I first became aware of the Department of Peace campaign through Marianne Williamson's site. I subscribe to her email newsletter and there have been some emails about it. But I'd never taken the time to investigate it. For some reason it came to mind this morning, and before work I listened to a couple of the video streams from their conference last month in D.C. I listened to Marianne's opening remarks, and then I listened to the conversation between Dennis Kucinich and Walter Cronkite. Good ol' Walter Cronkite. I knew he had to be awfully old by now, so I looked up his age online. He'll be 89 next month...and joining the campaign for a Department of Peace. You gotta love Walter. He's such a seminal figure from my youth.
From what I've heard and read so far (and honestly, I've barely scratched the surface), the Department of Peace would not only deal with international relations and war situations, but would also address domestic issues (domestic violence, gang violence, violence in schools, etc.) Kucinich said a couple of things in his conversation with Cronkite that stuck with me all day. One was this:
KUCINICH: You know, the idea of a Department of Peace first came to me when I saw the Administration of Bill Clinton locked into a course of combat against Serbia, which included bombing the cities in Serbia.
I saw how the tempo of war caused people to get caught up in war. And I saw how war thinking spread like a virus through people in the House of Representatives. Individuals who were otherwise fairly placid, even, would suddenly feel this need to just go to war.
And I began to study war. I learned that over 100 million people perished in the 20th century in wars; most of them civilians, non-combatants. I began to look at the philosophy behind war and the world views behind war and the individual views behind war and got to that question, "Is war inevitable?" And, "If it's not inevitable can we create structures in our society that can help us avert conflict before the conflict really starts?"
I looked at this issue of violence, not just as represented in the macrocosm, which war is, but in the microcosm: the wars which we fight every day in our own lives, which have a way of resonating in the society at large and then around the world.
The wars we fight every day in our own lives... I really thought about personal wars today--about all of those fights we take up with our mates and children and coworkers and politicians and neighbors and fellow drivers. We fight turf wars at work. We chase and race each other down the freeway and to the checkout counter to see who can get there first, and therefore win. We say we must "pick our battles" with our kids. What personal wars did you fight today?
The other quote from Kucinich in that Cronkite conversation that really resonated with me was one by Robert Kennedy. I tried to Google the quote while I was at work because I wanted to share it with a coworker, but astonishingly, the school district's internet "safe search" function has blocked access to the JFK Library. But here's Robert Kennedy's quote:
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
When I saw that it was a quote from a speech that Robert Kennedy delivered at the University of Capetown in South Africa as part of a Day of Affirmation in 1966, I grew curious. Tonight I went to the JFK Library website and listened to RFK deliver that speech while I read the transcript. I was stunned. I grew simultaneously teary and chilled while listening to his words. Replace the phrase "Negro American" with "African-American" and tell me that his 39-year-old speech isn't utterly timely today. In the wake of what has happened during Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Halliburton--all of it--listen to Kennedy's words as if they'd been written today.
Hearing RFK's voice all these years later, I instantly remembered the television images of his body lying on the floor of the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He'd just given a speech to celebrate his victory in the '68 California primary. And to think he was running against a PEACE candidate, Eugene McCarthy. What a very different world we might be living in if Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy, rather than Richard Nixon, had moved into the White House in January of '69. I remember feeling devastated by RFK's assassination, even though I was only 13. Think about those times. Three assassinations in five short years: JFK in November of '63, MLK in April of '68 and RFK just two months after that. And in my house, we spent years eating dinner while watching Walter Cronkite deliver the latest news on the Vietnam War on our big, old, boxy, two-channel, black-and-white TV.
Thirty-nine years after Robert Kennedy's speech in Capetown, we sat in our living rooms and watched tens of thousands of impoverished New Orleans residents go days without food and water. I find it very hard to believe that regardless of whatever political,
religious or economic dogma American citizens subscribe to, that their
hearts were not touched by the plight of those flood victims in New
Orleans.
And then we've got 89-year-old Walter Cronkite trying to generate support for a Department of Peace. Peace begins at home, and I don't mean inside my house--I mean inside my heart and mind. I'm going to spend some time examining the personal wars I choose to fight.
We talk about "fighting the war on poverty." Maybe we need to change our language, and therefore our mindset. Maybe we need to inextricably link peace and poverty in our minds. For how can any of us truly experience peace when our brothers and sisters are living in poverty?
I really do believe in the power of ripples. We can be, in RFK's words, a "center of energy and daring" whose ripples contribute to a mighty current of change. What loftier goal could there be than to strive to make the world a place where future generations might experience every day as a Day of Affirmation?
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