planet 2
resolve
As I foresee that I will have little time to work on the The end of all wars stories in the upcoming months, I decided to publish the draft for this story because the thought it explores would be particularly relevant if it proved to be true.
Co-writers with extensive historical knowledge welcome, especially with knowledge about the two world wars, the wars by the British Empire, other colonial wars and the more recent wars. Potentially, this story could be used for several stories for more focus.
Charlie Alice Raya
23 September 2024
resolve
For five hundred years we didn’t have a single month of planet-wide peace. Some war was always happening somewhere, and in frequent intervals sparks would spread and whole continents and sometimes the whole planet would be on fire — until exhaustion made peace treaties possible. Peace would spread almost everywhere until the next small fire ignited more devastating wars.
I was lucky. I grew up in a multi-generations house and from an early age on, I listened to the stories the young, the mature and those in between had to tell.
I was a quiet child, always a listener, a thinker, rather than a talker. As I grew in years and size, I noticed that those who speak a lot have the least to say. At the same time they were listened to the most.
This puzzled me and one day I went to the oldest person in our house, nearly one-hundred and twenty years, who lived in the attic, mostly sitting in her study. I asked her whether she had made a similar observation.
She began to rock in her rocking chair, and it took me a moment to realise that she was laughing. Alarmed at the sudden outburst and worried because her laughter was soundless and only apparent in the movement of her rocking body and her broadly smiling face, I ran to fetch a glass of water.
When I came back, she had stopped rocking. Still smiling, she spoke in her strong deep voice: ‘Dear, dear. I’ve thought for a while that you have a great mind, eyes and ears sharp. Thank you for the water. I didn’t have my teeth in and didn’t want to scare you with the sight of my toothless laughter.’
I smiled and she emptied the glass of water. ‘Your absence gave me enough time to put them in. I hadn’t noticed how thirsty I was. Thank you.’
‘Dear Zadu. What was so funny about my question?’
Grey-haired Zadu smiled. ‘Because I had almost given up hope that I would get my chance to make a difference.’
I frowned and her merry face turned earnest. ‘It took me more than a hundred and ten years to figure out how we can do what is way overdue. But by that time, I was already tired and not half as nimble as I used to be. And while I love the people in our house, they like to talk so much, they don’t have the patience to think even when they want to and try really hard. But thinking is what needs to be done, and then we have to find a way to communicate our findings to all the impatient souls on our planet.’
‘We?’ I asked hopefully, experiencing a strange joy and alertness, I had never felt this strongly.
‘Yes, we. I don’t have long to live but with your help we can assemble a group of thinkers. You have the legs, the mind, and the smile. I have another mind and a plan.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘Ah, I needed you to develop your own thinking mind, make it resilient and independent in an open way. If I had talked to you sooner, you might have become my parrot and that would have been disrespectful to you and of no use to me. Together we can make it happen.’
My whole body was beaming and I asked excitedly: ‘What are we going to do?’
‘We are going to end all wars.’
I deflated.
Imagine a large balloon filled near to bursting point. That had been me until this moment. In a second I turned into a shrivelled bit of rubber.
Zadu pushed herself to the edge of the rocking chair and stroked my arm. ‘It can be done.’
I shook my head. ‘Peace is the period between two wars.’
‘Says who?’
‘Everyone.’
‘And who is everyone?’
‘Those who talk the most—’
‘—and?’
‘—and have the least to say.’
That was the moment when it first dawned on me that perhaps it could be done. Though I didn’t yet see how. Slowly I added ‘—those who talk so much that they don’t have time to think.’
Zadu smiled and excitement took hold of me again. ‘What will we find when we think?’
Zadu’s face became earnest and she said: ‘First we will find out why we start wars and do so over and over again even though at the end of every war we swear that we will never be this stupid again. And then we will find out what it will take to break the cycle of war – peace – war.’
Time was precious and so I quit school at only fourteen and hastened to contact everyone on the list Zadu had made me write.
After only eight weeks we had assembled a group of three hundred people from all over our planet. Luckily we all spoke Motas, our planet’s bridge language which everyone learned. Which tells you that generations before us had tried to unite the people of our planet, too. What had they overlooked? was one of our big questions.
We moved to a former holiday resort, no one had bothered to restore after it was destroyed in a war, and which was far away from all present wars.
I was in heaven. It was as if my grey cells finally learned to dance after fourteen years of hopping around wildly. I got drunk on thinking, exchanging thoughts, exploring options, developing ideas.
We were all aware of Zadu’s age and this pushed us to hurry, more than the multiple signs that another major conflict was brewing.
Zadu had brought us together and we wanted her to see at least some of the fruits of her work. And strangely, no one doubted that we could succeed, though we had no idea what made us so certain.
It happened after six week.
A small sub-team called us together to the large empty swimming pool which we used for big meetings.
The group’s speaker said: ‘This is what happens every time: A government finds reasons why a war has to happen and later why it has to continue. Nations engage in a war. As the losses and the destruction increase so does the determination to emerge as the so-called winner. At the same time, resources become scarce, and a deep, desperate tiredness envelopes the nations.
By the time the war ends, there is one thing everyone wants: forget! Forget and get back to some idea of normal.
This urge is encouraged by politicians and by business people, because after all the destruction, it is important that workers rebuild homes and businesses.
And no one asks why this war happened in the first place. What were its seeds? What brought the situation to the boil? What can be learned? What needs to be addressed, even now?
In fact, over the last five centuries, the only thing we have learned with regard to wars is how to build ever more lethal weapons.
And that is why we slide into conflicts over and over again. We don’t explore, we don’t learn, we don’t evolve. And most importantly: We don’t resolve our conflicts.
Instead we are stuck in a cycle which inevitably keeps sending us back into wars, because our conflicts were never resolved.’
‘We don’t resolve our conflicts. We just forget them,’ another one in the group said.
Zadu nodded. ‘Good work. We let the end of former wars pass without reflection, without putting in the work to make sure that we understand what happened, to resolve what needs resolving. And I guess the fact that we bury traumata with every end of a war, plays a role, too. Traumata, too, need some kind of resolve.’
‘Everyone wanted to forget,’ I mused.
‘We had to rebuild or starve,’ my neighbour remarked, thoughtfully.
‘We could have taken time after we had restored the basics,’ another added, frowning.
As a result of this discovery, the three hundred of us spent endless days and nights studying a selection of wars of all sizes, exploring the roots of those conflicts (not like recorded in the history books which never dig deep and speak of aggressors and defenders, of losers and winners. But war, we already knew, is never black and white. Like the roots of trees, the roots of wars are a complex web.)
As we kept digging, we kept coming across a number of issues which, if they had been addressed directly after a war, might have enabled us to evolve from warring creatures to creatures who are capable of solving conflicts.
Our first list, read like this:
- No matter how dire the situation take time to grieve: for your loses, for the loses of the others.
- Deal with your trauma and with the trauma of those close to you.
- Be aware that there are no winners or losers. In a war everyone loses — even those who make money from war. They lost their souls and dignity.
- Have a period of no more than two years to restore food supplies, shelters, infrastructure.
- After that have a period of (probably) three years to reflect on what led to this war, what happened during this war and why. Ask whether the result of the war is just and acceptable for all sides. Ask whether the original conflict is resolved or whether it has simply been beaten down. Explore what it would take to avoid this and any other war in the future. Check whether the new arrangements between the formerly warring nations ensure that none of these nations will ever be strong enough to dominate one of the other countries.
- Only when nations are certain that they understand the conflict and have resolved it, and when they have dealt with their traumata and reshaped their priorities, ethics, goals, and when they have decided how to avoid falling into the trap of war again, — only then the period of reflection should be concluded and the new road taken.
This and our other ideas sounded simple enough, but it took us over a decade to make it happen to the extent that our suggestions prevented wars, and it took another decade before all wars came to an end.
There hasn’t been a single war in over seventy years on our planet. People have come to enjoy a liberating dance of the grey cells, and when someone feels like spilling blood, they can use one of the many Challenge Gardens, and challenge any person of similar skill to a fight. Mostly those fights end with two terribly bruised people, spending the night in one of the adjacent rest pavilions which serve food and teas around the clock. And often enough the opponents laugh together by the next morning.
Zadu left us a day after the first warring nation agreed to test our ideas. I was there and saw the smile on her face as she closed her eyes for the last time.
Additional snippets
‘Resolve past wars.’
‘How far to go back?’
‘As far as it takes.’
‘All true,’ the first speaker said. ‘We wanted to live, dance, drink, have a future. We didn’t want to face the fact that we had failed. We had failed ourselves, our families, our communities, the planet, the future generations. We need to face the past to have a future.’
Someone else stood up to stretch his legs and said. ‘Maybe we even need to end past wars.’
Several of us repeated that thought. ‘End past wars.’
‘It is true. So far, we contented with putting generals on trial and putting memorials up. But that’s not enough.’
‘Peace is at stake if we close our eyes and ears to what needs to be resolved, rethought, reshaped. We need to reflect on how we got into this or that war. And if we don’t lay the foundations to never fall into the same traps, we are lost. We have to evolve or we are doomed to return to war over and over again.’
Ending this war by resolving previous wars. Maybe pick one war where the roots of the conflict go back several past wars. And a smaller one with an old family’s grievance far back in the past.
Resolve past injustices.
The scarce and hatred from previous wars.
An older note from Views from around the universe, 2022, I had forgotten about:
history = There is a common believe that history repeats itself. That is a myth. The only reason why the same mistakes are repeated is that humans don’t ask enough questions. They don’t go to the roots of what caused an uprising, a war, a pest, racism, femicide. They don’t take the time to understand what leads to the mistake. If humans explored why they do what they do then they would be able to change the course of their actions. But since they prefer to brush over their mistakes as if they never happened, they don’t learn. It’s like humans are simply glad that a catastrophe is over or didn’t reach into their home. Now all they want is to get on with their lives, forget it ever happened. And while they look the other way, the roots find new ways to surface.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Asking questions, facing the painful mistakes of the past and present, there is a lot of potential in that. History is not some mystic monster that can’t be slain. Humans could have a lot more control over their lives if they chose to question what happened and to learn.
It is surprising though that people who believe in the myth of history repeating itself, don’t do everything they can to prevent that.
© Charlie Alice Raya, The end of all wars, planet two, resolve