Greek to Me
Shades Of Gray
©2008 by Michael Raysses
Thank God Leo Tolstoy had a sense of foresight that bears dividends even until this day. Beyond penning what many consider one of the best novels ever written, he presented us with this month’s theme—war and peace. (Personally speaking, I am just glad he opted out of writing a sequel entitled “Death and Taxes.” But I digress…)
War and peace. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you rarely, if ever, hear that phrase sequenced to read “peace and war.” War is sexy. It commands top billing. Besides, war begets peace. Peace couldn’t exist without war. It is war’s logical conclusion. At least, that is what the proponents of war might have you believe.
We have recklessly lived and needlessly died as if war and peace are black and white, absolutes that exist in part only to define the other. We have romanticized and glamorized war. Peace, on the other hand, gets the kind of lip service typically reserved for eating one’s vegetables and watching PBS: healthy and edifying, with absolutely nothing to elicit passion beyond their practical utility. War, with its inherent blackness, has been painted onto our cultural canvas as artfully as a grand master blends dissonant hues to create a seemingly harmonized whole, blotting out whatever light peace may have brought to the picture. And it has been done at our peril.
The seduction of war lies in its illusory necessity and its false value. Its threshold of involvement taps into our primal need to marshal ourselves as individuals into groups that represent ideals that are worth battling and killing for. It also poses the impossibly alluring prospect of ennobling lives by the mere fact of one gesture—the willingness to fight. To wage war. And in so doing to confer heroism on what might otherwise be a meaningless, if not dull, life. Ironically, by making the ultimate sacrifice by dying in the service of that act, a perverse sense of immortality can be achieved.
Bullshit.
Before you dismiss this as so much liberal cant, ask yourself this—why do we name wars as we do? It’s not as if they are going to be confused with one another. It’s because we value them as watershed events that define us. Beyond that, look at the names we bestow on these tragedies: The Great War, The War to End All Wars. And in one of this country’s greatest acts of self-deception and self-loathing, the Civil War, a conflict named to capture the sheer lunacy of citizens killing citizens in a conflagration that ultimately came to represent savagery and carnage that is remarkable even by today’s jaded standards. (Don’t even get me started on how history will label the debacle in Iraq—The Grand Clusterfuck would not be inaccurate in my mind. Besides, I love understatement.)
Yet we never give a name to those times in which we aren’t actively engaged in warfare with someone else. The absence of war is simply known as “peacetime,” a destination to be stopped at while en route to some place else. Some place that inevitably leads back to war.
What brings all of this in focus for me is how the very aspects of our society I’m decrying play out in my own life. I will suffer some personal setback, which then becomes a problem. I let the problem fester until it reaches critical mass. Now things have reached the crisis state—my solution? To declare my own personal war. I take on an embattled demeanor, as I set my jaw and narrow my gaze. All my attention is riveted on that issue. Now, I am thoroughly engaged. I feel alive as I plan my attack. It’s a feeling that is heightened as I execute my plan, and even as I feel the inevitable ebb and flow that comes with solving the riddles of one’s own life, I hum with the electricity required of me in this time and place. In that moment, when I conquer my enemy, there is nothing but celebration.
Afterwards, there is, once again, the absence of war. But there’s no real peace because true serenity isn’t a destination, it’s an elusive state of being. It is a calm reached by reconciling the impulse to reflexively wage war with the delusion that war’s absence is peace. By having the courage to make sense of that which exists between war’s pitch black and the luminous white of true peace—the ever shifting continuum of the inscrutable shades of gray that makes up our lives.
Until we address those shades of gray and learn to live with them in a spirit of genuine tranquility, we are consigned to swinging helplessly between black and white—pendulums with no sense of purpose beyond the seemingly irresistible force of our own momentum. And the greatest casualty won’t be the war that we didn’t win but the peace that we lost.
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator who lives in Los Angeles. His email address is MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.