Peace in the m.e. begins with m-e.

After my work is done I am going to start a blog about the need for peace in the middle east. It will be uncapitalized in solidarity with all those who ask, “east of what?” East of the Center of the Universe in Europe? Or maybe it will be a blog about the need for peace in Southwestern Asia. Or not. Maybe that implies an acceptance of war in nearby Western Asia, in places like Afghanistan, which need peace also, and maybe even more desperately right now.

Maybe my blog will be about the need for peace between humanity. Maybe it will talk about the need for an end to all fighting between people over the age of about five. We could leave a little bit of fighting in Kindergarten, so that kids learn why fighting is bad, and what it is that we need to maintain our precious grown-up peace for. Of course, if we made an international law against fighting between anyone six years or older, we’d only end up with five and a half year old professional boxers suing their parents for emancipation so can have ice cream for dinner and all the candy they want. And that's before someone at Fox or ESPN starts "letting" emancipated kids fight to the death.

So maybe instead my blog will call for peace between nations as an organic product of peace within nations. Speaking of organic, it will have a weekly column on better organic farming processes. It will talk about how much easier it is to grow healthy food when we do not cover it in poisons first, and it will refuse to call these upstart pesticide pushers “traditional farmers” as the military-industrial-journalistic establishment so willingly euphemizes their only-decades-old euthanization of the natural, traditional pollinators of so many of the best foods on earth.

It made headlines all over the world when half of our bees died. It made headlines again when someone thought cel phones might interfere with their navigation techniques. Cel phones still cause brain cancer and pesticides still kill insects without regard to whether they are necessary for the sex lives of the plants that we live on, but as these stories are not new, they are not news. They are just one more example of a number of sets of problems that we will not solve as long as we are more concerned with small green pieces of paper than with happiness, security or sustainability of life on earth.

Sustainability of life begins when we stop killing each other. That will be the central thesis of my journal on the need for peace in the middle east and wherever else there is war. Of course, as Bob Marley once quoted an even more famous person, “Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.”

The situation in Israel and Palestine is an example of two different groups of people believing themselves to be of different, each-superior “races.” It is, of course, a scientifically unsupportable proposition, not only that they are each superior, but that they are separate in the first place, given the number of successful “interracial” couples.

In biology, a species is defined as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce childbearing young. Jefferson’s children are still with us today as a testament to the absurdity of any attempt to separate humanity, stop its migrations or control the interaction of its various populations.

As long as Israelis and Palestinians insist on their fundamental difference from one another, they remain at war. As long as you or I believe that we are not Israeli or that we are not Palestinian, we are at war with ourselves. Mankind is one of the more intelligent and articulate forms of life on this planet. We have shown our ability to conquer this planet, to pick and choose those species we will share it with, to change the very nature of the creatures we consider our friends and supporters, using dangerous viruses to add a little extra protein to rice, all in the name of those small green pieces of paper.

With great power comes great responsibility. We cannot seek personal gain when human life is at stake. We cannot allow ourselves to fragment into factions, for any fraction of humanity is less powerful, less capable, less educable than the whole. When we find ourselves chasing pieces of paper, prices of eggs in China, large tracts of land—focusing on power and control—we are in a hole.

How do I propose we establish peace in the middle east? Obviously since I brought it up it is my job to solve it. Well, I don’t think we can resolve it by moving borders, by launching missiles or by killing off low-level paramilitary officials. I don’t think we can solve it by switching sides, changing partners, backing off of our commitments to back new attackers. I don’t think we can fix it by military action at all.

Actually, I can think of two reasonable solutions. The most obvious is to simply get every State in the region to sit down together and agree never to hurt each other’s people again. After that, they could set up a court of unbiased outsiders to resolve whatever other inconsequential property disputes these countries find so important that they have all joined together to break what they allegedly agree is God’s commandment to respect human life.

The more radical solution, and this will shock a lot of my more conservative friends in that it involves spending money together on something that doesn’t kill anybody, is to just move the two sides apart and build them all a bunch of new houses and monuments. The biggest could be a monument to peace between nations. Hopefully truly conservative people will be persuaded to adopt this approach when they realize that it saves money and saves lives compared to our current means of solving foreign political problems by developing trillion-dollar weapons systems, training trillion dollar armies and sending our children to places they've never heard of to become permanently traumatized mass murderers or else just to go die.

If we compared the economic and human costs of maintaining standing armies in every country, it must be astronomically higher than the cost of everybody working together to build some comfortable houses for each other. And while we’re at it, let’s give everybody a computer, a video camera and a fiber optic connection. One of the first tricks a parent or a pet owner learns to curb bad behavior is distraction. Plus, with enough communication, current adversaries may discover more common ground and more mutual attraction.

Mankind has already proven that we like to act “en loco parente” to serve as God of the vegetables, God of the honeybee, God of the polar bear and gun-toting God of the sad-eyed wolf puppy. We judge constantly. What we find pleasing, we allow to thrive. What any one of us finds displeasing, regardless of scientific evidence of its necessity to our planet or our livelihoods, we destroy. But this is not all that the God of our great stories does. We're doing only the painful half of the job. As little impersonators of Gods, is it not our responsibility to shower the lost people of the world with love and to feed them manna from above? How is it that instead we sell them guns?

Today, lost in the desert for so many more than forty years, it appears frustration, hatred and previous land claims are impossible for two wise peoples to forget. But let’s see if these drives are really so powerful that they can withstand YouTube, pornography and ChatRoulette.