Peace is a State of Mind

President Obama's success depends upon the bravery of trust in the process of creating peaceful change.

I recognized the power of his motivations early on, and I have supported him despite several faltering steps that he made at the beginning of his presidency. It was only when I learned that President Obama had made a deal with the pharmaceutical companies to help pass his health care reform that my support had wavered, as I wondered just how far President Obama would go in playing this kind of politics, after winning the presidency on the strength of his inspiring speech titled, The End of Small Politics. But, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, my trust in the bigger process prevailed.

I had allowed myself to wander, briefly, away from my own arguments about why President Obama deserves our trust and support, even though many of his actions seemed contrary to his message of “change.” I had seen in his visage a figure who did have big plans to end small politics, but who was a practical visionary, who understood that he had to work carefully within the system as it exists. I saw a man with ideas that were more expansive than most people could even comprehend, a longer-term plan that involved patiently negotiating the change that he had promised, and a keen intelligence about how to face the world's colossal complexities. I had seen great promise in his cross-racial identity. And I had hoped that I was right and everybody else was simply wrong who immediately jumped to the conclusion that, because everything was so complicated and his actions were confusing, he had been a fraud during the election, that there never was any “change we can believe in.” By taking this attitude, they have joined the ranks of those who had always disliked and mistrusted Barack Obama, for whatever reasons were in their hearts, and are thus failing to provide the support that he told us that he was going to need to enact that change. As I wrote on my blog, “Change We Can Believe In” is not a spectator sport.

For those of us who believe that this could and should be a less violent world, that nations could solve their differences through peaceful negotiation instead of through war, that a great nation does not need the greatest show of military might to sustain its greatness, it seems that our ideas are always being brushed aside as naive, as politically unfeasible, as unrealistic idealism. And now, we who see in President Barack Hussein Obama a truly transformative figure, because we understand the stupendous scope of his vision and see the alert shine of competence in his eyes, are again and again being sidelined by so many skeptics who do not believe that President Obama is interested in creating peace in the world, and that the Nobel Peace Prize was just so much wishful thinking.

When the President of the United States already has a record of working on nuclear disarmament, and this President had immediately, upon taking office, moved to show his commitment to changing policies of the previous president that were offensive to the ideas of democracy and world citizenship by signing the statement about closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and then stressing the importance of the State Department in creating less militaristic, much more negotiation-oriented foreign policy, and furthermore, when this President reaches out to the Muslim world with a truly inspiring speech in Cairo, then backs off of an aggressive and destabilizing plan to place missiles in Eastern Europe, and actually takes action to engage with repressive regimes in Iran, Burma, and the Sudan in order to apply this nation's power peacefully, I say that this is major change toward a more stable and peaceful world that is more than worthy of a prize.

President Obama is making huge strides in several important areas in the world already, yet I find that people focus only on the difficult domestic situation wherein the military, as well as other organizations that operate in the murky, secret realm of “national defense,” such as the CIA, are made up of career operators who have other ideas than creating peace in the world. President Obama faces the conundrum that he is expected to act militaristic, as the Commander in Chief of the world's largest military, so it is difficult for people in this society to see him as an agent of peace. I would go so far as to say that peace is, in fact, regarded in this society merely as an ideal that dreamers and artists dwell in, not a viable reality.

The question that we must ask ourselves is, why is the idea of peace so unthinkable? Could it be that our society is afraid of peace? In a society that is afraid to trust anyone, a society where violence is a social norm, born of the swagger of entitlement, there is a deep-seated fear of what might happen if everybody were to lay down their arms, as well as their cynicism. Therefore, we must tear down this wall of fear, and find in ourselves the strength of character to admit that it is war and state aggression that is not viable. It is not naive to realize that modern warfare is not a noble endeavor, as it invariably either devolves into an asymmetrical morass or an unthinkable nuclear confrontation. There are no longer any “good wars,” and I believe that President Obama does understand this.

The situation in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, is not a simple matter of drawing down troops and walking away from a disaster of our own making. Whatever solutions there are will involve patient unraveling and insistent determination. And while it is a long-term process, we must all not only support but actively work diligently to help enact a change toward greater stability, because ultimately, peace is a state of mind.