The pursuit of peace

With his appointments of Sen. Mitchell and Amb. Holbrook President Obama has demonstrated that he wishes to be active in the pursuit of peace.

In his Second Inaugural address Pres. Abraham Lincoln, Pres. Obama's model, called on a weary nation to “strive on . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." During the National Prayer service prayer was made for just and lasting peace. There can be no doubt that Pres. Obama is interesting in a just peace and schieving such will be difficult. It will be even more difficult to achieve a lasting peace.

Peace that has to be maintained with the threat of violence is not a lasting peace. We seek peace because we are inherently a peace-loving species. Wars between humans are an anomaly. To expand on Sen. Mitchell's view that problems caused by humans can be solved by humans, we need to understand that we somehow slipped from a world at peace to a world at war by our own doing and it is up to us to find the way back. We need to demonstrate our commitment to achieving lasting peace by applying all we have learned about problem solving to this problem.

The first step is to attain a full understanding of the problem and how it began.