Shifting the Planetary Conversation The Costs of Armed Violence
Can We Really Design Peace?
- April 22nd, 2008Let’s think about this together. One might say there is the Old Conversation or the old way of looking at war and peace and now there is a New Conversation. The old way of thinking says “War will always be with us” and “There is nothing we can do to change the violence in the world.” It says, “We must defend ourselves from attack,” and, “You have to retaliate for attack or you look like a wimp.” You can go on and on with these examples. We all know this rhetoric. We all grew up on it, and not just Americans. It is a world-wide conversationand it’s thousands of years old. It is embedded in the way humans think, speak and act.
What if War Wasn’t Cool?
Now just imagine if humans, perhaps most of us on the planet, began to change our speaking and thinking about violence. What if, instead of war being thought of as inevitable, war came to be seen as unworkable, ineffective, and dare I say uncool. What if, at some not too distant point in the future people said, “We used to do that but we decided not to do it anymore.” “Dream on”, you say. But wait a minute.
A Radical New Idea
There have been major turning points in history when some new idea happened and it caught the public imagination . Once it happened there was no turning back. Democracy was such an idea; the civil rights movement was another. Gandhi said the British would leave India and the British left India. Sixty years ago it was normal to smoke in the US; now it is becoming rarer and rarer. If people decided they truly wanted a world that worked for everyone and were tired of sacrificing their sons and daughters on the battlefield, then no one would be able to stop this new idea from becoming a reality.
Imagine That!
To make this happen we would have to envision the kind of world we truly want to live in, the kind of world we want our children, grand children and future generations to live in. And we would have to carefully consider the costs of keeping this costly habit of violence of going. We could ask whether it truly serves us. It is now possible for us to design our lives as individuals and now, together we can be the authors and co-creators of a new way of being on this dazzling jewel of a planet. To be engaged in that endeavor is far more thrilling than war, more exhilarating than killing, more awe-inspiring a than any act of violence the human mind can dream up. Welcome to Peace by Design.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I’ve just learned that I will become a grandfather in a few months. When Joy talks about the kind of world to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, it has shifted my thinking a bit already. I’ve always taken it for granted that my daughter would be living in this present, war-torn world . . . but this grandchild hasn’t even been born yet: I don’t want he/she to automatically be assigned such a world! This is a prodigious vision and goal; I’ve never thought it possible, but perhaps from this moment on I can start believing that it may be.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Joy,
Thank you so much for taking what has been only a conversation in your own mind and birthing it into a conversation for all to share in. We need this conversation desperately and I for one am past ready to have it as you are! I look forward to seeing how it unfolds. I love your passion and your willingness to take on such a grand and beautiful mission.
Peace,
Laura C.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:59 am
joy
What do you mean by “Cold War”. Please give your meaning and how it differs from our country use of this term. How can peace be obtained by using differ phrases or words.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Barbara;
Thanks for this interesting comment about the use of language. The term “Cold War” is definitely one of those “old conversation” phrases. It came from the US/Soviet Russia era when Russia was our “enemy” and there was a fierce and terrible competition in the world about who would use the nuclear bomb first. It was very “cold” because mostly it was a stand off. The two sides couldn’t talk to each other. The Cuban missle crisis began to shift this tension when we came to the brink of nuclear war but I would say that the huge amount of citizen diplomacy in the 80’s with people visiting the Soviet Union helped to thaw things as well. In the “new conversation” I imagine a world where we don’t have to have “enemies” and where we don’t get stuck in prolonged stalemates like this. Our response would be to encounter and engage the nation or group that we are having trouble with and talk to them and try to understand their point of view, to walk a mile in their shoes. It is a very different way of being in the world. HOpe this gives you a glimpse of the “new conversattion”. We will be exploring this idea at length in this blog.
Joy