The Deep
What do you see?
What do you know?
What do you believe?
The surface tells you nothing about what takes place below.
When you live on the surface, the tides are out of your control.
When you fight against the current, you know not what you are up against.
The belief in peace can not equal the faith in the war that has gone on for over two thousand years.
The conflict is in the origin of faith they both love.
Who owns exclusive rights to be seated in the place of honor at the table?
The belief, there can only be one.
Deep water.
To those who live deep under the surface, what takes place up top has nothing to do with their reality.
No matter how much the winds of change may blow, the people of the deep are not moved.
They are insulated from critique.
The people on both sides have chained themselves to an ideology that says they are special. They are the chosen. They will rule over their enemies in life and after death.
They are in love with their conflict.
It fills them with purpose.
It feeds their prejudice.
How do you find a compromise between two opposing people who believe the total destruction of their opposition is required so they may live?
The thousands of children on both sides that have died have not moved them.
The destruction of their community on both sides has not moved them.
The thousands upon thousands who have died on both sides are ignored.
Only the surface of the conflict has ever been addressed.
The window dressings, the easily understood issues, the things that can be whined about without touching the elephant at the bottom of the ocean.
Ther thing that continues this conflict that has not been addressed?
The thing there in the deep waters that brings fear to the peacemakers?
Something so profound that if talked about would shake the foundations of society?
That which shall not be named.
God.
Religion and its structure are at the core.
Either one is right, the other wrong, or both sides are wrong depending upon your own belief.
And there's the rub.
The three religions of the West all claim the same spot on earth as their's and their's alone.
There has never within these three groups been any room for compromise.
King of the hill or ruler of nothing.
Like blind fish in the deep, the faithful follow the voices of hate.
There can be no compromise with those that oppose us as being rulers of humanity.
It's written in the holy books of all three faiths.
The problem is now defined, so what do we do?
We send a message of hope.
We let the people of the deep know that life is possible on the land.
It's a different life than what they have known, but it is life.
We must ask them as many times as needed to understand we share this world with them.
The people on the land and the people of the deep can live together.
There can be peace only if those who live in the deep want it as much as those on the land.
DFrey
Peace