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Volume 32 Issue 3
PEACE
 I If the way of peace is a way of being that is chosen, it is a choice is that is made from moment to moment. It would be naive to think that it is made easily; it would be ignorant to dismiss the wide range of challenges and tempations that get in the way of the Way. The spells cast by our own personal and cultural mythologies are more than enough to encourage our allegiance to other paths. Take, for example, the insistence of the politically powerful to sustain the same military industrial complex that an unlikely prophet (Dwight D. Eisenhower) warned about more than fifty years ago. Kat Meade takes us to the heart of the beast in her tour of the Nevada Test Site. Annie Dawid observes that the intertwined icons of militarism and masculinity are, at times, difficult to name and expose.
Finding the way into Peace isn’t easy. Still, in his poem “The War Zone,” David Romtvedt shows us that the hunger and hope for peace stays alive in the face of even the most egregious violence. And Mark Nepo, in the essay that concludes this issue, testifies to a greater goodness that can lead us toward Peace: “I have heard the breath of the Universe whisper, ‘If you could settle into the silence beneath your fear, you’d come to the shore between life and death and simply hold each other.’” ~Peter Anderson, Editor
The Atomic Testing Museum, at 755 East Flamingo Road, sits mere blocks from Las Vegas Boulevard, home to the mega casinos. To depart, as I did, Steve Wynn’s Italianate Bellagio and arrive at the Atomic Testing Museum is to exchange one surreality for another. But surreal is to be the operating system of the day, June 29, 2005. ~from Craters in the Sand
by Kat Meads
My son’s last male babysitter is now in Afghanistan. With his earrings, soft voice and long hair, he seemed an unlikely candidate to volunteer. An eighteen-year-old boy, humiliated by the breakup of his first romance, he decided to enlist for lack of a suitably dramatic alternative. The former girlfriend, a scholarship student at university, would be sorry, wouldn’t she, if he got injured or killed. ~ Babysitter Goes to War
by Annie Dawid
Photo by Joshua Sage
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