Anything for Peace?

by Eleanor Rodgerson, MD

One evening, an important person on TV commented, "We must work for peace. We must do everything we can for peace."

A listener answered, "Yes, yes, anything for peace!

I thought about it and recalled the night, not unusual in this house, when an older boy in the family, not wanting to get to his homework, was particularly agitating, teasing his little brother into screaming frustration. It had to do about entering a room. The older brother said, "No!", and stuck his foot in the way. The younger was persistent. The sister shouted, "Dad, do something! I’m trying to study!". But the commotion persisted. Dad was at the door talking to a neighbor.

When the telephone rang for the older boy, a friend begging him to come over to play cards for awhile, there was a lull. "Dad?"

"Let him go," said his sister. "Then we’ll have peace around here."

He went and there was peace, no solution, but quiet.

Isn’t national and international peace a sum of a lot of little things, like individual’s reactions to one another? If strife cannot be solved on these basic levels, what can be expected further on up? Like smoothing frosting on a cracked cake.

When three people want to use one telephone, do they put in three telephones, or two? Or do they limit the time for each call on the one telephone and work out a schedule? Are television programs always switched to please? When children argue about room accommodations that cost great time and effort, do they displace the other members of the family, or are they forced to learn how to get along?

Anything for peace? Too often it seems to be freedom from disturbance that ’s being sought, tranquility, taking the easy way out. And isn’t there a loss in discipline? Don’t children want to know where and how they fit in, what the family believes, where it thinks it is going, a pattern to live by, a pattern that is the beginning of the future.

What is peace? "Freedom from hostilities," says the dictionary, "an agreement between contending parties to abstain from further hostilities," "an undisturbed state of mind". Take your pick of synonyms – tranquility, harmony, neutrality, bloodlessness.

After some thought and a short conference with the family, rules were made and enforced. Homework came first. Teasing was under better control. Not anything for peace.