Requiem for the Peacemaker

 Requiem for the Peacemaker

They dress the wound of my people

    as though it were not serious.

‘Peace, peace,’ they say,   

 when there is no peace.

--Jeremiah 6:14

My tendency is to be a peacemaker.  I think this is because my father and my big brother were both hard of hearing when I was a boy. We would be working in the garden or in the yard, and one would say something, and the other would misunderstand it, and there would be an argument.

As I was the only one present with two good ears, I saw it as my responsibility to try to make peace between them.

Somewhere along the way, it became part of my self-image.

More than ten years ago when I was president of the union on campus, there was a disagreement between a member of the union and one of the administrators.  I thought I could mediate a peace between the two.  It was then that the late Dr. Robert Ratzlaff, who was the academic vice president at the time, passed on a very simple, very useful bit of wisdom, “Sometimes people just aren’t going to get along.”

I took it to heart then, and the wisdom of it has become more and more apparent as my experience of the world has increased.  As for the two people I was trying to mediate, they never got along.  I think one of them is dead now. The chance for rapprochement is over.

So what do you do when you have two individuals that don’t get along with each other and you can’t fire or kill either of them? (Killing: It’s not only wrong, it is against the law. This is my mantra.) I go to the Bible for guidance.  There I find a pair of my favorite characters: Jacob and Laban.  After a while, they didn’t even want to try to get along.  They were tied together by Leah and Rachel.  Laban loved them as his daughters and Jacob loved them as his wives.

They piled up a big pile of rocks and used it to divide up the world: You stay on that side; I will stay on this; Leah and Rachel can pass back and forth between.

And since there was no Facebook, Twitter, or anything else like that for them to snipe at each other, that settled it.

This brings us to an important distinction: Solving a problem versus managing a problem.

We like to solve problems because then they...solved.  We don’t have to think about it anymore.  It is all over.

Right now, by all indications, smallpox is solved. We vaccinated everybody and the smallpox virus has gone extinct. (Except for the labs where they keep it around for some reason.) We need not deal with smallpox.

COVID is not solved. It is being managed.  How successfully? Listen to the debate around you and make up your own mind.  Nothing illustrates the wisdom of Dr. Ratzlaff’s words like the hatred filled debate that is swirling around us now.

If we could make a pile of rocks and keep one group on one side and one on the other, that would be quite helpful, but because of social media we can’t.  And in any case, there isn’t just one side. Oh, and it’s been politicized, so we have two political parties which have no incentive to turn down the heat on it.

It can’t be solved; it can’t be managed.  What is a peacemaker to do?

Move out from the position in the middle, take the rocks you were going to use to separate the combatants, and hide under one of them. Or I guess you could get some popcorn and watch the donnybrook. 

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )