Special Section: PEACE
It's Still an Option
A U.S. Department of Peace. In Our Time? Maybe.
by Sam Slovick
Spiritual Activism
by Julie Deife
Human Peace Machine Takes Off
Engaged Buddhism Offers a Path
by Steven Vincent
You wouldn’t have thought so during the summer months as war raged everywhere, it seemed, at least on the side of the world where the United States had an influence or a say.
But we would like to suggest that peace is still an option. You just have to change where you look and the way you listen. And it would help as well if we each picked a hard-wired habit and began to change it. There’s a movement within the political landscape and a movement touching the depths of the inward focused yogi to go outward. The results, in action on the outside world, are called “spiritual activism.”
In Our Time? Maybe.
“I cannot tell you with what weapons mankind would fight WW3, but I can assure you that WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones.”
- Albert Einstein
Over 100 million people lost their lives to war during the 20th century, more than a lot were non - combatants. The U.S. Department of Defense provides over $400 billion for the Department’s base budget, an annual increase of seven percent, for a total increase in defense spending of 35 percent since 2001.
The red river of American blood freely flowing in the Middle East is easily traceable to a series of veins and arteries connected to a vascular system of outmoded precepts, fueling the flow into the shallows, saturating the banks and hemorrhaging in streets of sovereign soil of Los Angeles.
This fluid movement is accompanied by a wretched resonance. You can hear it on the nightly news. It’s a low vibration. It’s the sound of grieving mothers of children shot dead while playing in front of their South L.A. homes. I hear it every time I look out my window and see battered women who have taken refuge in the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row in Los Angeles, waiting curbside in the mornings with their kids for the big yellow school bus.
The source of the plasmic pitch is an unconscious subterranean stream. Seemingly innocuous, this liquidly philosophy is a culture of intimidation and manipulation, of arrogant isolation… of violence. The deafening collective silence equals a deadly complicity. In the absence of a voice of shock and awe at the audacity of this gathering storm of senseless destruction you have Afghanistan, then Iraq then…. Iran? Korea? You have World War III.
So where is the outrage? Where is the rioting in the streets over the indignation at seeing brittle broken bones of septuagenarian Afghani peasants and tiny disemboweled bodies of four-year-old Iraqi children bleeding out in the dirt? Their suffering tattooed with the word America. So where is the screaming voice demanding humanity and peace now?
Cover your ears. Open your heart. Meet Dot. She’s making a lot of noise. Just back from the Global Alliance for Ministries and Departments of Peace Summit in Victoria, Canada, where 60 people from 18 countries met to forward the cause of peace, she has a lot to say.
Dot Maver is the executive director of The Peace Alliance. A nonpartisan citizen action organization advocating for legislation that supports a culture of peace. This is real. This is serious. This is the business of waging local and global peace. The mission is to ‘work to foster positive, proactive change toward the creation of a more nonviolent and peaceful world’.
The Peace Alliance is spearheading the national campaign to establish a United States Department of Peace. Dot is driving the peace train, currently active in all 50 states. Riding shot gun is Former Cleveland Mayor and Gandhi Peace Award recipient Representative Dennis Kucinich who proposed the Department of Peace bill, HR 3760, introduced in the House of Representatives, with more than 60 co - sponsoring members of Congress, on September 14, 2005.
Also on board is Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota who introduced a senate version of the DOP legislation, bill number S.1756, for the proposed cabinet - level department of the executive branch of the U.S. government.
“In places like Liberia, the Solomon Islands and the Philippines where there are already peace commissions and peace offices and ministries for peace building,” Dot says, “people are calling on government and civil society partnerships in profoundly pragmatic peace building technology that already exists on the planet: conflict resolution education, mediation, repatriation.”
Dot’s plan employs already existing tools on a local and global scale. She goes on to say, “What’s going on is even in our Pentagon right now. A peace directive is recognized that for real human security and safety to take place, not only do we need that level of training we need to help create civil society capacity and infrastructures. Terrorism thrives where there is chaos and a lack of infrastructure, that’s straight out of our Pentagon research.”
The department of peace bill has been introduced 85 times in this country. Three times in the last 6 years. There are currently 75 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. It’s clearly an idea whose time has come. The DOP is potentially the point of departure for a radical planetary transformation.
The idea for a Department of Peace was first offered up in GW’s administration. That’s George Washington, not Bush. Originally introduced in debates by the framers of the Constitution, the first formal proposal dates to 1792 when urban planner / publisher Benjamin Banneker and physician / educator Dr. Benjamin Rush pitched a “Peace Office” as the separate but equal sister of the “War Department.”
This old school idea is now a grassroots wildfire burning out of control in Los Angeles according to peace pyromaniac, Terry Mason. She’s the Department of Peace regional coordinator for Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. “The Department of Peace is definiately going to happen,” she told me. “This grassroots movement is catching fire in the Los Angeles area. A year ago we had fifty volunteers, today we have ten times that. We’re in 50 states… over 4,300 congressional districts. Peace is practical. Peace is going to cost less than the violence we’re paying for. We’re at a point where violence in our society has escalated to where it’s systemic. We have an all systems failure and we need an all systems solution.”
Also hard at work to realize a nonviolent society is Department of Peace activist, Azim Khamisa. Khamisa is an invest banker who founded TKF (www.tkf.org), a non profit organization dedicated to breaking the epidemic of youth violence when his 20 year old son was gunned down by a 14 year old gang member in San Diego. He reached out to the guardian of his son’s killer. 11 years later the two have connected with 500,000 kids live and another 20,000,000 through classroom television to promote nonviolence.
“We are teaching kids that violence is real and hurts everybody,” Azim says. “We can all seek to choose forgiveness instead of revenge and that from conflict, brotherhood and unity are possible.”
Adds Azim, “If we’re ever going to have a world at peace, we must begin with our children. These children will be future leaders, and as future leaders they will look at conflict in a different light than our leaders do today.
“An eye for an eye doesn’t work. Since the beginning of time they have used that strategy and it doesn’t work. Every war leads to another war.”
Or as Martin Luther King said, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”
These locally grounded roots are clearly tethered to the deeper planetary violence.
Another speaker at the September 2005 Department of Peace conference in D.C., Walter Cronkite, said “Wouldn’t it have been an advantage in the run - up to the Iraq War to have had a cabinet officer whose department was responsible for training U.S. personnel in human rights, conflict resolution, reconstruction and the detailed planning necessary to restoring a durable peace; in short, to do what was so disastrously absent when our forces rolled into Baghdad?”
We are reinventing tomorrow now by planning the peace now. At some point there was no Peace Corps, no Department of Education.
“Founded on hope, optimism and a commitment to freedom and the assertion that we can once again become a beacon of hope for the world,” Dennis Kucinich’s declares on his website about the DOP. And it seems like we lost that distinction a long, long time ago. The message sent by Dot, Dennis, the Peace Alliance and all the people working directly and indirectly for peace has not fallen on deaf ears. Politicians and light workers are being heard loud and clear. A vein of truth is open; it’s in the air, enlightening, healing and coagulating.
This healing increases exponentially as sponsors like Congresswoman Diane Watson of the 33rd Congressional District, California add their voice to the choir.
Watson says. “You can’t get peace at the end of a barrel. We start by setting a priority on peace. We look at how do we solve conflicts? How do we use mediation? How do we negotiate? If we combine our efforts in a Department of Peace we can move toward nonviolence. We’ve got to change priorities.”
They shall beat their swords into plowshares; And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.
Excerpted from In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Gandhi Peace Awards © 2002-2006 by James Clement van Pelt.
The Peace Alliance Annual Conference Feb 3 - 5, 2007; Washington, D.C. Make Sense. Make Peace. Make History; www.thepeacealliance.org
San Diego, Americans for the Department of Peace; www.AFDOP.org
World Peace Walk and other activities
Sam Slovick, Los Angeles writer, is a regular contributor to LA Weekly. samslovick@earthlink.net
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