Peace on earth, good will to all

In Tolstoy's world the graphic was simple: War in the red corner; Peace in the blue. Black and white as that; no interim shades. The concreteness of this concept has faded with time, particularly the one concerning Peace.

Peace is as much in the War corner now as it is in its own. Everywhere, yet nowhere. It is at the core of every human desire, we are told. It's the bottom line, our top priority, our Middle Earth fantasy.

Yet, where is it? Perhaps with the young soldier in Afghanistan, crouched behind a mud hut, rifle at the ready. His country's dispatched him there. For peace, he was told.

A trained man with a gun, (if you discount the uniform), with national sanction to pull the trigger, kill, if need be. In war, 'if need be' is perpetually at hand. Perhaps peace rests with the idealistic sniper, shielded by the crest, lining up the soldier in his crosshairs.

Two men on versions of peace missions that only one can survive. Both have wives, both wives have children, both men have lives. But how long before Peace claims one?

The report will read 'Killed in the Afghan War'. We, the distanced, the immunised, will accept it. Soldiers die. Freedom fighters die. It's a given. Get on with life.

Someone's got to win. Turn to the sports page. Back in Sydney, a teenager leaves home, sobbing into a white handkerchief of truce. To find some peace, she says.

Another young missionary on the highway, running away from a domestic war zone. Of course, she means 'inner peace' and ironically she's seeking it outside the home.

Then there's robust Helen. She rules the roost and the rooster. She will tell you, imperatively, over the strains of "I am woman", 'This what we've got here is a nice, peaceful house.' Helen's is the uneasy peace won by a dictator.

She cannot predict when hubby George, resentful of it all, will - like the freedom fighter - launch a covert and tactically well-planned 'Mission Overthrow'.

For now, though, he sits on the verandah, smoking a pipe dreamily and saying, over the strains of "I am Pegasus", 'I do it for the peace of it all, you know!' Watch the Anglo-Indian at the annual Christmas dance, quickstepping smoothly to Okie from Muskogee (even singing out aloud, 'I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee'.)

Nine times out of ten he hasn't the faintest clue who an Okie is, or where Muskogee figures in the longitudinal, continental scheme of things.

It's the melody that winds him up and the voice of Merle Haggard that sends his feet a-sliding on the talcum-smoothened floor. For the rest, Peace brother. Peace elusive peace.

If only we could find it, we say. If only we had a map, because it's all got so complicated, so many-stranded, so labyrinthine. And this constant battering we receive in the media each day, 'Forty dead in bomb blast', 'Fifteen killed...' 'Seventy wounded...' fills us with eternal despair.

For them, for ourselves. Each day we slip one millimetre away from the peace we seek. But if the media could, somehow, change its tune, pluck up our wilting spirits, publish more (and even more thereafter) on peace missions and peace endeavours, it will help restore a focus, repair the listing ship of humanity and set it on a course from which it will never, must never, look back.

Glorifying peace should be the new anthem. Not merely paying it lip service. Glorifying peace, and showing clearly that war is not a bone-strewn pathway, through which the rest of us pick our way to tranquillity.

That is the nearly-impossible, idealistically nonsensical thought I go to sleep with each night. And in that frame of mind I think: There are billions of us.

If all of us could, somehow, be on the same side (for peace), who could ever be against us? What a formidable team we'd be. May we all, somehow, attempt to head in that direction in 2008.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.