Peacemaker and Making Peace With Yourself
The moral case for trying to find a way to make peace with yourself.
Author’s Note: I’ve released my second “Meaning Monday” issue in case you want to vote in the poll over the question of “Everyone is a Hero”. All subscribers can vote, paid subscribers can discuss the issue in the comments.
“I've made a commitment to peace and I don't care how many men, women or children I have to kill in order to get it.”
Most people have something they can't let go of. Whether it's something that happened to you, or something that you find out happened to someone else, or perhaps something you did to someone else. In what could be the worst cases, all of these aspects happen to you over the course of your life. These experiences are painful things that you end up going over and over in your head. It can get to the point that it feels like these events come to feel like they're a part of you. An unsettling part of you that you wish you could find a way to get rid of them. Forget them or at least come to terms with them in a way that you're no longer bothered by them.
You might even feel at war with these aspects of yourself. Trying to fight them off and completely destroy these parts. If you don't, you'll never find any kind of peace. They'll unsettle you so that you can't get sleep or function in a relationship with anyone in an honest relationship of some kind. People around you will feel uncomfortable spending time with you. Especially when you might treat them in a way that they don't appreciate, perhaps because either they or someone else treated you like that in the past. It can all be incredibly painful and destructive if you can't find some kind of peace.
Getting to that peace doesn't come easy. In some situations it requires you to confront those who have wronged you. Or failing that perhaps some kind of forward moving action like making sure someone around you doesn't experience the same destructive aspects which lead you to feel so unsettled. There's a calming quality to knowing you have prevented it in other people. It may not fix you and your problems, but at least you can be sure that you haven't continued the cycle of pain. Sometimes that can be enough.
Peacemaker is fundamentally about trying to make peace with your own pain. Christopher Smith, as played fantastically by John Cena, who also goes by the name Peacemaker, has a lot of pain in his past which he's trying to come to terms with. Most of it is in his past, but at the same time it's in the people around him. He sees so many people who are suffering because of things they've had done to them but also what they're doing to other people. He wants to find a way to make it stop. He simply can't allow it because he isn't able to resolve his own issues. And he's willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen, including murder of pretty much anyone who gets in his way. It's a powerful thing to watch and can sometimes help people learn to live with their own pain.
Do yourself a favour and check out Peacemaker and find a way to come to terms with things.
Check out Peacemaker on HBO Max in the United States, Crave in Canada and Apple.