We are no happier with unrequited hate than with unrequited love.
We desire that those about whom we feel something should feel it towards us equally. Otherwise, how do we justify it? How do we sustain it? How do we complete the circle of the emotion?
We feel this way, at least, in the beginning, when the relationship is new, the emotion fresh, and the blood still hot with the passion of it. Later we may see love change, or hate change, and we can reconcile to that in time; learn a new emotion, a new relationship; keep in our memories – the memories of our hearts – those first feelings of love or hate; but move on.
But when that first flush of passion is unrequited, we feel foolish, ignored, hurt. How is it that the other does not feel as we do? We want to make them feel it! We will declare it, profess it, make it important. The other must know our feelings and return them! Else how shall we go on?
We need to act on the emotions and want to require the other to act as well. What if someone called a war and nobody showed up? What if we called a war and only one side showed up? These are two different situations. In the first instance, there is a common, even if unstated, agreement not to fight. There is a rejection of violence altogether. But the second instance is more complicated. One side is prepared for war, desires war, needs war for some reason. The other side rejects that. This requires some kind of response from the first. But what response?
A lot depends on the relative power of the two sides. If a weak opponent refuses to fight, then the stronger attacker will become a conqueror, perhaps mocking the weaker as he attacks. This is the schoolyard bully, beating up a smaller kid and all the time telling him to “fight back, you wuss, you coward.” But if the one who refuses to fight is as powerful as, or more powerful than, the attacker, then something else happens. The attacker’s own weakness becomes evident. This is the would-be bully, swinging wildly at someone he can’t beat, landing punch after punch, but to no effect. This is also the situation of masses of people standing up to an oppressive authority, taking hit after hit and still standing up again and again. Such action has brought down more than one tyrant, expelled more than one colonial power.
But we too often tell ourselves what the bully tells us. If we don’t fight back, then we are weak, cowardly. We allow ourselves to believe that in order to defeat the enemy, we must become the enemy, act as the enemy is acting. Fight fire with fire.
Every interaction with another human being establishes and develops a relationship between us and the other. In every action we take, we can act to protect and defend ourselves as the primary goal of the action, or we can act to nurture and support the relationship as the primary goal. For every protective and defensive action there is a nurturing and supportive counteraction. This is the principle on which assertiveness is based and the principle on which civil disobedience is based.
Unfortunately, it is always simpler to respond to negative action with negative counteractions. If someone strikes out at us, it is simple to strike back in kind. The two actions seem balanced and appropriate. The problem is that they also lead to escalation of the conflict as each person attempts to overpower the other and end the conflict. If someone hits me and I hit him back, this will continue until one of us hits the other hard enough to disable the other from responding. If I know this in advance, then I may be tempted to use my most powerful response first in order to end the conflict as quickly as possible and to suffer as little harm to myself as I can manage. If the other knows this in advance, he may begin the conflict by using his most powerful weapon preemptively, so that I cannot strike back at all.
But hatred is always about ego. It is an ego response to genuine feelings of grief or anger or disappointment. What we want is not just for the other to acknowledge our feelings, but to take responsibility for them, to atone for them. We need satisfaction more than resolution. We have become our feelings. And therein lies the answer.
If we name our feelings as hatred, then we give up ownership of the feelings themselves. We try to get the other to take the feelings from us, so that we don’t have to bear them ourselves. And since the other will not willingly take on what is not the other’s burden, then we are left with new grief, new anger, new disappointment or frustration; and new justification for hatred.
But if we can name our feelings as they are; if we can say, “I am grieving,” or “I am angry, “or “I am disappointed or frustrated.” If we can see the truth of our feelings, then we can legitimately ask the other to acknowledge those feelings. If we can make the connection between the other’s actions and our feelings, but still see that the feelings are our own, then we can ask the other to take responsibility for the other’s actions and acknowledge their connection to our feeings.
When conflict happens and we are hurt, then this is perhaps the first step in a peaceable response. When we first hear ourselves saying “I hate,” then we need to step back from that and say “no, I feel.”
The second step is to remember that the other is not us, does not share our feelings, perhaps does not even understand them. We can love unconditionally; love the other even if the other does not love us. Our collective art and literature are filled with lessons of unconditional love. Our spiritual texts tell us the virtues of it. But we cannot hate unconditionally. We are not taught how to hate those who do not hate us back. When we hate someone who does not hate us, then we cannot sustain that hate; and if they insist on loving us back, then it begins to take so much energy, to cost us so much, to continue to hate them, that soon there is no path but to either stop hating or to turn the hatred inward.
When someone wants us to go to war, we are often told that the enemy hates us, and we are asked to hate them in return. To live peaceably, we must learn the action of positive unrequited hate.

Equal and equitable are not the same thing when it comes to the distribution of the world’s resources.  Equal simply means that everyone gets the same share.  If there are twenty-five people and one hundred apples, each person gets four apples.  Equitable means that there is a relationship between the value of each individual’s contribution to the availability or acquisition of the resources and his or her share of them.  If you have twenty-five people and one hundred apples, but one of those people has nurtured and maintained the apple tree, another has picked the apples and a third has delivered them to the distribution center, while the other twenty-two have had no hand in any of that, but have been doing other things of value to the first three, then an assessment would be made of the relative value of each person’s contribution and the apples would be distributed accordingly: perhaps the grower would get six apples, the harvester five, the distributer three, and everyone else two each.

It has been said fairly often that the problem of poverty isn’t that there isn’t enough of the world’s resources to go around, but that they are badly distributed.  The same could be said about the current state of the U.S. economy.  The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough wealth in this country, but that it is badly distributed.  Does this mean that we need to do something about the redistribution of wealth?  Yes.  Peace cannot exist where there is a grossly inequitable distribution of resources; and wealth is simply a measure of that distribution.

Let’s understand, first of all, that all economic systems require the redistribution of wealth in order to survive and prosper.  Wealth tends to move upwards.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Unless an economic system has ways of ensuring that enough of the wealth collecting at the top of the economic hierarchy is redistributed back to the bottom on a regular basis, then more and more people will lose the ability to purchase the goods and services which fuel the economic engine.  This is undisputed economic fact.  The question isn’t whether such redistribution is necessary, but how it should be accomplished.

Pure socialism would argue that all labor and all resources belong to the society as a whole.  In the ideal socialist society, everyone would be motivated by a genuine desire to serve the needs of the society.  They would go to work not for personal profit, but because their work served the greater good.  .  Wages would be irrelevant, because all the society’s resources would be freely distributed according to need.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  Such a system would redistribute wealth continuously and immediately so that it would never have the chance to accumulate at the top or stagnate at the bottom.  There would be neither poverty nor great wealth.

Pure free-market capitalism would leave all decisions about redistribution to market forces.  The capitalist, ever mindful of the need to keep refueling the economy, would arrive at a proper balance between accumulation and redistribution according to the value placed on goods, services and labor by the marketplace itself.  The principle means of redistribution would be through the creation of jobs and the management of prices.  Wages would be determined by the economic value attached to the specific labor relative to the real-market cost of goods and services.  In this way, People would be motivated to work by the promise of sufficient wealth to buy the things they needed.  The distribution of resources would be determined relative to the individual’s willingness or ability to perform the labor necessary to earn sufficient wages to purchase what was needed.  Those whose labor created the most value would become wealthy and those whose labor created little value would be poor.  The problems associated with poverty could be managed by a small redistribution of wealth through charitable giving.

Pure socialism imagines a world in which all resources are shared, belong to no one individually, and to everyone equally; a world in which greed is impossible because it would be unthinkable; a world in which the distribution of resources is equal.  Free-market capitalism imagines a world in which resources exist to be exploited by the individual, ownership is establish by that exploitation, first-come, first-served; competition for resources leads inevitably to the ascendance of those best able to use the resources; and greed is simply another name for motivation; a world in which the distribution of resources is equitable.  Of course, we don’t actually live in either of those worlds.

We live in a world that requires a distribution of resources that balances the forces of equality and equitability.  At the moment, that balance doesn’t exist, and the distribution of resources is both unequal and inequitable.

A purely equal distribution of resources can create a generally stable society with a generally static economy.  In the absence of both great wealth and great poverty, however, there is the risk of a leveling out, a sameness of experience that works to inhibit the kinds of conflict that lead to great innovation, great art, and the individual self-actualization that is necessary to becoming fully human and achieving genuine fulfillment; a world in which the lack of an equitable relationship between one’s contribution and one’s compensation can ultimately erode one’s commitment to the greater good.  A purely equitable distribution based on the market value of labor and resources can, in its idealized form, lead to a generally vital economy, but at the expense of a generally unstable society, in which the unequal distribution of resources leads to unrest, even revolution.  If people are motivated first by individual profit and only secondarily by the greater good, then constant competition for resources can lead not to greater innovation or improved goods and services, but to greater manipulation or circumvention of the system itself.

The reality is that there will always be some people who are motivated primarily by self-interest and others who are motivated primarily by a concern for the greater good.  There will also be those who are motivated by their place in the social hierarchy, and those who are motivated by their physical needs.  A society that seeks balance between equal and equitable distribution of resources would start by considering how and where these various motivations intersect in the economy, and use a mix of motivation and regulation to ensure that the redistribution of resources is consistent, and sufficient to keep the economy and the society both generally stable and reliably vital. This would require three difficult assessments.

First, there would need to be a clear differentiation between those vital resources necessary to life, which are the common property of all and not subject to private ownership; and those resources which might reasonably be considered discretionary, privately owned, and market-valued.  For me, the first category would include a clean environment, used sustainably; sufficient food and water and nurturing care to maintain health and vitality; sufficient shelter and protection against dangers both natural and man-made; equality of representation in government and the law; and equal respect and dignity as human beings and members of the society.  The second category would include individual labor; non-vital resources; manufactured goods and the provision of services; and the free use of one’s own property, including material, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.  And there would have to be recognition of the need to resolve inevitable conflicts between these things.

Secondly, there would need to be the establishment of a clear and reasonable baseline for the equal distribution of resources necessary for a minimal standard of living.  Ideally this would be a world-wide effort, but it ought to at least be possible for the wealthiest societies to offer all their citizens a life that includes the essentials, plus a bit more to give them access to those things which promote self-actualization and growth.  It isn’t enough to survive, a society needs to help its citizens thrive as well.  At the moment, the U.S. poverty line is generally acknowledged to be well below what is actually necessary for survival without assistance, and nowhere near what is necessary for real participation in all that the society has to offer.  Almost one in four Americans does not earn enough money to have to pay income taxes.  Nearly sixty percent of families receiving food assistance have at least one working wage-earner, but those wages are not enough to meet basic needs.

Thirdly, there needs to be a realistic and fairly objective assessment of the real value of goods and services, of labor and resources that is not strictly market-driven.  We need to go beyond supply-and-demand to questions of value based on the greater good of the society.  Do we really have a need for good baseball players, for instance, that justifies compensation for their services that is hundreds or thousands of times greater than what we justify for teachers?  If the monetary value we place on something reflects its social or moral value, then what we pay for someone’s labor reflects the society’s social and moral values overall.  Is physical labor more or less valuable than intellectual labor?  Is the actual production of goods or provision of vital services more, or less, valuable than the management and manipulation of money or economic resources?

Then we need to develop strategies and policies that help us to meet the challenges that those assessments would make clear to us.  These would include decisions about taxation, minimum wages, environmental protection and development, the balance between individual needs and social responsibilities and between individual beliefs and the social contract, and about the management of conflicts that arise when people with different needs and different perspectives are all trying to exercise their rights as individual human beings.  None of this is easy and requires dedication to and protection of a social and political system that encourages and facilitates equal and enthusiastic participation by all citizens.  And it requires not just tolerance for our differences, but a recognition that those differences are our most important assets, and the source of our best hope for the future.

There is an attitude, fairly broadly held, that war is inevitable; that human beings are war-like creatures, and that pacifist ideals lead ultimately to tyranny – either because they make us weak in the eyes of our enemies, who then will defeat and enslave us, or because the idealists who eventually take power are corrupted by it.  If we want to bring about a more PeaceAble world, we must assert, through our words and actions, the principle that war and peace are choices; and human beings are, first and foremost, capable of choosing.  In the face of all that happens in the world, we can choose to live peaceably among ourselves and with others.

The idea that humans are genetically programmed for war confuses, I think, biological evolution and cultural evolution.  Certainly it can be argued that the biological human creatures of the 21st century have not evolved significantly during at least the period of recorded history.  We are still the same creatures that spread throughout Europe and the Mediterranean under Alexander or Caesar, seeking control over vast empires.  We are still the same creatures who swept from the east in hordes to bring down the Romans.  We are certainly the same creatures who colonized Africa or the Orient at the point of a gun.  And we Americans have clearly not evolved biologically since we drove the Native Americans from the land, and fought for independence from Britain, or to preserve the Union during the Civil War.  We are only a few generations away from the doughboys of WWI, and those in power now are the sons and daughters of the people who fought in WWII or Vietnam.  The veterans of Vietnam are getting gray while their children or grandchildren fight in Afghanistan.  It would seem self evident that war is in the very nature of the human species.

But we also have the example of people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, and more recently the protesters who forced political change in the Middle East.  In lots of ways, human culture is evolving more quickly than human beings are.  At the same time that some of our leaders are continuing to advocate for war as a solution to our problems, humans are learning more about how to coexist, how to understand and appreciate the diversity of human experience, and how to solve our problems in peaceable ways.

Conflict, of course, cannot be eliminated and should not be eliminated.  Conflict serves an essential role in the lives of individuals and nations alike.  Conflict happens.  Peace isn’t about eliminating conflict, it’s about learning how to manage conflict in ways that are peaceful rather than violent, or abusive, or destructive.  Conflict occurs when there is more than one possibility and a choice has to be made.  Choosing forces us to put our values and beliefs to the test.

Becoming PeaceAble will require something of us that war does not.  Pacifists don’t need to have a definitive answer for questions about conflict or whether the species is inherently war-like, but we do have a responsibility to help frame the debate, so that peaceful resolutions to our problems can be found.  And we have to be confident that they can be found.  We need to rethink our relationships socially, economically, and politically. And war is just that: a solution to some perceived problem.  Wars happen when a nation – or those charged with representing the nation’s interests – perceives a need, a problem, to which war seems to be an appropriate response.  War is almost always about problems of access to, or control over, resources and power, not about ideology.

We need a paradigm that does not depend on winners and losers for its measure of success.  We need a paradigm that allows us to envision competition in mutually beneficial ways; that allows us to view profit and success as something shared, rather than something hoarded.  And we must start to live that paradigm ourselves.  If, in working for peace, we see ourselves as revolutionaries, we have already lost the battle, because revolution is itself a war metaphor.  If we see ourselves as having to win the peace, we have already lost the battle, because in our common language our winning means that somebody else has to lose.  It is necessary in the broadest philosophical sense of things for us to find another way.  The reality is that our situation is built into our culture in ways we cannot do much about.  We cannot have an election without somebody winning and somebody else losing.  But you can have an election in which the winning and losing are seen not as a competition between individuals, but as a discussion of ideas, wherein the individuals simply represent ideas or directions, policies, perspectives and so forth that from time to time will shift.  Ultimately, the important thing is that all are heard.

The nice thing about peace is that it isn’t something anyone has to own, it doesn’t require us to acquire more of it than our neighbor.   We don’t have to compete for it, in fact, if we did compete for it, no one could actually acquire it.  You don’t have to hoard it or accumulate it.  It is a way of being that can exist even in the presence of conflict.

And we need to deal with the related problems of disconnection and dehumanization.  What is it we’re disconnected from?  A lot of things.  We’re disconnected from our
lives, because we don’t think about them enough.  It’s hard to define what we’re disconnected from.  Partly from each other.  Except in the smallest kinds of groupings, we are disconnected from one another.  Membership in larger groups doesn’t really connect us.  It connects us to the idea of group, often, rather than to each other.

People will, of course, say that’s not true.  They will look at the aftermath of a great tragedy at the people gathering, but that’s more of an attempt to connect, rather than an actual connectedness.  It’s evidence that we are in general disconnected from one another.  If we were connected to the rest of humanity and connected to the idea of that, would we need to involve ourselves in other people’s grief, the grief of strangers, in this kind of voyeuristic, heavy-handed way?  If we were, in fact connected to the rest of humanity, would we not, instead, respect the privacy of their grief, respect their need to grieve without our interference?  Would we not, in fact, let them grieve; feel something for them — empathy, compassion, love — and leave them alone.  Leave them to their family, to those who can comfort them the most?  Would we need to thrust microphones in their faces to find out how they’re feeling?  Would we need to make a show of their mourning? Or would we already have sufficient empathy to understand how they might be feeling; would we already know how to mourn for their loss without imposing our vicarious grief on them.

We are disconnected from our own and others’ human-ness and so it becomes easier to dehumanize the other.  War requires the de-humanization of the enemy.  If I am to kill the other, then I cannot see him as anything like me.  The soldier of the enemy is just the enemy, not a human being who is someone’s son or daughter or mother or father or husband or wife; and certainly not someone with honorable or patriotic or noble purposes in trying to kill me.  And this dehumanization outlasts the war.

Dehumanizing the other also dehumanizes us.  It invades other aspects of our lives.  The metaphor of war is a metaphor of dehumanization – in our relationships, in our sports and other entertainments, in our politics, in our lives.  The metaphor of war is a metaphor of us against the dehumanized other.  As soon as we begin to humanize each other war begins to become less desirable as a solution to our problems.  As soon as we connect to the consequences of our actions on for ourselves and others as human beings, then it becomes more difficult to justify killing each other.

And therein lies the possibility of peace; because we can do these things, each of us, one person at a time.  We can make a commitment to remind ourselves each day of our own humanity; we can commit to try each day to see the others we encounter as human; we can use these commitments to help us reconnect to the world in PeaceAble ways.  Then we can begin to seek leaders (or become leaders) who are ready to see the world the same way, ready to reconnect; and we can work for change in the larger community of humans.  Each of us can find her or his own specific way to reconnect: with the environment, with children, with the hungry or the dispossessed; starting with people like ourselves and reaching out to (or at least not building walls against) those who are different.  I am only a war-like being if I choose to be.  I can be a PeaceAble being when I choose to be.

War creates heroes more readily and more publicly than peace does.  We honor peacemakers, such as Martin Luther King, only after a lifetime of work — and often only after an untimely death – in pursuit of peace.  Warriors are honored en masse, often for nothing more than membership in the organizations and institutions of war.  We must seek, or develop, ways of honoring peacemakers more frequently and in greater numbers.  We must assert the idea that to work for peace is to work patriotically for the greater good of freedom, democracy, justice and the American way.  To be anti-war is not, as some have suggested in recent times, anti-American.  The peacemakers must reclaim their rightful place under the American Flag.

Suppose we routinely honored peacemakers as we now do warriors. Suppose we had an “army” of well-trained, well-paid, committed professionals dedicated to actions which promote peace.  We could call them the Peacemakers Corps.  The Corps would recruit in high schools and colleges; offer scholarship assistance for college or other post-secondary education.  Recruiters would talk about the specialized training Peacemakers would receive in engineering, medical fields, business, communications, international relations, and languages; advertise the opportunities for travel and enrichment; and promote pride in membership in the Corps.  They would try to attract the best and the brightest to serve their country and give something back for all the privileges they might take for granted as U.S. citizens.

What would the nation do with the Corps?  Is there a fragile election process in an emerging democracy?  Send in the Corps to help organize and monitor the election.  Democracy by ballots, not bullets.  Is there a drought in Africa?  Send in the Corps to distribute water and food, and to dig wells, build viaducts or pipelines or irrigation systems, and help people establish sustainable agriculture.  Assistance that doesn’t come with military fatigues and side arms.  Are two third-world countries engaged in a border dispute that is about to escalate into, or has already become, a shooting war?  Send in the Corps to help with negotiations; or if the war is on, to make certain that the civilian populations have the basic necessities of food, water, shelter, and medical supplies, and are kept out of the line of fire.  The possible role of the Corps in natural disasters, political and social crises, and economic development efforts are almost unlimited.  All of this, of course, would require the cooperation of the world community, and a strengthened United Nations as a peacekeeping body.  But imagine the world’s vision of an America ready to put its enormous resources on the line without tying it to our own big business interests or military might.

And if the Corps did have to be deployed, imagine the news coverage of our brave peacekeepers heading off to represent America in the world’s humanitarian trouble spots.  The images of truly courageous and dedicated young men and women boarding airplanes, saying goodbye to family members, talking about their feelings as they head off to the latest peacemaking mission.  Imagine the nightly pictures, at the height of the crisis, of individual Corps members under the banner “America’s Peacemakers.”  And if someone performed some extraordinary act of compassion or genius; or if, tragically, someone were injured or killed in the line of duty; there would be medals and parades, and streets named after them.  Imagine being able to put on one’s resume or a special license plate, “Member, U.S. Peacemaker Corps.”  Imagine two or three days of every year set aside for parades and balloons and picnics to celebrate those who served their country in peace.  Imagine stone pillars and granite monuments in city parks, with the names of local kids who served as Peacemakers during this crisis or that emergency.

Imagine the citizens who would come home from experiences like that to take their place in the American democracy.  And imagine the generations of new citizens who would be their children.  And equally important, imagine the generations of children around the world whose images of Americans would be formed by the relationships built with Peacemaker Corps members.

A society tells itself, and the world, who it is and what it values by what it celebrates.  If our most public heroes are warriors; if we reserve our most extravagant celebrations for warrior heroes; and if those who toil in the name of peace are given only passing mention; then we tell ourselves and the world that we are warriors first and peacemakers later.  We need to learn how to honor peace publically and extravagantly, so that we can say to ourselves and the world that we care about peace, that it is important for us to do the work of peace, that we are PeaceAble.

I have on occasion heard people singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” and wondered if they had actually ever listened to the lyrics.  Lennon imagines a peace that requires the end of individual possessions, the end of religion, a singular universal belief that excludes heaven and hell, and nothing at all that is important enough for people to consider killing or dying for it.  This is not the way I would imagine peace, nor would I particularly wish for it.  For me, peace is not about the elimination of all those things which might disturb the peace, but about finding peaceable ways to deal with those things.

Conflict is not only inevitable for humans, it is also necessary.  Conflict exists whenever there is more than one possibility and a choice needs to be made.  Interpersonal conflict exists whenever two or more persons share the possibilities and the choices.  Choosing between alternatives is a fundamental human activity.  Without it we are not fully human.

All conflicts exist in the context of our attempts to get our needs met.  All choices are attempts to find the best possible solutions to the conflicts created by our needs.  All relationships are attempts at engaging each other in the meeting of our individual and shared needs.  All human activity involves conflict and the making of choices that attempt to resolve conflict.  Without conflict and the choices we make about it, there is no art, no science, no literature, no altruism, no basis for morality or ethics.  When we confront conflict and make a choice, we give expression to our knowledge and our beliefs; we tell ourselves and others who we are.  It is within this context that we need to begin to imagine what peace would look like.

To begin with, any realistic look at the possibility of peace also needs to recognize that, because our own needs will always be different from the needs of others and our shared needs will be perceived differently, peace will look different to each of us.  So what we need to craft is a way of being PeaceAble that allows us be assertive of our needs for peace while being sensitive to others’ very different needs.  For this we need a language of peace that we can use collectively.  Notice that this is what keeps our “war-ability” in place.  So much of our language is the language of war.  And even those who claim to oppose war regularly use that language to describe what they want.  “Wage Peace” proclaims a bumper sticker.

One part of the problem is that we conflate war and competition.  They are not necessarily the same.  Wars are always about control of or access to resources (physical, intellectual, ideological); they are based on a sense of “scarcity consciousness” (resources are limited and anything the other has reduces how much is available to me); the language of war is violent, self-centered, dehumanizing, divisive, and rigidly categorical; the goal of war is to win, and to cause the other to lose.  The winners in war are granted broad physical and moral superiority.  Competition, on the other hand can be (and occasionally is) peaceable.  Competition can be about personal and collective improvement (again physical, intellectual and ideological); the language of competition can be non-violent, supportive, humanizing, inclusive rather than divisive, and open and flexible; the goal of competition can be to advance the common interest of everyone involved and to celebrate achievement over victory.  In competition there is the possibility of seeing equal value in the contributions of all the competitors and to assign superiority  more narrowly: one may have been stronger, but another had greater determination, another a unique strategy, and still another an especially clear focus, for instance.

Another part of the problem is that we have enormous amounts of cultural language – in our official doctrines and practices, in our media, in our rituals and celebrations – that reinforce the value of war and the meme of the warrior; but very little to reinforce the value of peace or the cultural place of the peacemaker. The term “peacemaker” has even been applied to weapons large and small, and we regularly refer to armed troops as peacekeepers.  When we send men and women to war, when we train them to kill, and then ask them to be ready to die for us, we rightly recognize the enormity of that sacrifice.  As soon as they put on the uniform of military service, we call them heroes.  We regularly celebrate their service with holidays, parades, glowing testimonials, educational and medical benefits, special recognition at public events and in public forums. Because service requires membership in specific organizations, we have easy access to names that identify the warriors and make them visible to us.  We have no such things for peacemakers. Which of our holidays celebrate our peacemakers?  Martin Luther King’s birthday is, even now, a controversial commemoration, and he is recognized primarily for his work on civil rights for African Americans, while his broader advocacy for peace is often criticized, rather than celebrated.  And the message of peace that is so often expressed around the Christian holiday of Christmas is undermined by the crass commercialism of the season and the many ways in which our religions have been used to foster hatred and division.  There are hundreds of medals for warriors, few for peacemakers.  In thousands of ways, both small and large, our culture reminds us daily that the central metaphor of our lives is war, and that peace is at best a very minor part of who we are or how we should behave.

So as I consider what a PeaceAble society would look like, and as I develop these ideas further in these essays, I ask you to first take an honest look at what a “war-able” society looks like – what we look like now.

I suppose that a blog about peace ought to be written from the position of an enlightened or peaceful life.  It ought to be approached with optimism and hope.  It ought to speak of the author’s own experiences of unconditional love and a life lived according to certain rules of activist pacifism, with credentials from at least one or two of the great peace movements of the author’s lifetime.  If you also suppose these things then this blog may disappoint you, because this is a blog written by an author who claims no special enlightenment or peaceful past; it is written from a place of fear and anger; and it makes no hopeful or optimistic predictions of some great dawning of Aquarian peace on earth.  The author has been moderately active over the years in local movements, studied draft law in a non-credit class in the 70’s, gave a few speeches in town meetings during the nuclear freeze movement, and has always voted for the mainstream candidate who seemed least likely to lead us into Armageddon; but beyond that I can claim no special background or credentials except more than 30 years as a professor of human communication.

This is a journey.  As I write it I am trying to find my way out of anger and fear toward hope.  It is a fundamental premise of this blog that the one great hope for lasting, creative, and universal peace lies in that journey, a journey that each and every person on the planet must make individually, so that we can all make it collectively.  My impression of most of the literature on peace, or perhaps I should say the literature that claims to show how to achieve peace, is that it is primarily about either how the individual can find personal peace in spite of the craziness of the world, or about one prescription or another for the political agenda for peace.  Alongside these we have enormous amounts of ink being expended about a wide range of issues, each proclaiming the absolute necessity of some resolution to the particular conflict if the world is ever to be at peace.  It is also my perception that every one of these books tells the truth, and that the path to peace is paved with all of them, but that ordinary people will read very few of them, and be discouraged or confused or turned away by most of the rest.

The practical questions that I have not seen asked, or answered in any detail, are: “What would a truly peaceful world be like?” and “What would such a world require of me?”  The answers to these questions and some observations about the relationship between peace and our individual and collective choices will be the subject of this blog.

I choose to use the term “peace-able” rather than “peace-full” because I believe that the second cannot be achieved (if it can be achieved at all) until we have achieved the first.  To be peace-able is to be prepared to live one’s life in ways that open the door to peace, rather than create barriers.  To be peace-able is to think about all our choices as leading toward peace or away.  To be peace-able is to understand that there will always be conflict between humans, because there will always be differences in need, in belief, in knowledge, experience, understanding and perspective.  To be peace-able is to understand that we are not perfect.  To be peace-able is to want to make choices in our relationships with others that seek to nurture and support those relationships rather than simply protect ourselves.

To be peace-able requires that we develop some new habits, perhaps some new consciousness, in our daily lives.  We have to develop the habit of asking ourselves each day, “Who do I want to be today?  What do I want my life and my choices to mean to me and to others?”  We have to ask ourselves about our choices. “How does this choice affect the peace-ability of my life and the lives of those around me?  Does it make me feel more or less peaceful, more or less able to engage others in peaceful ways?  Does it seem to generate in myself and others feelings of peacefulness, of acceptance, understanding, gratitude, love, respect?”

To be peace-able means developing what I call “Pre-Forgiveness.”  This is an attitude toward our own and others’ hurtful, unkind, negative behaviors that allows us to more quickly put down the burden of hurt, fear, anger, and judgment; so that we can get on  with the business of living our lives in peace-able ways.

To be peace-able means to think about what we truly do believe about life, about God, about what it means to be human.  And then we must measure our choices against those beliefs as honestly and clearly as we can.

If genuine peace were to suddenly arrive tomorrow, would we be ready for it?  Would we know how to act, how to think?  Would we be able to live our lives in ways that could sustain that peace?  What would it require of us?  What would it look like; feel, taste, smell, and sound like?  These are the questions that I will explore as best I can in these pages.