What brings peace among us?

"What gets in the way of peace?" is, at one and the same time, a very simple and a very difficult question for me.  The only answer I can ever really come up with is the one that I left on the Questions and Reflections page: ME! 

I have trouble enumerating the thousands of things that stand in the way of peace when I move the focus off myself. "What brings peace among us? is a better question for me.  This question also implies a lack of peace, but the slant of this question is more positive.

Some of you are thinking, Why doesn't he just answer the question then, IF it is so positive?

"You keep thinking, Butch.  It's what you do best."

Since it be Veteran's Day, and conincidentally, the day after the Marine Corps birthday, I will answer the question.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid aside.

Inclusion, cooperation, compassion, and consensus with an eye toward understanding and accepting the Other will bring peace.

I genuinely believe that IF I were doing more of the right things and less of the wrong things that I could bring world peace.  I do not mean alone, of course.  To even think that I could bring peace alone, I'd have to have a bigger head than Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Smedley Butler combined.  I do believe that peace is possible and I know that when WE have enough folks who genuinely want peace and act on THEIR desire WE will have it.

WE already know what to do AND how to do it.  WE know how to clean the air and the water.  WE know how to stop wars and starvation and disease.  WE could have done ALL these things in the 19th Century, or maybe even the Eighteenth, but WE choose not to do them.

Everyone says, "War is wrong, BUT . . ."  Everyone says, "Starvation is wrong, BUT . . ."  WE ALL say, "Hatred is wrong, BUT . . ."

Little children are dying this morning because of OUR, I mean MY, IFs, ANDs, and BUTs.

WE only need to lose OUR IFs, ANDs, and BUTs . . . to have peace in the World.