By eleven o clock alchemy

At many of the anti-war events I have been to in the last short while, there seems to be an overwhelming sentiment that something called “peace” should happen as soon as possible. Let me be honest; I’m wary of this “peace”, as I am wary of anything I don’t really understand.

When I see people of color at marches and rallies, I rarely see them holding signs or banners that talk about peace. I notice their signs, instead, often talk about “justice”.

Why is this?

Is justice peaceful? Is peace just? Is peace just peace and no fighting? Is it no bombs? Can the U.S. still engage in covert activities in Colombia under peace? Can we still occupy the Philippines and Afghanistan and have troops just about everywhere else under peace? Can there BE a military under peace?

Does it mean that if the U.S. stops dropping bombs on Somalia, oh, I mean the Sudan, oh I mean Afghanistan, oh I mean Iraq, then there is peace? Or does it mean that if we stop the sanctions, then there is peace? Does it mean if we pay the Iraqi people $5 for every child lost since we first dropped bombs on them, that there would be peace? Do we pay taxes that go toward building stealth bombers and not our own health under peace? Is peace ours? Or does it belong to everybody else on earth, too? Does it belong to the earth itself?

All these questions and no answers. But I’m still hearing this thunderous white cry for PEACE PEACE PEACE.

I think I’ve got it figured out. I think this “peace” means that white people don’t have to hear about what we do to other countries because we are “at peace” (free to go about our business without guilt nipping at our heels). In peacetime, we don’t have marches and rallies for the young women that work in maquiladoras for worse than shitty pay making all the shit we use to clothe our own well-fed young women. In peacetime, we don’t hear too much about the fact that our most favored nation is China. We don’t have to listen to what our best trade buddy China does to Tibet, or to its own people, because we are at “peace”. In times of peace, we don’t have to hear about our good friend Israel, the recipient of the most U.S. aid. We don’t know too much about the fact that Israel is not so quietly or covertly going about their own campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. I wonder if the Palestinians thought the U.S. was at “peace” a few years ago when they started the latest intifada. In times of peace we don’t hear the ground we walk over every day shouting “What have you done to us?”. Most of us white folks don’t look at the blood of the slaughtered Indigenous people on our ancestors hands.

Maybe white people want peace because it doesn’t threaten us. When I see signs that say peace now, I think to myself that it should read underneath: “Because I am guilty.”

I am not part of the peace movement. My movement is the anti-imperialism, anti-oppression movement. I do not want war or killing, certainly not. But to ask another question, don’t we need justice more than we need a comfortable, air-conditioned, sound-tracked, airbrushed, leather-upholstered SUV-driving, sweatshop-clothes buying, racial profiling, meat-eating, bourgeois, mother-fucking peace? If peace means that we go back to the nightmare that we were living before we started dropping bombs this last week, then I don’t want peace, I want a revolution.

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