Stop the Next War Now (9 page)

“Such toys may fulfill a need for adults to feel patriotic or support U.S. troops,” says Diane Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College and the author of
Teaching Young Children in Violent Times
. “But they often channel children into narrowly scripted play and convey a message that violent play is OK and exciting.” Choosing toys wisely is one way to begin teaching peace to children.

Schools can teach peace as well. Research shows that well-designed violence-prevention and conflict-resolution programs can have a significant positive impact on students. For example, independent evaluations of the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, an initiative of Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR), found that it successfully teaches young people the skills of negotiation, mediation, and peacemaking.

ESR offers its program in four hundred schools around the country. In those schools, educators were better prepared for the events of 9/11, says Linda Lantieri, founding director of the program. “The children in our programs have learned the healing power of love and respect and understanding,” Lantieri says. “They see the connection between the way they treat one another and the way they will treat the world when they are in charge.”

The Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit partnership of educators, health care professionals, and other advocates for children, has prepared a brief guide for parents and educators outlining eight concrete steps they can take for peace education at home and at school:

Make room for peace at home
. Outer peace begins with inner peace. Children and adults need special places that give them a sense of privacy and peace and that can serve as a quiet refuge for times when hurt or angry feelings might lead to violent words or actions. It could be a room or just a corner, decorated simply and lovingly, where any family member can go for quiet reflection or prayer, or to work through turbulent feelings.

Find peace in nature
. Turn off the television and the computer and go outside. Take children for a walk or let them explore nature in their own way. The beauty of nature is a great balm to the soul. Children often seek out their own secret outdoor spaces, even if it’s only a corner of the backyard.

Make time for creative play
. Young children need plenty of time for unstructured, creative play. Research indicates that make-believe social play in particular reduces aggression and increases empathy in children. Children also use make-believe play with others to work through feelings of fear and sadness. Choose children’s toys carefully, avoiding those that encourage or glorify violence. truce (www.truceteachers.org) prepares an annual guide to help parents choose good toys. The Lion and Lamb Project (www.lionlamb.org) focuses on how to avoid violent toys.

Engage children’s hands and hearts
. Young children need a direct, hands-on experience of giving. They love to make things, small and large—their own cards, tree ornaments, cookies, or bread—for neighbors, family, or friends. They can learn to enjoy sorting through their own things and even giving away some treasured possessions to others in need if it is part of a family tradition.

Establish a “family foundation.”
Create a homemade bank for donations— a miniature family foundation. Parents, children, visitors, and friends can put money in the bank. Children can be introduced to tithing when they receive gifts, earnings, or allowance. Choose a charity together—one that has personal meaning for the children. When there is a flood, fire, or other disaster, the family can gather to decide whether to make a special donation from the family bank. As the children mature, talk to them more about the needs of the world and ways they can help.

Support peace education at school
. Urge your early-childhood center or school to establish or strengthen peace education and conflict-resolution programs. Contact ESR (www.esrnational.org) or the National Peace Foundation (www.nationalpeace.org) for ideas, including advice on how to create “peace places” in schools, where students can go to negotiate and mediate conflicts and resolve disputes nonviolently.

Encourage older students to study a conflict-ridden area of the world, looking at it from two or more perspectives. When students read books and talk to people from each side, they learn that every conflict has many layers and that building peace requires working respectfully with all sides. For resources to help you with this kind of study, contact the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding (www.karunacenter.org); Facing History and Ourselves (www.facinghistory.org), which has resources for students to learn about the dangers of stereotyping, prejudice, and hatred; and the Public Conversations Project (www.publicconversations.org), which also offers resources for creating dialogues on divisive issues.

Face local needs
. Help children become comfortable with the people in your community who need help—the elderly, the disabled, the poor. Starting in middle school, students benefit enormously from working in hospitals, soup kitchens, animal shelters, and the like. Make sure there is someone there to mentor the young person when such experiences become emotionally painful or confusing.

Make a difference in the world
. Help young people find active ways of working for peace, the preservation of the natural world, the relief of human suffering, or other concerns through organizations like Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots (www.janegoodal.org), Larry and Jane Levine’s Kids Can Make a Difference (www.kidscanmakeadifference.org), Craig Kielburger’s Free the Children (www.freethechildren.org), or PeaceJam (www.peacejam.org), in which students work directly with Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

DARK ENOUGH

TO SEE THE STARS

CATHERINE INGRAM

Catherine Ingram is an internationally known dharma teacher with communities serving several thousand students in a dozen cities in the United States and Europe. She is the author of
In the Footsteps of Gandhi
and
Passionate Presence
. She is a cofounder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, widely considered the most prestigious Buddhist meditation center in the West. She is also a cofounder of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.This excerpt is adapted from
In the Footsteps of Gandhi
.

The history of war in both the ancient and modern world makes one wonder if war is an irresistible compulsion for human beings. Perhaps the pull toward violence or at least occasional bloodletting is a deep need in the human psyche, an evolutionary adaptation we struggle to understand. What is this love of war, of violence, of bloodshed? Is it ever possible to, as a species, love peace more than war?

To answer this we need only look at the lives of people who dedicated themselves to loving peace. The names we remember and celebrate in history—Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Saint Teresa of Avila, Lao-tzu, and many others—were all beings of peace. We mostly do not know and certainly do not celebrate the names of the warriors of those times. In more recent history, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama are spoken of with the reverence reserved for people whose presence on this troubled earth soothes the spirit. We celebrate their existence because there is an awareness in most of us that recognizes goodness, kindness, and fair play when we see it. In other words, those people who have most inspired us have always offered messages of love and nonviolence. This speaks to an inherent wisdom that exists in our hearts, despite our behavior.

We sometimes make the conceptual mistake of thinking that people whose message was love and peace belonged on the whole to former times. We think of those people as legends in a historical context, or we assume that they were from traditional cultures whose values accommodated such quaint views. But what if those lives were not so much an example of where we have historically been as of where we need to go? Not of how we once were but how we might become? What if humankind is being compelled to evolve into peaceful animals, or else face extinction?

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I know somehow that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” It is now our time to shine in the darkness, to honor the values for which we have worked over many years, and to keep our strength by remembering that love is the only power that lasts.

“Peace cannot be achieved through violence;

it can only be attained through understanding.”

—Albert Einstein

THE MIND CAN BE

A PRISON OR A DOOR

SUSAN GRIFFIN

“Is not the change we have seen astonishing...”

—John Adams, 1776

War starts in the mind, not in the body.

Waging war is not a primary physical need.

Though war can cause anger and grief, or be fueled by those emotions, war is not a feeling. Nor, though war is aggressive, is it an impulse.

War must be carefully organized.

War is not designed by nature and it is not universal. It is instead the product of some but not all human cultures.

To become good soldiers, men must be trained, humiliated, and taught to obey orders automatically. They must learn to ignore their own intelligence, their natural physical reactions (such as fear) and basic emotions (such as compassion).

War arises from unfounded ideas and distorted perceptions aided by lies and silence.

Very few wars have been judged by history as necessary for self-defense.

To imagine peace is not nearly as sentimental as to think of war as glorious. In modern warfare, more civilians die than soldiers.

War is not inevitable. The only thing in the universe that is inevitable is change.

Chapter 3

BUILDING A
STRONGER

ANTIWAR

MOVEMENT

ACTIVISTS AS

AMBASSADORS

PHYLLIS BENNIS

Phyllis Bennis has been a writer, an analyst, and an activist for many years. Her publications include
Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
,
Before and After
, which analyzes U.S.foreign policy after 9/11,and
Calling the Shots
,about the United States’ role in the United Nations. Currently she is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (www.ips-dc.org).

In late 2002, when American antiwar groups began working with groups in other countries to oppose the pending war on Iraq, something new happened: for the first time, masses of people showed an extraordinary understanding of the global consequences of the war and the need for the whole world to stand against it. I’ve been calling this phenomenon “the new internationalism.”

For my generation, who came of age during the last years of the Vietnam War, the movement against the war in Iraq marked the first time we had seen such widespread global resistance, thanks partly to the presence of technology that allows for easy communication and a coordination of efforts around the world. The February 15, 2003, demonstrations in cities and towns across the planet were a triumph of mobilization: they made it impossible for governments to sign on to the Bush agenda, which in turn made it impossible for the Bush administration to claim that this was a war backed by the whole world. So even though the demonstrators were not able to prevent the war from being waged, they were able to prevent it from being legitimized. And this lack of international legitimacy helped broaden the movement at home to more mainstream organizations. Campaigns such as Cities for Peace, in which 165 American cities signed antiwar resolutions, would never have happened if this war had been authorized by the UN Security Council.

But looking back, I can see that I didn’t understand early enough the significance of the global movement. I don’t think American activists did enough to mobilize people around the world to pressure the United Nations. Unfortunately, there is a strong anti-UN streak in the global peace movement. In 1995, Madeleine Albright shocked many by bluntly stating Washington’s view that the United Nations was a tool of American foreign policy. But the truth is that the UN is a tool of American foreign policy only sometimes. There are also times when it stands up to U.S. pressure, and that happens when there’s a global mobilization that compels governments to take difficult positions.

During the buildup to the war in Iraq, codepink engaged in enormously creative actions, such as support rallies at the Washington embassies of several nations that opposed the war. Activists would have been wise to keep up the pressure on the recalcitrant countries and continue praising the countries that were doing the right thing, even if they were countries whose policies on other issues are found wanting. The South African government, for example, enters into terrible arms deals with countries around the continent, but in the international arena it is playing an extraordinarily important role in building international governmental support against empire.

We have to be sophisticated enough to understand that governments standing against war, even for the wrong reasons, can be tactical allies. France, Germany, and Russia had their own opportunistic motives for opposing the U.S. invasion—we can recognize that, yet welcome their position. We can’t afford to be absolutist in our tactics and our strategies. Our principles are absolute, but our strategies have to be responsive to current conditions.

In the fall of 2002, a very small team of us from IPS tried to work some magic at the United Nations—we hoped the international body would invite Nelson Mandela to speak to the Security Council against the impending war. Mandela’s impassioned words, we thought, might keep the Security Council from caving in to Bush’s war. Despite ill health, Mandela seemed agreeable, but the process of wrangling an invitation was nightmarish, with late-night phone calls to government representatives on the other side of the world. While this plan ultimately fell through because of diplomatic challenges, it opened my eyes to the potential of enlisting the aid of the most influential individuals in the world in a moment of global crisis.