The Real Way to Peace

First a recipe:

If you want to make homemade turtle soup, you have to be careful and you must wait. You’d want to catch a sea turtle because you get thirty or more pounds of meat from it – depending on weight. You need help too. A couple of men would do, to place the turtle inside a garbage barrel filled with fresh water. Close the lid and leave it there to starve. It sounds brutal, I know, but there’s no other way to do it if you want to have homemade turtle soup. Sea turtles can live up to a hundred years, so it takes a while for them to die. If someone tried to slaughter them, they’d release a poison into their system that would kill anyone who ate from it. One must therefore keep the area surrounding the garbage barrel quiet so the turtle doesn’t think it has been caught by anyone but itself. Turtles, unlike elephants, have a bad memory and will forget they were trapped.

For animal lovers, don’t feel so bad. People trap each other like that and call it love.

Elephants, on the other hand, don’t forget. If someone tried to hurt them, they come back in a hundred years to step on them.

People avenge each other like that and call it justice.

Yet as Daniel Quinn writes in Ishmael, people consider themselves superior to animals – even though there are three things that people do that never happen in the wild.

1. People exterminate their competitors. In the wild, animals will defend their territories and hunt to eat, not just make their competitor dead.

2. People systematically destroy their competitors’ food to make room for their own. In the wild, the rule is: take what you need, and leave the rest alone.

3. People deny their competitors access to food. In the wild, you may deny your competitors access to what you’re eating, but you may not deny them access to food in general. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.

The problem stems from people clinging to the specialness of man. They perceive a vast gulf between them and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world. Of playing God, the Creator.

Man throws paint on walls and calls it a creation. It’s not creation. It’s paint on a wall. It’s a form of something appealing to the eye. Writers don’t create. They formulate words. They aren’t creators. They’re compositors. Man is a recipient of creation.

To make something one needs two or three things. Only God made something from nothing. He made people in diversity. He made water, fire, life and death.

First mixture man made was killing. Man in general hurts himself everyday by saying, “I created this and that.”

But we’re not God, the Creator. We’re man and woman, human beings, creatures. Yet, we’re afraid of letting go of, or looking at the terrible price of advancement which is crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction.

You see, the largest beast on earth is man without God. By making havoc, weapons and bombs, he made a dark void for humans. No other beast on earth has done more damage and yet man calls everything else a beast – rattle snakes, lions, alligators, tigers. Everything.

What’s the solution? The real way to peace? Well, presently the world’s governments spend about one trillion dollars a year for military purposes. That’s a million dollars a minute worldwide. If we were to use some of this money to feed our hungry, clothe our needy, house our poor, bring security to our elderly, and provide health care and dignity to all… the causes of crime would be lost forever. New jobs would spread as dollars are pumped back into our economy.

Let’s use the past as a warning of how our current civilizations could destroy the environment of the future. Civilization was born in ancient Mesopotamia, now called Iraq, over 5000 years ago. Writing, astronomy and science were invented there. Yet today, Mesopotamia, the biblical Garden of Eden, is a flat desert – thanks to inflation, overuse of agricultural land, and enemy invasions. How can we prevent further catastrophe? By making peace a personal thing.