What’s The Best You Can Possibly Feel?

What’s the best you can possibly feel? I look at this iconic VJ Day image and I have to think these people are right about there. I try to imagine what it must have been like for everyone hearing the news at approximately the same time that the war was over.

I imagine what it was like to realize all the struggle, the loneliness, the fear and the destruction were finally behind us. That after years of being away from those I loved, I was free to go home and create the life I should have been living all along. And I imagine not only me feeling this overwhelming sensation of happiness and relief but everybody around me feeling the same way. On this day, strangers became friends and to look into the eyes of others was to see the joy you were feeling mirrored back at you. And if you stopped to think, you’d realize your whole country felt this way.

The end of hostilities was not a glorious victory for all. The smoldering, radioactive ruins of two cities must have created pain and terror more intense in Japan than the feeling of joy in the United States. Of course, the Japanese did bomb Pearl Harbor, so we had little alternative but to strike back. The problem with wars, however, is the people who do the suffering and the dying are usually people who had nothing to do with starting the hostilities. There were many women, children, and old men in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and elsewhere who had no interest in fighting Americans. Those sorts of decisions are typically made by a few politicians and military officers, along with powerful business interests. And few of those sort ever pay the price for the damage done.

War is just a game played by psychopaths who use the rest of us as pawns in their bloody pursuit, and it’s time we stop thinking they’re on our side just because we happen to live in the same country as them. It’s time for a little international solidarity here, people.

I’m sure at some level the joy Americans felt on VJ Day was ever so slightly diminished by the thought of those who would yet suffer and die in the aftermath of the war. And if they had stopped to consider, their joy would have been muted still more by the realization that we wouldn’t stay out of war for long. In fact, it only took five years for use to become involved in Korea. But it’s good that people are able to put aside such concerns once in a while and live in the joy of the moment. And that must have been a truly wonderful, joyous moment.

But to return to my original question, what is the best you can feel? It seems evident that the joy an individual feels when he realizes he has served his time and is heading home is amplified immeasurably by the fact that everybody is going home with him. When we are at our happiest, we want to be able to share our happiness with everyone. We want everyone to be happy as we are happy. So individual soldier’s happiness must have been amplified by knowing everyone felt the same way. Well, everyone on our side.

That’s still pretty good. That’s still a lot of happiness. In fact, I can only think of one state of happiness that might exceed it, and that would be by ending not merely a war, but ending war itself.

Just try to imagine that, as you have already tried to imagine how it felt for those people on August 1, 1945. Only this time, imagine not just everyone in your own country but everyone in the entire world feeling that same feeling. I have to think each and every one of us would experience a joy no individual in all of history has ever felt. Every single one of us.

Now, we can’t at the moment get the full experience of world peace, but we can have the still very good feeling a soldier gets when he realizes his time in service has been completed. All we have to do is say, “Okay, I’m done with war. Others can fight all they want but I’m not contributing to it.”

It feels good to say it. I know it feels good because I’ve said it and it does. Not only that, I’ve met others like me. And it feels even better to be in their midst than it did when I was alone. Each of us experiences the same happiness because each of us knows we are done with war.

You don’t have to wait for the whole damn world to beat their swords into plowshares. You don’t have to wait for orders to start with your own sword, because the only people who give you orders tell you to kill people. If you are capable of killing other people despite your inner revulsion at the idea — and judging by what I have read of war, most people are — then surely you have the capacity to do what you are already inclined to do, which is to refuse to kill others. If you’re a Christian, the idea is at the core of your religion. And if you are not a Christian, it’s still a pretty cool idea.

Imagine. And when I say imagine, I mean leave yourself open to the idea and think how it might feel. Then once you have imagined, once you glimpsed the joy that is yours to experience, permit yourself to experience some of it. You won’t be alone, and you will enhance the joy for everyone else.