Picking up the thread I began last month about the book Peace Is Every Step —

Even those who profess themselves to be peacemakers often cannot resist the trumpet call to arms. The author, Thich Nhat Hanh, relates a story from his days as a peace activist during the Vietnam War. During a talk he gave in the United States in 1966, a young man stood up and told Hanh to go home. “The best thing you can do is go back to your country and defeat the American aggressors! You shouldn’t be here. There is absolutely no use to your being here!”

The young American and his fellow activists wanted peace, Hanh says, but “the kind of peace they wanted was the defeat of one side in order to satisfy their anger.” Frustrated with the lack of progress toward a ceasefire, some activists had even begun calling for the defeat of their own country. Though they said they worked for peace, what they were really doing, Hanh says, was taking the attitude of violence that had brought war into Vietnam and unleashing it upon their own countrymen and women. “We Vietnamese who were suffering under the bombs had to be more realistic,” Hanh writes. “We wanted peace. We did not care about anyone’s victory or defeat.”

Lasting peace does not emerge from any kind of partisanship that denies the opponent’s humanity. The work of ending war cannot begin with a heart full of hate; it requires not just a worthy end, but also worthy means. To practice nonviolence, we must first become nonviolence, Hanh points out. “Because without being peace, we cannot do anything for peace. If we cannot smile, we cannot help other people smile. If we are not peaceful, then we cannot contribute to the peace movement.”

In a world where every action, however small, has consequences, what the individual does matters. And so the choices she makes — to favor war or peace in her dealings with other people — has much to say about the choices her country makes in its dealings with other countries. “The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives — the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods,” Hanh writes. “We have to look deeply into the situation, and we will see the roots of war. We cannot just blame one side or the other. We have to transcend the tendency to take sides.”

Yet many of us are under the illusion that we have no say over matters of politics and war. We insist that the country’s top politicians and generals and intellectuals have all the power, and what say or do has no effect on the course of events. Hanh disagrees. “You may think that if you were to enter government and obtain power, you would be able to do anything you wanted, but that is not true,” he writes. “If you became President, you would be confronted by this hard fact — you would probably do almost exactly the same thing as our current President, perhaps a little better, perhaps a little worse.”

It is difficult to accept this — especially if you’re not a fan of your country’s current head of state. But the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy made a similar point in his novel War and Peace. We believe great leaders to be all-powerful, but we forget that their decisions are never made in isolation, but rather a refraction of the influence of many factors, including the actions of those they supposedly command. “The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few men,” Tolstoy wrote. Yet most of us live our lives under this delusion of impotence.

According to Hanh, the simple act of looking deeply into our reality and changing ourselves — a practice he calls meditation, though it is not limited by religion or belief — can bring our world closer to the peace we seek. “If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things,” Hanh writes, “we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen