Past the Fist

CW FISHER As a longtime hater of labels, I don't call myself a pacifist. It's the ist that irks me, the implied affiliation with some club of likethinkers. The ist is what steals the light away from the idea and sweeps it over the bearer instead: he's a pacifist. Call me a pacifist, I get homicidal. If I take on one label, I'll take on two, for common is the pacifist who doubles as a masochist. Human beings are surprisingly flexible. We may say what we mean, and we may mean what we say, but we almost never know what we mean, because if we did, we wouldn't say it. We spend the greater part of our lives swimming with one school of fish or another; we go where the school goes: we can't help it; we want it that way. The school makes most of our decisions: what to wear, how to act, who to trust, how to get home. Even the hermit swims with his school by his act of swimming alone. We tend to do what's expected of us, and we find it easier to play parts. Divide us randomly into prisoners or guards and see ladies become monsters and boys become babies. Make of us jurist or journalist, therapist or manicurist, even apologist, and we will become as expected, regardless of our deeply held beliefs, the ones we wear like underwear beneath our everyday clothes. In my underwear I tell you this. I'm for peace through love. I'm against killing. I'm against harm and injury, against force, against labels, against pussyfooting, namecalling, navelgazing, gangbanging, biblebanging, doppelganging--but mainly: I'm against the killing of our own species, no matter what the reason, no matter the circumstances or means, no matter who's involved, excluding only self defense. I'm against killing. I'm against killing in all its forms, from abortion to Kervorkian, psycho serial killer to suicide bomber, state executions and gangland hits, any terrorist or antiterrorist action that results in killing people, I'm against: Waco, Baghdad, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Texas. Killing is wrong. I'm against killing. I am against killers. I'm against being killed. I'm against killing killers. I'm against harm, against injury, against ways and means that don't work, that fail to secure the peace because they're working to ensure the unrest. I'm against force, but not against the fight. It's just that, in real life--the life we live in our own neighborhood--we know that if started killing each other, there's be no end to it. So we don't, by and large, and by gum it works out pretty good for us. Maybe when the world shrank to a fistsized ball we failed to notice its great equalizing effect, and what the consequences might be for those who once breathed the blue air of the highest peaks and those who once fried in the valley below, and how things will be on this level new playing field. As neighbors move closer together, it's always a good idea to be a little more neighborly, since the alternative is war. Which I'm against.