Everything Matters
Reaping What We Sow
By Patrice Gaines
Thursday, August 24, 2006

I remember once in the middle of an argument with an ex-husband, a voice said to me, “Do you want peace—or do you want to be right?” I stopped arguing. When he finished speaking, I said nothing.

I wanted peace.

When the bombs began again in Lebanon, I thought of that question and like many people I wondered if the leaders of countries ever asked themselves this: “Do we want peace—or do we want to be right?”

This would mean not responding to anger with anger, or bullets with bullets. It would mean Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Hezbollah Sheik Hassan Nasrallah sitting at a table together and talking. It would mean the United States would be a true negotiator of peace instead of a supplier of weapons.

In an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Lakhdar Brahimi, a former special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General, wrote, “What a waste that it took more than 30 days to adopt a United Nations Security Council resolution for a cease-fire in Lebanon. Thirty days during which nothing positive was achieved and a great deal of pain, suffering and damage was inflicted on innocent people.”

Brahimi said the United States used its diplomatic clout to prevent a cease-fire “while more military hardware was rushed to the Israeli Army.”

I run into people everyday who know this.

I was walking toward the lake in my neighborhood one morning when I saw two women stopped up ahead of me, facing each other, their eyes closed, their hands cupped together. As I approached they parted, said “Good morning” to me and bid farewell to one another. I started walking with the woman who was headed my way.

“We pray each morning,” she offered. “There is so much going on in the world.”

 “Every prayer matters,” I said.

“I feel the world is falling apart,” she said. “It is so sad.”

 We expressed our sorrow over the deaths of so many Lebanese people. “Can’t we see war creates more hatred?” she asked.

We talked about the retribution we expect to be levied against the United States for its role in the war and we promised to pray for everyone involved.

After she left me, I returned to a thought that had been in my head for days: My life is worth no more or no less than the life of a Lebanese. I thought of this again when I read the current online column of my friend Patricia Arnold. (www.loudmouth-balcony.com ) She mentions the work of an author who studied religions and found some basic truths shared by nearly all of them. They included: “The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you)” and “As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap.”

“Ironically, even though these principles have been making the same declarations for centuries, we’re still choosing to do to others what we would not want them to do to us. We’re still harming others,” writes Arnold, who is an author and owner of a public relations and marketing communications firm in Chicago. “We’re still trying to conquer through violence. We’re still judging without the expectation of being judged. We're waging war, fully expecting peace.”

“Thousands of years have passed, and we still don’t get it. We still don’t understand that if the world is scary, our enemies didn’t make it that way; we did.”

In his Op-Ed , Brahimi advises, “If the United States and other key countries could see this conflict through a different lens, there could be a real chance for peace. This would be the best way to signal genuine respect and atonement for the suffering inflicted on so many innocent people for so many years.”

Brahimi, Arnold, my neighbor, I and millions of others in this country share some basic truths too: The recent war did not start with the abduction of Israeli soldiers. War has not made Israel - or the United States - safer. It is impossible to sow seeds of peace with war.

Patrice Gaines is a career journalist and author of "Laughing in the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color—A Journey from Prison to Power and Moments of Grace.” She lives outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, where she is co-founder of The BrownAngelCenter, a program for women who have been incarcerated.