Today is September 21st, the “International Day of Peace.”  Images of peace symbols and people holding hands feeling good about themselves stream through my news feed I can’t help thinking about the ironies.

Now I don’t begrudge anyone their meditations whether it’s for peace or true love.  Lord knows I’ve been trying to manifest my dream job law-of-attraction style.  Some of us call it prayer.  If you can dream it, you can do it and what you focus on expands, right?  Ohm on my friends.

Still, most of these same friends will completely negate their heartfelt desire for peace in the world by their votes.  They’ll vote for the guys who oppose the war but under whose leadership violence increases around the globe.  They certainly won’t vote for candidates who are strong on foreign policy and military defense – they’ll oppose them in protest.  But being a peacenik doesn’t mean they are wiser or gentler or more enlightened.  They aren’t actually making the way for peace in this world and they’re often fighting very hard against those who are.  They’ll fight to eliminate our weapons, to reduce the military but they won’t fight our enemies.  And yet they’ll sit in a circle and meditate.  What a colossal waste of time.

Thinking peace will never work unless we’re all doing it, and we’ll never all be doing it.  The difference between those who meditate for peace and those who are willing to fight for it is that the latter understand human nature.  There are bad people out there, there is evil that we can’t wish away.  We have seen this evil manifest before in Communism and Nazism.  Today it’s militant Islam, and its followers will burn and suicide-bomb their way across the globe unless someone stands in their way.  Such violence can only be ended by stronger violence by good people.  Know who they are?  The Marines.  The SEALS.  The American military and the friends and families that support us.

After the Twin Towers were attacked, we knew we were at war.  I said so to a cousin who was horrified: “Don’t say that!”  It was obvious, and yet in the face of an unprovoked attack like that, my cousin, whose daughter was in the 2nd Tower and (we found out later) managed to get out, she was horrified at the idea of going to war.  She would rather have meditated for peace.

Patrick Nichols, Fallujah 2005 by Jude Eden, USMC

We are the enemy of militant Islam because we can speak freely, practice our faiths freely, and if we can dream it, we can do it in America.  The faith and dedication of the Founders that brought about our form of government is not only what separates us from every other country, it’s what makes those in every other country want to come to us.  It’s what makes those who hate freedom want to destroy us.

In our democratic republic, the ones who are actually making peace possible are the ones who are willing to fight for it.  We learn to fight, we arm and practice and are willing to risk it all, to go into battle to ensure that others who don’t want to can sit in a circle and hold hands.