What to do with criticism of the peace movement?

There’s a fair bit of criticism going around directed at the peace movement. There are those who say that for all our preaching and protesting, we’re not making much progress. I just want to say that, speaking from way down here in the South, there’s value in speaking your mind, even if it seems like nobody with clout pays it much attention. If the Constitution bites the dust; and all our jobs go overseas, and our kids are forced to be corporate soldiers to feed our grandkids; if shortsighted greed and consumer lethargy drive us into big time global warming; at least we’ll have the righteous satisfaction of saying “we told you so.” It’ll be a family tale the grandkids tell each other as they expire on the parched desert of Northern Minnesota somewhere.

But back to the criticism… the most annoying thing about it is its relevance. Everybody I know who’s engaged in the struggle to resist the imperial juggernaut, are people deeply committed to the part of it they’re working on. There’s an incredible variety of people, issues, and approaches embedded in major cities and medium-to-small towns all across the country. There are Vietnam vets in the most remote Ozark woods with tiny radio stations that send out Democracy Now to hill folk who’ll never have heard of it before. There are people carrying placards on the streets of Tulsa, who get paint thrown at them by their uninformed neighbors. Now how do those critics think these dedicated folks feel, when they go saying that their dedication and suffering are a waste of time? Well, it feels pretty annoying. But even more annoying is the thought that after a 5-year-long protest, and hard work for an election that we imagined we’d won, we’re still bombing other people’s countries. Our fearless leaders are even thinking of more to bomb.

So it feels like the criticism shouldn’t be brushed aside lightly. If the question is one of effectiveness, (can’t deny that) we need some new ideas. I happen to think there are a lot of good ideas out there.

As Louise Diamond said at the Culture of Peace Conference in Santa Fe last spring, the peace movement is in “discovery phase.” Getting all those ideas out there to be talked about is where it’s at right now. I really like that idea because it gives all of us permission to explore our own thinking about peace and violence. It’s also something we can do, even though we lack one thing I feel is a real weakness for us: we have no infrastructure. To me, the peace movement could put a little less time into protesting, and a lot more time into creating an infrastructure for a culture of peace.

Let’s see… what kind of infrastructure do we have in place already? We have a US Institute of Peace – the research organization. That's very good. We also have good peace studies programs in some major universities. There then are the widely dispersed peace groups that spring up in protest to war and dissolve again quickly when peace is imposed…some others that maintain a presence even after. Then there are scads of service organizations who work for rights, justice and meeting human needs (most working on shoe-string budgets, with overworked staff, in the face of overwhelming odds). There’s also the Department of Peace idea slowly gaining co-sponsors (very slowly).

This isn’t the kind of infrastructure we need to effectively create a culture of peace though. The war culture has a school system that trains children from a young age to blindly respect authority. That’s very useful when they’re recruited into the military 12 years later. They have training and research institutions, well-paid internships and paid employment, think tanks, manufacture and distribution networks, connections between levels of government that are continuously refined, large buildings to house work happening, places to store things, transportation networks, and a lot of well-established funding streams, just to name a couple things. In some people’s minds, when we get together down on the corner with our placards, we’re working at some kind of disadvantage.

Well ok, maybe we are, but I think we shouldn’t give ourselves too much grief for that just yet. We have to start somewhere. But if we really want a culture of peace instead of what we’ve got, we need to start planning the next step. What infrastructure will really act to create an effective and sustainable peace movement that can permeate the culture over time? In my heart, I believe ideas for it are already percolating in there… just waiting for the moment to erupt into some heady and healthful brew that’s going to rejuvenate all of us. That is, if we don’t all expire in the global warming desert first.