by Jasmin Maurer
In a peace economy, people would be treated like people. Society’s first aim would be to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. That no one goes hungry or homeless. All people would be respected, their rights protected, their ability to live a fulfilling life unhampered.
What we have now is a society that teaches us to dehumanize people. It creates “others.” Those others are subject to fear and hatred. It perpetuates homelessness, excessive debt, racial profiling, wars.
The “war on terror” uses our ability to dehumanize others to its advantage. Companies like Boeing make their profits off of the creation of killing machines. Drones are manufactured as toys of the military. They’re used to with the almighty purpose of reducing US soldier casualties, but at the expense of killing innocent others. These drones are imperfect. They kill beyond their target, or miss completely. This goes without even mentioning President Obama’s kill list where he decides who will live and who will die.
I will never forget that symbolic moment when my brother cut off his ponytail. His hair was shorter than mine for the first time in years when we dropped him off at the recruiter’s office. He now belonged to the US Marine Corps at the age of 17. He would go on to train around the country, including Missouri, serving a term in Iraq. But what was truly devastating was when he said that he wanted to go to war and “kill hajjis.”
My brother believed that a group of people was somehow inferior to him. That he had a right to travel to their country and take their lives. It was like a game to him. His base was boring. He hoped for excitement in Iraq. Luckily, that excitement never came for him, but I can imagine other young soldiers thinking similar thoughts.
In college I watched a documentary called The Ground Truth: The Human Cost of War. In it, former soldiers in Iraq talked about being trained to consider the people who’s country they were invading to be less than human. The military reinforced this dehumanization of a group of people with actions and through how it communicated with soldiers. The soldiers themselves were left with very little support as they returned home to face this truth.
Even at home, in our own communities, there are so many examples of how humanity is kept second. Fear is created racially, hatred exists between socio-economic classes. The welfare system is seen as a dirty word where undeserving people leach off of the government. We fail to see the human beings who are suffering under debt racked up through exorbitant interest rates. It somehow has become okay to say that an individual deserves to be homeless or hungry or without health insurance in much the same way that it is okay to blow up families because they live in a “terrorist nation.” This all makes us safer somehow.
The removal of wars is not enough to create a peace economy. I see a place where all systems that pit individuals against each other are removed, where profits are not being made at another’s expense and where people are constantly linking their humanity to others’ regardless of perceived differences.
In his novel, Indecision, Benjamin Kunkel has one of his characters explain to another what her idea of paradise looks like. She says, “I am imagining a paradise where there is no lack of time. I would like for everyone to have so plentifully much time, and everyone such an excellent memory, that eventually, over time, everyone will have been everyone else. Do you see? In the length of history everyone will have been all the other people in the world. And then for once finally we will treat each other well. You and I will treat each other perfectly.”
It is impossible to be another person, but it is not impossible to imagine another human being’s motivations or struggles. It is quite easy to talk to each other, ask questions, and learn from each other, and treat each other with respect.
Jasmin Maurer, PEP Lobby Intern since June 2012
