Ploughshares into Swords

Zipping through the blogosphere this morning, I came across a comment someone made on another blog discussing the crisis in the Middle East. It read: "Only when there are no weapons will there be peace."

That certainly sounds intuitive. If there were no rockets or missiles, what would people blow up each other's buildings with?

Unfortunately, we already know the answer to that question.

I remember having a conversation with a colleague shortly after 9/11 in which she said that her mother was perplexed by the attack: "Who looks at a plane and thinks to themselves 'that's a weapon.' It's sociopathic. It's a perverted genius."

But that gets exactly to the heart of the matter. Even if nations disarmed themselves, the bad guys would find ways to fabricate weapons from seemingly benign tools, and we would simply have no way to defend ourselves. If weapons didn't exist, we would make them...after all, that's where weapons came from in the first place. It isn't a problem of material existence: it's a problem of evil imagination. Weapons are born in our hearts and minds. Weapons are a completely renewable resource.

When the time comes for us to beat our swords into ploughshares, it will be because we have purged from our midst thoughts that would transform passenger jets into suicide bombs, fertilizers into demolitionist tools, or ploughshares into swords.

Until then, governments have a responsibility to protect us from those who are not yet fit to live in a peaceful or virtuous society.