Trust and peace

Each of us understands how it feels to have trust questioned. When war or violence breaks out the individual goes through a break in trust of everything and everyone. Rebuilding that trust is the most difficult part of peace. The hate and anger that is brought on by the break in peace, which the individual carries, needs to have an outlet. Each of us must find a postive outlet. However one method of dealing with broken trust for some is revenge. Recently, one of the projects I have been involved with had experienced a break in, robbery and destruction. Now we must move on with the pain of the violence fresh. The physical damage is rarely worse than the emotional and social damage. There is also the reality that everyone is going to be questioned in your mind as you try to solve the break in peace. Peacebuilding programs are built upon providing support and structure to peoples lives. The hardest cases are the ones that need the most attention. Such cases will continue to break the peace until something happens where they understand that such a tactic no longer is a good choice. How do we give people more support when they have just taken so much away? This question deals with the essence of peacebuilding. To build peace youmust have hope beyond the seeable future. You have to be able to see and live beyond the pain of today. You must be able to live and feel the future in which you are building. Furthermore you must prepare for even greater breaks in trust. The possibility of even more pain being caused is a reality that you must prepare for but work to end. Some people will take all they can and still seek to be supported. Now we have to prepare eachother to give more support. The reason is that this support will also be heard and felt by those that break the peace. Even in the face of providiing more support you must realize that you can be hurt even more. This is the point where you want to stand tall, strong and yell "Why did you create such a hell hole of anger and pain"? "WHY, why, why"?O ften the answer is "Because no one cares anyway". That is why we must always give more. Sadly we live in a world where many of the leaders believe the efforts to rebuild both society and the individual are best sought through revenge. "We must make them pay for what they did". This thought process will just spiral into what we have in Israel and Palestine. At some point we must see through the hell we create and begin to see a different method to solve breaks in the peace. Further violence has rarely worked and not nearly enough for us to continue to use it.