(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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 Change and the Resistance to Change What is change? Why do some of us resist it?The theme of change in the current political campaign has gotten me to thinking about how human beings are separated by their attitudes toward change itself. I sit firmly in the welcome change camp but it was not always so. For years I resisted change. Only a lot of pain and suffering made me, finally, clamor for change. Something had to be better on the other side.

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The Instability of Peace  We live in a world in which certain situations are stable and others are not. A coin on the table is stable facing Heads, and just as stable facing Tails, but completely unstable standing on its edge. Peace seems as unstable as a coin on its edge: precarious, easily toppled, its fall a matter not of “if” but “when”. A few, sowing seeds of discord and strife, can polarize the many and set them against each other. I have felt for a long time that the hard question to confront about peace is not how to get there, but how to make peace a more stable situation. In one sense it seems unconfrontable: getting to peace is daunting enough, but staying there?

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This is a continuation of the conversation we started last week addressing the costs and impact of our long habit of engaging in the use of armed violence to solve conflict. Last week we looked at the costs to the combatants themselves and the sponsoring nation/group of engaging in violence. This week we will focus on the other costs of armed violence and the deeper, hidden costs of this form of problem solving.                                                                                                                                                                     Costs to Victims and Collateral Damage Civilians, men, women, children, the aged, none of them matter during the relentless march of armed violence. All their needs are swept aside. Everyone is a target.

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In the Valley of Elah.  (2007) Written and Directed by Paul Haggis.  Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon   and Charlize Theron.                                                                                                                                                                                 A Missing Son Retired soldier Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is notified by the Army that his son Mike, recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, has gone AWOL from his base in New Mexico. Hank immediately drives there to find him. What might have been a standard mystery thriller, becomes a meditation on life, death and the cost of war in this beautifully written and acted film.  Even though he has been out of active service for some time, old habits die hard and Hank Deerfield is still every inch a career soldier.

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 A Two-Part Series on the Costs of Armed Violence                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Today is the first in a two-part series on the costs of armed violence. It is a difficult subject, one most of us would rather not face. Today’s blog will focus on the costs of armed violence to combatants. Next week’s blog will focus on the costs of violence to civilian victims and to the world as a whole. I am addressing the use of organized violence used to solve problems, whether that violence be legal violence like war, or out-of-bounds violence like terrorism and genocide.  In actual practice, the effects on people from these forms of violence are the same: people die or suffer terrible injuries; they are displaced from their homes and some live with horrific memories that may haunt them all their lives. These are the true costs of armed violence and I will consider them as one.

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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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