PEACE COMES FROM WITHIN
Rodell, Fred
Peace Comes From Within By FRED RODELL PEACE on earth, good will toward men. Those are the old, the mellow, words. But the earth is not at peace and good will does not rule the minds of men, this...
...Unfortunately, either would smack too much today of pressure, socially conformist pressure, from the outside...
...Peace on earth, good will toward men...
...No, not even Adolf Hitler—the psychotic whom an effective civilization would early have confined to an asylum and tried to cure...
...They must come from the inside, from the minds and hearts of men who have learned, each alone and yet all together, to be unhating and unafraid...
...The world is too much with us and too much for us...
...once said, of fear itself...
...World socialism is not the answer...
...There are only the atomic bomb—and men, whose skins chance to be black, being shoved off their farms in Indonesia and shoved off busses in Alabama...
...The brand of Christianity we need is the brand that needs no trappings and wants no show...
...This does not mean a revival of formal religion nor a sudden spate of church-going...
...The British are bloodying up Java because they are scared to death of losing their rank as a first-rate world power—and of losing the wealth that such rank implies...
...Some Christmas to come when we—or our children or their children—will have learned the old, old lesson of good will toward men...
...Nor even world democracy...
...Are we not somehow tarred with the same intolerance...
...We have come far enough from the morality of the ancients, we have learned enough about the workings of the mind, to know that no man is inherently a bad man...
...WE need to get back to that simple set of values that rates self-knowledge and quiet courage and common humanity above power and competitive success...
...For their hatred is bred of fear, deep uncom-prehended fear...
...The man who damns or hates or scorns all Negroes or all Jews, all Japs, or all Germans, is afraid, down in his inner being, of his own place in the world...
...Yet those who hate and fight and kill for money or for power—those nations or corporations, groups or individuals, who set their courses by the stars of the ledger and the sword—they are not alone...
...America, best-willed of any nation on earth, is bounded by hatred and bad will...
...We should not hate the haters...
...MOST of us are afraid—afraid of the unknown future, afraid of failure, afraid, as F.D.R...
...But the earth is not at peace and good will does not rule the minds of men, this Christmas day, 1945...
...FEAR turns so easily to bitterness and hatred and strife...
...We need to become Christians in the inner sense of the word—the kind of Christians that the British aren't in Java and that U. S. industrialists aren't in dealing with labor and that church-going Congressmen aren't when they uphold the poll tax and Jew-baiters aren't and German-haters aren't and you and I aren't much too much of the time...
...What we need is a little more old-fashioned Christianity...
...we are not yet a race of neurotics...
...From the nigger-haters, of the South with their Nazi-like racial creed to the labor-hating motor magnates up North, from the jumpy Jap-haters along the West Coast to the German-hating revenge mongers of the intellectual East, suspicion and arrogance, greed and stark hatred, ride proud and high...
...The Big Three, big and strong as they are, cannot impose peace or good will on the world...
...I think we are...
...Perhaps he will forgive, and permit, my quoting a stanza now: "Two ultimate Jaws atone we know, The ledger and the sword— So far away, so long ago We lost the infant Lord...
...We need to lose our fears, and with them our prides and greeds and hatreds, in a blend of confidence in ourselves and humility toward, others...
...There-is no peace in Java...
...And around the world the quickened tension of an armed-and-rearming truce grips nations which were yesterday at war...
...And that is why we can never have either peace on earth or good will among men until men grow up to be unafraid of each other—and of themselves...
...We can achieve peace on earth—not this Christmas or next Christmas but perhaps some Christmas to come...
...The best way is probably the old way—a way so old it has almost been forgotten...
...The haters, too...
...No outside force, nor outside system, will ever bring peace or good will to man...
...There, men kill other men, en masse, for money and for power...
...But there is neither peace nor good will...
...But those with power, those with prestige or wealth, sensing that those inverted virtues are ephemeral and can pass—they are the most afraid...
...We do not need universal psychiatry or psychoanalysis to rid us of our fears and make us mature...
...The National Association of Manufacturers is afraid for the profits and the industrial power of its members...
...belong to mankind...
...Nor is world capitalism...
...Within nations, as between nations, good will goes begging for a room to live in...
...But the British imperialists and the bosses of General Motors and the Jew-baiters who walk every street in the nation are not psychotics...
...The United Nations Organization cannot talk or vote them into being, nor could a "real" world government legislate them into being...
...Ogden Nash said it once in the finest Christmas poem I know, "A Carol for Children...
...What of us who preach and peddle our own peculiar brand of hatred—a hatred of the haters—in the name of good will...
...The threat of the atomic bomb is not the answer...
...Sane, yes—but maladjusted, insecure, unhappy, afraid...
...we should pity them...
...The heads of the Russian Government suppress civil liberties for fear that freedom of discussion might lead to a different Russian government...
...The man whose inner security makes him unafraid has no emotional need to hate his fellow man...
...By every test we know they are sane...
...There is none in China or Indo-China or Iran...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 51
