Alex’s analogies

This morning at breakfast Alex was working with me on some analogies. He’s learning not only how to “do” them, but also how to write them. He wrote ten of them that we were studying this morning, his last was breathtaking — army:war, peace:us. This one took my breath away for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s not that simple or easy a reality, and I worry about how he’s taking all of this in. But also because the analogy — framed that way — suggests that an army engages “war,” and peace engages “us” — all of us! It flips the relationship, or inverts it, in some interesting ways. Alex did not write “army:war,” we:peace” (or, in the way I learned to say analogies, “army is to war” and “we are to peace”). Rather, he wrote “army is to war” as “peace is to us”. It made me think about how very few of us can do much of anything in relation to what our troops are going through in the middle east (regardless of where we stand on the issues), but ALL of us can do something about peace.