Notes about The Peace Equation
In the past I've observed young people experiment with algebraic relations in this same way and on more than a few occasions. Usually they are killing some time like doodling with a pen and perhaps they've been impressed recently with a math lesson concerning mathematical equations. Young people and even the young at heart are impressionable by nature and our clearly affected by what goes on about them and there is little doubt that they are imaginative to a fault, but they are also natural moralists and I think that subconsciously they are deeply affected by many insecurities concerning the future of the world that they must live in for the next sixty or seventy years.
Until early April of 2002 I had never had the inclination to write or doodle a formula for Peace or to be more precise: seek a mathematical relationship between Hope and Despair and equate it to Peace as something that can be quantified. I wasn't all that young at this period in my life either but I did have young children to be concerned about and as a poet I too, am quite affected by what affects others. Normally, in a world that has a population of billions we expect a lot of chaotic conflict to be occurring on a daily basis and so it should, however it always appears to have little or no sense to it if you are an observer from another culture or another part of the world but at the same time we should also all recognize that there are always very real reasons for human conflicts. At the time that I was writing the Peace Equation and in the world events timeline, the Battle of Jenin was in full swing in the West Bank. I'm going to steer well clear of the specific politics of this event and for good reason but to me at this time it looked as if humanity had reached a new low. As I remember, for more than a week the media focused in on the new nature of this conflict: the severity of tactics that were being used and the greatly increased tenor of the propaganda - by both sides - and also on the unusually young ages of the combatants - and again on both sides.
So after a week or so of this media deluge of hysteria concerning the Battle of Jenin I sat at my computer late one afternoon and ripped and burned some new old music onto a CD for my Discman; some old Buffalo Springfield and Bjork's Selmasongs (an unusual mix aye?). Behind me the television news likely played and when I was done I left for work for a twelve hour nightshift as an industrial electrician. I would have been in excellent spirits this evening because I would have the next three days off. It was a beautiful spring evening and dusk would only be just approaching at this time in April and when I was about a quarter into my forty minute walk to the plant I turned a favourite corner onto a nice quiet street - I was listening to Bjork's "I've Seen It All" which is a real beauty through my discman headphones and instead of being confronted with a mass collage of florescent greens from the huge trees and big lawns of this older and more established residential neighbourhood I was instead confronted with big yellow and red emergency vehicles and lots of them.
At first I thought there must be a fire, but there was no smoke. Then I thought a gas leak - because the building that seemed to be at the center of it all was a three storied apartment building that appeared to have all the tenants evacuated into the street and into two groups - or sort of. At one end of the apartment building's front yard about eighteen or so people stood all visibly shaken and upset about something of a serious nature and at the other end of the front lot was a lone man - obviously distraught and beside himself with grief and where the others were comforting each other - he was alone with his misery. I'll never completely forget his face because he looked like he had looked death right in the eye.
I'm no rubber-necker and I had no time to stop and question anyone there on what was up - but for certain something tragic had happened. To this day I have never witnessed in person a more collective amount of despair in my life. So the crazy idea I had a few minutes earlier about writing a peace equation was now becoming cemented in my head and over the next eight hours I toyed with many different words and configurations and questioned myself continuously on even the viability of such a thing.
The next morning I learned that a young child had been murdered (manslaughter) by her caregiver. The child, her family and the caregiver and the caregiver's family all lived in the same building and the distraught young man - he was the caregiver's husband and the first on the scene rescuer - he administered cpr and alerted the authorities. What a mess - a child had died violently, families, friendships and lives were ruined.
I soon realized that I knew something of that woman - I had seen her many times in the past on the bus in careful charge of children she seemed to watch - one or two seemed to be her own and the others her friends' or so I thought at the time. Her eye's seemed always busy and vigilant, holding the tiny hands of children. Two years later, at her trial she offered little or no defence on her part in the murder and of course they threw the book at her. I've heard nothing more since on the matter but by a chance occurrence it seemed that young girl's tragic passing had helped make a silly piece of algebraic poetry mean so much more to me.
Therefore, there is an inverse relationship between the amounts of Despair and the amounts of Hope and the resulting value represents how much Peace is present at anytime and anywhere and in anyone's life.
S J Garrett
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