Winners and Losers

We’ve created a culture of antagonism and agitation, of winners and losers

Where words can cut deeper than spears and pierce our enemy’s armor

We refine and polish our arguments like swords to gut our opposition

Trained in a culture of savage warfare to transform opponents into enemies

One who was once a brother or sister now becomes something less than human

A demon in my eyes to be cast out and slain, their bodies and reputations annihilated

Rather than walking a mile in their shoes I doggedly pursue their retreat

Hunting them down in their refuge and taking captive their allies and families

Dividing the world into camps and erecting walls of dogmatic certainty

Turning plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears

We ignore the costs and the civilian casualties incurred in the onslaught

As we raise our standards and blow the bugle to assemble the amassed armies

There to fight a war that never needed to be waged if we could learn a different way

In a world of winners and losers there is no need for reconciliation and healing

History belongs to the victors and the losers are a part of the casualties of time

Or become the terrorists of tomorrow fighting a lost battle because it is all they know

But maybe there is another way where the conflict never evolves into combat

Where swords can be returned to the forge to become the instruments of harvest

Where the enemy becomes my brother and my opponent my sister

And I walk in their shoes and begin to see the world through their eyes

Where instead of tracking my enemy down in their home I welcome them into mine

My righteous indignation can be set aside at the mote in my neighbor’s eye

And there can be a future together in the dawning light of forgiveness

And the world gasps a sigh of relief that its forests are no longer consumed

Building walls and siege engines to fuel a conflict which never ends

And perhaps in our culture of agitation and antagonism we are all losers

Caught in perpetual cycles of conflict, continually training for the next fight

Unable to be at rest under our own vine feasting with our friends and companions

Perhaps in our string of victories we may ignore the tremors of our own trauma

We may justify our own unending nightmares of the past or the wounds we carry

For in a world of harsh justice where wound cried out for wound, scar for scar

And eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a heart for a heart, a life for a life

We all come out broken and hurting too tired to focus on the fields of harvest

Perhaps there is a time to end the pouring out of our neighbors and our own blood

As some sort of sick libation to the cruel gods of conflict we choose to serve

And it is a time to live, a time to be born, a time of peace

A time when brothers can live together in harmony if only we can learn another way

Let us Beat Swords Into Plowshares, a sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich, given by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959

Sign of the Rose