perhaps it’s not possible to really resolve conflicts outside of the truth. Often, facing the truth requires the resolution of a conflict between wishes and the world.

Making peace between wishes and the world does not mean reconciling oneself to any sort of inevitability of violence or inequality, as activists are often urged to do. To the contrary, making peace means seeing the world more clearly specifically in order to change it.

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