Peace, Right Here, Right Now The tips of the trees outside my window dance gently in the morning breeze. The sounds of traffic in the distance hum.  If I close my eyes I almost believe that humming is the sound of waves. This is a beautiful summer morning and I am at peace, right here, right now. Is everything perfect in my life? No, certainly not. Anxieties creep up: family members with serious health problems, money and relationship challenges.  All over the world people are set in furious conflict with other and don’t have enough for survival itself.

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Book Review:  Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Benazir Bhutto. Harper Collins, New York, New York, 2008. Finished Just Before Her Assassination This book was finished days before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan last December.  With the publication of this book we can now honor the contribution she made in leaving it to the world.  It is an important work and forwards the reconciliation and democracy building she was engaged in as she lived. I have never read anything as comprehensive as this about the Muslim world.

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Stop Violence without Causing More Violence                                                                                                                                                              How do we stop people who are hurting other people? Is it possible to stop them while at the same time preventing violence that may happen as a result of the stopping process itself?  Last week the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, on charges of waging genocide and rape in Darfur.  This is the first time prosecutors have ever issued charges against a sitting head of state, a very high risk strategy indeed. The international community is still ashamed of its inability to stop the genocide in Rwanda and its intervention in Bosnia came much too late.  These glaring failures led to the creation of the International Criminal Court as a permanent war crimes tribunal. The Responsibility to Protect The responsibility to protect doctrine, worked out with incredible care and thought by diplomats at the United Nations, includes circumstances under which military intervention would be necessary in the event of genocide.  In Sudan, over the past several years the government has made war on its own people, employing the murderous janjaweed milita.  Two and a half million people are now living in refugee camps. Part of what makes this conflict so complex is the fact China buys oil from the Sudanese government and would likely block any action by the UN the Security Council to arrest Bashir.

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 Calming The Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism.  Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press: Berkeley, CA, 2005. On An Idyllic Fall Day In September Seven years have passed since those haunting days in September 2001 when the airplanes hit the twin towers in NYC and Washington DC. As I sit here on this idyllic summer afternoon, it could even be today, and thousands could be going to their deaths.  In fact, in Afghanistan right now, they are. For terrorism is not over. To read the newspapers  it has barely gotten started.

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 ”I Want to Kill You” A patient on the psychiatric unit where I work threatened my life last week. In a cold, steely voice, this very distubed man looked into my eyes and said, “I want to kill you.” I believed him. I knew, given different circumstances, he could and would fulfill on that threat. Surviving by Being Nice and Good We live in a world that has seen far too much war, that has known too much tyranny, genocide, terrorism. I come from an unhappy family with a history of abuse, which formed the way I thought and behaved for years. It didn’t make me a happy person.  I learned to survive by becoming  good, sweet and loving.

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(Editor’s Note: Today we welcome Andrew Himes, founder and Executive Director of Voices in Wartime, an Education Project dedicated to educating high school and college students about the experience of war. The Project has produced a film (Voices in Wartime) an Anthology of Poetry, and a curriculum for use in high school and college classrooms.) Q: Was there a particular event that fueled your desire to make the film Voices in Wartime?  What fueled the passion in the film, the anthology and the project, to create a less violent world and to heal the trauma caused by war? AH: In the beginning 2003, as the Bush administration was on the verge of invading Iraq, I was on the verge of despair. I had protested the war and seen millions of others oppose this bizarre and misguided invasion, but it appeared to be going ahead no matter what was said or done to oppose it. I was one of an international movement called Poets Against the War, which gathered and published over 13,000 poems written in a global outcry against the impending war. But somehow the war proceeded.

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Introduction: In today’s interview I welcome Jack Berriault, the founder and Executive Director of The Israel Palestine Project. The mission of TIPP is to cause a major step toward an equitable and enduring peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a common historical narrative. I have been a member of the Board of Directors of this project for several years and Jack is a personal friend of mine. Q: Jack, why did you create this project? You have no ties by birth to the conflict. JB: It started when I was 14.

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War Is A Force Which Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.  Public Affairs: New York, 2002. Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for 15 years, many of them for the New York Times, has written a passionate, exciting and disturbing book in which he tries to understand the enduring attraction of war. Hedges, in his long career covering wars and conflicts from the Balkans to Central America to the Middle East, has directly witnessed war at its worst. His reflections make for absorbing and disquieting reading. This book cuts through much posturing and folly and goes directly to the heart. An extraordinary writer, Hedges weaves in the stories of people and events he personally witnessed in conflicts he reported on and he mixes these with quotes from the Odyssey and the Illiad and from Shakespeare.

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There is a universal longing for peace and yet we never seem to achieve it despite our longings and good intentions. We are pervaded with cynicism and a deep-seated belief that war will always be with us because, well, “that’s just how humans are.” The intention of this blog is to start a new and very different conversation: that peace is possible if we say we want it, and if we are committed to creating it so it thrives on the planet. We can design and live into the kind of world we want to inhabit. This blog is about inquiring deeply into all our conversations from the past, exploring what keeps us in a violence-filled world, the costs of living in such a world and what it would take for us to deliberately create a world which works for every one, not just for a select few. A second intention of this blog is to create a community of readers who see the possibility in the ideas presented here and who will take hold of this new idea about creating peace intentionally on the planet. Toward that end, I am strongly encouraging readers to comment on posts and to interact with me, guest bloggers and with each other.

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 Why Israel Feels Threatened In a powerful Op-Ed piece in the NYT, Benny Morris does a wonderful job of describing the vulnerability and fear that Israelis feel in their 60 year old state.   Morris’s article helped me to own up to my arrogance in the blog I wrote about Israel’s victimization. Recognizing My Own Arrogance Towards Israel I indulged in talking down to the state of Israel like a child.  In truth, I am yearning desperately for the killing on both sides to stop.   I directed my remarks to Israel, rather than to Hamas, because I see Israelis as having more capacity to effect change in this situation. These opponents are not evenly matched.  The majority of Palestinians in Gaza are starving!  Perhaps I underestimate the power of Hamas to make rational choices in the current circumstances.  A Fight Over Human Feelings and Needs The key word in Morris’s column is feels.  Israel has the 5th largest Army in the world.  Two peoples are fighting over feelings and perceptions. These needs are so important to Jews and Palestinians they are willing to die for them, and yet they are so passionate they are unable to communicate the depth of their importance to the other side with any coherence.                                                                                                                                                                                                              Interpretations of What the Trauma Meant Fuels Violence Both peoples hold themselves as victims.  Both were hurt by traumas in the past. Those hurts are held in several ways: physical wounds, emotional experiences, but most importantly, in interpretations (i.e.

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