THE Solution

I concluded that there is a way to achieve peace in this world, whether it be in our hearts, our families, our society, or on this globe. The answer is 'go back to the garden'. This should not be confused with, "Go and work in the garden," a metaphor you've probably heard me preach a billion times over, especially when I'm reading/teaching Candide. And though working in the garden IS SO VERY IMPORTANT in maintaining our current functionality, what I'm postulating now is very different - it's the solution.

If you'll remember, I have had such a cool opportunity to mull things over in recent conversations with my boss, and I make light of our sometimes ultra-silly conclusions. At the same time I've been reading some very serious Hemingway short stories about war and the lost generation (esp. "Under the Ridge" and "A Natural History of the Dead") and also Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse-5. Of course, the news (CNN, NPR, BBC, ETC.) elbows its way into my brain, as do the words of Bishop Tutu ("The world is still good because the norm is not news!"). So I'm left with Light and Dark; Holy and Vile; Heaven and Hell... on earth. It's confusing. So instead of trying to combine all of these conflicting "ingredients" into a peaceful whole -a perfect peaceful souffle (if you will)- with the hopes that if we tip-toe around it long enough, it will not self-implode, we should implement the simple solution. That is go back to the garden - to Eden before Adam, before Eve, before Lilith or the snake or the apple or the fig or the shameful nakedness and banishment.

This idea occurred to me before I read this passage in the Vonnegut:

[Billy] came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes...

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

I know that I'm not the first to suggest going back to the garden. And though Vonnegut makes a brilliantly cogent point, he is forgetting one major problem: Adam and Eve fucked up. They were given a choice - free will: to eat the apple fig or not to eat it; to obliviously live in harmony with God or to want more than what they were given, and they made the incorrect choice.

Human nature always wants more, and to not want more takes tediously agonizing work, as changing our natures would do. When given the opportunity to make good decisions, we generally hose things up by desiring more, whether it be more knowledge, more love, more wealth, more land, more ____fill in the blank____ etc.. That means, therefore, that we have to go further back than what Vonnegut suggests- before man was created.

That means we don't get to exist. That means we wouldn't get to say anything poetic about yins or yangs or the balance of good and evil, sacrifice or selfishness, martyrdom or terrorism. We wouldn't get to experience hope or regret, love or hate, "affirmations or taxes". This would sound sad upon first reflection. But I think that knowing we wouldn't be missing anything -because we wouldn't exist -helps us to understand that peace is well worth the sacrifice.

So, let's do it. Let's go back to the garden so that we can attain peace on earth.