A Better Way

Over the weekend, I watched the 1946 classic film, "The Best Years of Our Lives."  My screenwriter friend tells me it is one of top 25 movies of all time.  I could see that.  The acting was good. Character development was powerful. It was a heavy drama sprinkled with appropriate humor.  The story was compelling. 

The movie shared the challenges of three World War II veterans as they attempted to adjust to "normal" life after coming home.  The banker finds it difficult to be as cold and calculating in making loan decisions as he was before the war. The athlete adjusts to life without hands. The decorated officer of the threesome struggles to find work, and when he finally gets the job, it is in the same drug store where he had been a "soda jerk" before the war, still doing the same job. 

In the movie, we had a happy ending as all three of the protagonists resolved their inner conflicts to go on to what we assume will be normal lives. But, I grew up with a WWII vet who, by all appearances, was "normal," but he was never able to be emotionally available to his children.  He resolved emotional crises in the only way he knew: throw money at it and surely that would solve the feelings.

The movie reminded me of the thousands of Vietnam veterans of my generation that came home empty shells of the men who went to war.  Almost every day carries a story of similar adjustment challenges of our war fighters from Iraq and Afghanistan, even as we flirt with another intervention.

It would be easy to point to recent wars, which the media have covered so closely, and think they were different, but World War I wasn't much different.  As an undergraduate, I poured over poetry from WWI veterans Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.  I was drawn in a mesmerizing way by them into my own grandfather's life.  He was never the same when he returned from "The War to End All Wars," as they called WWI at the time.  We might call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) now.  They called it "shell shock."  He spent most of 25 years sitting in a catatonic state in a mental hospital, hardly eating, rarely blinking, and starring into space. 

The thing is that there are stories about veterans of the U. S. Civil War, who were never the same. In fact, if we go back to ancient literature, the vagaries of war have proven timeless themes.  The classic Greek drama Lysistrata relates the story of women maneuvering to get their men back from a long war. 

The senseless emptying of our men (and now women) every generation has been heavy on my heart as the news has been peppered with tales of one conflict after another around the globe, be it street warfare in Ferguson, thousands who have lost their homes in Gaza, or the beheading of a journalist who unwittingly become a pawn in a war in Syria as he sought to bring to people around the world. 

The victims of war aren't only those left on the battlefield, but in my family it was my father's father who was absent for his son and my father who was physically present but going through the motions of life.  There are countless others across generations who have been robbed of the fullness that the men in their lives might have brought.  What will it take for us to learn the spiritual lessons of war.

There used to be a bumper sticker that admonished, "If you want peace, work for justice."  I don't know that there is a simple formula for peace, but I truly believe that within each of us lies the potential for peace. We can bring more peace and justice into the world by making a difference within each of our spheres of influence today, tomorrow, and each day of our lives.