A paratrooper walks past an Afghan graveyard during a US-Afghan patrol April 30, 2012, Ghazni province, Afghanistan.
Credit: Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod / The US Army
When I dropped my daughter off at pre-school on Monday morning, I made a point of asking the teacher about eye safety issues regarding the looming solar eclipse. We’re not even going to bother with it, she said. There’s too many kids to keep track of, they’re not old enough to be trusted on something like this, and we weren’t going to go out and get a bunch of stuff we’d only use once. The eclipse is happening at naptime, she said, so we’re just going to skip it.
Fan-dab-tastic, I said, one less thing to worry about … and then I turned on the television, and there was the president of the United States staring belligerently into the sky, straight at the sun with no protective glasses or anything while his aides shrieked helplessly at him to stop. The next morning, the far-right proto-fascist host of my local sports […]
This story reminded me that when people grow up in war, they define peace in very different terms than we do. This is one reason why the brand of peace that the US and others attempt to institute abroad so often fails. We think we know peace, but we don’t know peace in the local vernacular. Maybe peace as the locals define it simply never holds the necessary profit potential, so we ignore it. How could anyone, anywhere possibly be happy without a Starbucks, Exxon, McDonalds, and Walgreens at every single intersection? So our government instructs the military to flatten and pave over the world, then to assist with infrastructure improvements like schools and oil refineries. Sigh.
Thirty eight years is a long, long time. The median age in Afghanistan is just 18.6, meaning there are probably very few people left there as much as 38 years old. The entire population of that country has known war their entire lives. To them, peace as we define it is a ridiculous fantasy, an impossible dream. How might they define it? We should probably ask.
Wikipedia has a page titled “List of countries by median age,” which claims to get its info from the CIA World Factbook. 39 of these countries have median ages of less than just twenty. That means half of the entire population of the country is less than twenty years old. All but one of these 39 countries are in Africa or the Middle East, and have recently seen or are currently experiencing violent conflict. I wonder what peace means to them?
Peace is not something we can create by throwing money or pointing a gun. Peace is a lifestyle, not an accomplishment. Normal, everyday citizens in Afghanistan, Sudan, Mali, or Somalia must lead lives very different to our own. Before sending “military assistance” that would perpetuate the violence, perhaps we should actually investigate what the people there actually want. I remember something somewhere about “of the people, by the people, for the people;” maybe we could walk the walk if we feel like we have to interfere in the other people’s lives, too.