From Columnist to Teacher of Peace (WaPo years reflection)

Included among the blessings of writing columns for nearly 30 years at The Washington Post was having access to the world’s peacemakers. In interviews there were the Nobel Peace Prize winners: Mairead Corrigan from Ireland, Adolfo Perez Esquivel from Argentina, Mother Teresa from Calcutta and Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh. I spent time with Dorothy Day, both at her house of hospitality in the Lower East Side of New York and the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, New York. I came to know Joan Baez, whether she was a guest in my home or in our many conversations backstage after her concerts. There was Daniel Berrigan who I first met in 1967 when he was a volunteer literacy teacher for the children of migrant workers in a Colorado program run by the Office of Economic Opportunity. In political Washington, the peacemakers I sought out were giants in the Senate: Philip Hart, Gene McCarthy, Paul Simon, Mark Hatfield, Paul Wellstone, Patrick Leahy. In the House of Representatives, there was Andy Jacobs, Marcy Kaptur, David Bonior, Bernie Sanders, Jim McGovern, Ron Wyden, Patricia Schroeder.

In hundreds of journeys around the country, whether in the loneliest mountain hollows of Appalachia or the overcrowded housing projects of inner cities, I never failed to find an unsung peacemaker doing the works of mercy or rescue.

Whether speaking with the known or unknown, the question I always managed to ask was the basic one: what’s an effective way of increasing peace and decreasing violence? The answers rarely differed: go where people are, people who are having or will be having conflicts in their lives.

I heeded the advice. In the early 1980s I went to a public high school near my office at the Post and volunteered to teach a weekly seminar. The principal assumed I wanted to teach a journalism course. Thanks, I said, but I’d rather teach peace. Give it a try, she said, but there’s a problem.