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January 2004, Vol 94, No. 1 | American Journal of Public Health 10
© 2004 American Public Health Association

EDITOR'S CHOICE

To Think of Peace in a Time of War

Robert Sember, Associate Editor


Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought—disillusionment.

Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915)

You read this at the start of a new year. May this year indeed be new, a year of peace and well-being for you and all things.

I write this in New York City in early November. Yesterday was Election Day, and the news is filled with the promises of the reelected and the newly elected. May they dedicate themselves to peace and well-being for all things.

As I write, I remember September 2001. We live in the future of that time. Might it have been different? A terrible, blessed quietness followed the trauma of 9/11. In that quietness I longed to take the wounded city in my arms and be embraced by it in return. I thought there was possibility in that brutal reminder of the imminence of death. Now a cynicism fed by disillusionment has replaced that sense of possibility, and I recall with some embarrassment how, in that terrible, blessed quietness, in the intimacy of suffering, I thought we might never do to others what had been done to us. But only 2 days later I walked with my neighbors through the streets of our neighborhood in a show of support for the Arab-American families that live there, for they had already begun to hear hatred beneath the stillness, and they were afraid.

These feelings of disillusionment remind me of September 1987, when I left South Africa for the United States. I was born and grew up during a dreadful civil war, conducted as much through the social structures of everyday life as on the military fronts known euphemistically as "the border." Apartheid South Africa was nothing but borders, and along these borders violence proliferated. Peace was barely imaginable. The future we hoped for, a future against which reality counseled us, was only an image. This is the wonder of image—the power to give possibility to the impossible. Having lived that past, what stunning, stinging familiarity I now feel in this newly bordered city. And I ask what acts of peace we have yet to imagine so that we might find that future against which our present reality counsels us.


Union Square, NYC, September 2001. Photo by Abrahame Menasche.

I imagine what might have been. The towers might not have fallen. Peace might have been found in that terrible, blessed quietness after they did fall. The AIDS epidemic in South Africa, the focus of much of my work in public health, might have been curtailed. Might have been . . . what benefit is there in thinking of a future that never was? What use are these images of the impossible? Well, for a start, they open the present to criticism and analysis and we can imagine—our disillusionment notwithstanding—an impossible future. We can, for a start, commit ourselves to making that impossible future possible.




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