Teaching Peace in a Violent Culture (Hope Magazine Interview)

Questions for Colman, from Jon Wilson, Hope

1. How long would you say you’ve been working for

When I began writing columns for The Washington Post in 1969, at the height of the war carnage in Southeast Asia, I decided to focus on people, events and ideas that sought nonviolent solutions to conflict. It was a wide open field, with much of the media going the other way or seeing a peace beat as quaint but irrelevant. In time, I came to know, or write about, a long list of genuine peacebuilders: Sargent and Eunice Shriver, Jack Olender, Dorothy Day, Sean McBride, Ford Schumann, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Joan Baez, Mairead Corrigan, Anna and Sperry Lea, Adolpho Perez Esquivel, Gene and Abigail McCarthy, Philip and Jane Hart, Harold Hughes, Desmond Tutu, Bill Coffin, David Dellinger, Ginetta Sagan, people at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax Christi, Peace Action, the Catholic Worker.

But writing wasn’t enough. In 1982, I wanted to know: can peace be taught? If every human heart yearns for peace and if every government claims it wants peace, is it teachable. Only one way to find out. I asked the principle at the high school nearest my office at The Post if I could teach a course, as a volunteer, on solutions to violence. Sure, she said, give it a try.

I loved it. We read the literature of peace—from essays by Gandhi and Tolstoy to the resistance stories of Jeannette Rankin, Emily Balch, and the Danes in the early 1940s.

I’ve been volunteering at that school ever since. I took the course to American University a year or so later, then to Georgetown Law, the University of Maryland, and another high school. Now, five years after leaving The Post, I have classes at six schools: three universities and three high schools. It’s added up to more than 5,000 students in the pasts 20 years.

It’s the shame of American schools that the young are not taught even the basics about pacifism and nonviolence. We raise our children in a culture saturated with violence and then wonder why individuals, groups and nations keep opting for fists, guns and bombs as the way to settles differences.

In 1985, my wife and I began the Center for Teaching Peace, a non-profit that helps schools begin or expand academic programs in conflict resolution and peace studies. We market two texts: “Solutions to Violence” and “Strength Through Peace: the Ideas and People of Nonviolence.” We’re inundated with calls and requests. The motto of our center is , “the trouble with a good idea is that it soon degenerates into hard work.” So degeneracy works!

2. Was there an event, a series of events, or a

person in your life who catalyzed this interest in

you? If not, what do you feel did shape your

I went to a Jesuit college—Spring Hill, in Mobile, Alabama. The Jesuit fathers and brothers were spirited and kind men, but they gave space on the campus to Caesar: the ROTC program. Every Friday from noon to three, I’d see my college chums dress up like soldiers and, with the bugles blowing and flags waving, march around the drill field. What’s going on, I wondered? A campus ought to be a place where the force of ideas and the force of truth are honored, not the force of military violence. Along with a few others of like mind—it helped that we all had a rowdy bent—we’d disrupt the Friday drills. Nothing big. A prank here and there. But I used my column in the school newspaper to argue the case against the ROTC. I enjoyed the controversy, especially when the colonel running the program tried to get the Jesuits to boot me out.

3. Do you think that by nature you were a

“peacemaker,” even as a child, or not? Or were

there other factors at work?

My parents—my father was a country lawyer whose clients were mostly immigrants or poor people and my mother was a homemaker—were selfless, gentle and supportive to me and to my older brothers. I had loving and inspirational teachers in my elementary school and high school in Glen Head, Long Island. With these positive and nurturing examples, I had little reason to think there was a better way to live.

4. When you first began working in this area, was

it difficult to find allies, or did you feel you

were working rather alone?

Allies were everywhere. At The Post, my editor, Phil Geyelin, was a dream. He was generous with op-ed space. He was open to the off-beat. The Post newsroom brimmed with people of conscience: Morton Mintz, Bill Greider, Gene Patterson, Herblock, Mary McGrory, George Lardner, Hollie West, Sari Horwitz. Beyond The Post, I had friendships with I. F. Stone, George Seldes, Gilbert Harrison, Nat Hentoff, Roger Wilkins, Charlie Peters, Tom Gish—giants all.

5. Were you an educator or a journalist or a peace

activist first?

It began with journalism, and then naturally flowed into education and an alliance with pacifists. I remember something from Saul Bellow: “Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighing feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the undeveloped countries.” A love of people, whether those across the room or across an ocean, is essential for both writing and teaching.

6. How would you describe yourself/your work now?

As all three – or do you have an irreducible

descriptor for yourself?

All of us suffer from outrage overload. Our circuits can take only so many crises, so much governmental lying and warmaking, or corporate crimes, or personal affronts. Sometimes the struggle is merely to stay balanced, not to be overcome, to keep on as lovers of the long shot. My own imperfect solution is to try to be professionally angry but personally gentle. To stay angry, there are the obvious questions: how does public policy affect the powerless, how accountable are the powerful? To be gentle, there is the dailyness of listening well, doing favors for which you probably won’t be thanked, telling someone you love them, writing a letter in longhand, letting people finish their sentences, thanking those who rarely get thanked.

7. How would you define peace for our society and

civilization today? And what is peace for an

individual?

Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we’d all be good at it. Peace is the result of studying, learning and applying alternatives to violence, and if this were widespread, we’d have a truly humane society.

I spoke to a school board a while back about the need for peace studies in the county’s schools, beginning in first grade and right through college and graduate school. The board heard me out, but near the end one member said that he had a problem. “That phrase ‘peace studies,’” he said. “The word studies is okay but can you come up with another word besides peace? It might cause some difficulties among the parents.” I envisioned a headline in the paper the next day: “Studying Peace Threatens Stability of the County.” And this was an allegedly liberal school board! After I put together “Solutions to Violence,” an anthology of 85 peace essays, it took me seven years to get the book approved by the school board. Every syllable had to be checked for heresy.

8. How does the person of peace deal with his/her

outrage at injustice? How do any of us deal with

our outrage? (I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the

Lutheran pastor and theologian who was involved in

the plot to assassinate Hitler, and I understand

his rage – which got him hanged. What can we say

about such persons in the context of seeking peace,

and seeking justice?)

It’s essential not to worry about results. We are short-term beings up against long-term problems. Yet look around. Results can be found. The Soviet Union fell without a third world war, thanks to Lech Walesa, who started it all in Poland. Milosevic was brought down not by American pilots bombing Serbian people but by students organizing a nonviolent protest. Marcos was removed without a civil war.

In education, more than 70 colleges are offering degrees in peace studies, up from only one in 1970—little Manchester College in Indiana. A peace and justice studies association is in place. Peer mediation programs are now common in elementary schools. More and more college students are taking alternative spring breaks. Peace Corps enrollments are up, as are Americorps’ and Teach For America’s. Law schools are spending more money on programs in public interest law. Churches are sponsoring social justice programs. Much of this is fairly recent, if only we’d see it.

9.What about the chant, “No justice – no peace!”

How far do we go, in your opinion, to awaken fellow

citizens to the need for action?

Thanks to my wife, who is a Jungian scholar, I’ve read some Carl Jung. One of his most powerful thoughts has stayed with me: “It is not of vast importance that I make a career or achieve great things for myself. What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfil the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time for any other. Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness.” Devoting a few calories of energy spreading that message is a worthy days labor.

10. What do you think is the biggest obstacle to

peace that we face – both individually and

collectively, in this country?

Lack of imagination, lack of daring. The first day of every semester, I tell my students that in this class no one is allowed to ask questions. Questions are absolutely forbidden. Instead, be braver, bolder, be resilient: Don’t ask questions, question the answers. What answers? The ones that say the answer is violence. Whether military violence, domestic violence, economic violence, verbal violence—the whole rot. Questioning those answers takes imagination and daring. And we can get it by studying and learning the ideas and lives who have done it before us.

11. What can we do to change this? How do we create

a culture of peace – or is that an impossible

Schools need to be one of the major solutions. We have 78,000 elementary schools in this country, 31,000 high schools and 3,100 colleges and universities. All of those need to be teaching the basics of conflict resolution and the methods, history and practitioners of genuine peacemaking and the belief that we get strength through peace, not peace through strength. Right now, we have children in our first grades, second and third grades who in 15 or 20 years will be convicted and sent to prison for violent crimes. We also have children in those grades who one day will be in Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the corporate boardrooms. Unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence. Every conflict, whether in our personal lives or among nations, is faced through violent force or nonviolent force. No third option exists. It’s either prevention before the conflict with nonviolence or intervention after with violence.

Both violence and nonviolence have failed, but the worst failure—the bloodiest, the cruelest, the stupidest—has been violence. If violence were effective we would have had a peaceful world long ago.

We have extraordinary faith in violence, and at the same extraordinary skepticism of nonviolence. It needs to be the other way around. You can send a group of pacifists to a scene of conflict, and a certain number are killed or wounded. What’s society’s judgment? The damned idiots! Send in an army loaded with weapons and a certain number are killed or wounded. What’s the judgment? That’s war, no problem.

A double standard persists.

12. Of peace activists through time, who inspires

you the most, and why?

No need to go far back in time. The peace activist I most treasure is my wife, Mavourneen. We met in December 1967 and married the next month. I was for marrying the day after we met, but she asked, could we wait a few weeks. We had three children—boys—in the next six years. She has an immense capacity for kindness, for staying focused on the small things of the heart, for laughter, for being the most other-centered person I’ve ever known. Together, we’ve raised three teachers. I’ve interviewed all kinds of peace revolutionaries, but Mavourneen leads them all because she understood early in our marriage that the most revolutionary thing anyone can do is to raise honest, giving and compassionate children.

I’ve been lucky to know large numbers of genuine peacemakers. I came to Washington in 1966 to work for Sargent Shriver when he was starting the poverty program. We’ve been close friends ever since. No living American has done more to improve the lives of more people than Sargent Shriver. The programs he started are still in place: Peace Corps, Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services, Foster Grandparents, VISTA, Community Action. Plus, he and his wife Eunice have established Special Olympics as the world’s largest sports program as well as the world largest program for the mentally handicapped. Name another public figure who has done all that, plus raising five self-giving children.

13. In these times, is it possible or practicable

for many of us to emulate this person?

Sure. My wife’s kind of love is accessible to everyone: keep asking people what they are going through, and then acting on the answer. Love is not a mere emotion, it’s a call to action. And often the most ordinary of actions.

14. What are the most essential and important acts

of peacemaking that we can engage in on a daily

basis? (Put another way, what's the most important

thing we as individuals can or should do on behalf

When I was a boy, I caddied for a wonderful golfer named Tommy Bolt. He won the U.S. Open in 1958 in Tulsa. I ask him what was the most important shot in golf: “Son, it’s the one you’re about to hit.” The most important act of peacemaking? You’re next one. Few of us will ever be called on to do great things but all of us can do small things in a great way.

I gave a talk at the University of Kentucky a few years ago. My host was a woman in her mid-50s, a single mother. Over lunch, she told me that she used to be in the peace movement and had gone to all the antiwar marches in the 60’s. She’d picketed at the Pentagon. But now 25 years later, she said, she was no longer in the peace movement. Why not , I asked. She told about her son who was home from college during winter break. Driving home one night he skidded on some ice and crashed into a tree head-on. He severed his spinal cord. He couldn’t move from the neck down. The mother said she had enough insurance to put the boy in a nursing home. Or she could take care of him herself. She chose the second option. “That’s why,” she said, “I’m no longer in the peace movement.” Hold it, I said, “You’re a peace activist like you never were when hooting and hollering at the Pentagon. You’re taking care of your son. That’s your call to service. That’s true peacemaking.” She never won honorary degrees, was never asked to give speeches, never wrote books, was never sung. Yet she had as deep a commitment to the works of mercy and rescue as I’ve ever seen.

It’s a sad reality that so many of our heralded peacemakers were wretches are home. Gandhi was vindictive to his wife and sons, as was Tolstoy. Martin Luther was a pathetic husband. Einstein was emotionally cruel to his wives. Yet, look at Harry Truman. He idolized his wife and was the model family man. Then he dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killed tens of thousands of families.

15. Do you consider that you had to make a

transition from journalism to teaching peace? If

so, why? Did you feel that you were being “heard”

in your Washington Post columns? Do you think you

can have more of an effect, or a deeper effect, as

a teacher? Or is it a preference for seeing what

actually happens to persons that you work directly

Writing is thinking in private, teaching is thinking in public. The transition is natural because the goal is the same: offering information to people and then letting them embrace or reject it. With columns, you have an audience of millions. But they’re at a distance. In teaching, it’s a class of 25, 30 or 100 or so students—breathing and awake in front of you. The immediacy can be energizing. I had a high school student 13 years ago, a senior girl who was floating along and giving great effort to doing as little as possible academically. I took her and the class to a prison in Virginia, to spend an afternoon with men on death row. In talking with them, she was astonished to learn that few had lawyers to help them with appeals. That bothered her. She came back to school and began taking her studies seriously. She went to the University of Michigan, majored in criminal justice and graduated summa cum laude, at the top of her class. She joined Teach for America for three years. She applied to law school and was accepted at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown. She turned them all down and went to City University of New York, a scrappy public interest law school where cops, social workers and cab drivers go—people who see the problems in society and want to get a law degree to help solve them. My former student is now a public interest lawyer in New York City. I think it was that field trip to death row that stirred her then dormant social conscience.

I have hundreds of stories like that. Quality teaching is about helping students discover their gifts, starting with the gift of peacebuuilding.

16. What are your thoughts on demonstrations for

peace – how effective are they, and what kind of

effects are they having, in your opinion?

Demonstrations are fine, but without long-haul follow-up they aren’t much more than street theater. It’s one thing to carry anti-war signs and chant through bullhorns, but after the agonizing there needs to be organizing—starting with self-organizing. Jim Douglass, a stalwart of the peace movement says that before we disrupt the system with our commitment to nonviolence, let’s disrupt our own lives. One way to do that is to live as simply as possible, by figuring out the difference between what we need and what we want. That leads to the purest form of liberation. Socrates had a line: I love to walk through the marketplace and see all the things I can live without. We ought to put those words atop the gate of every shopping mall in America.

17. How can those who want peace and not war

counter the efforts to marginalize and minimize

their numbers and natures? When they are seen as

“unrealistic,” or “fuzzy-headed,” or even

“unpatriotic?”

That’s easy: just ignore the marginalizers and minimizers, most of whom work for the corporate media. Instead of relying on the networks, large dailies and conglomerate publishing houses, get information from small magazines like The Progressive, Sojourners, the National Catholic Reporter, Peaceworks, Hope—definitely Hope!—Pacifica radio, and publishers like Orbis and Common Courage.

18. How has teaching classes in peace and

peacemaking changed you, if at all?

I’ve calmed down a bit. I used to salivate to win arguments. But it’s less and less now. Even though we don’t see eye with someone, we can always talk heart to heart. I’ve come to have great affection for students who disagree with me. It takes courage to tell your teachers that they’re absurdly wrongheaded. I had a student at Georgetown Law some years ago. Actually she was a student—an English major-- at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. She’d read an antiwar column I’d written in the early 90s when the U.S. invaded Panama. She wrote a letter saying how ill-informed I was. I arranged to have the letter printed in The Post, side by side with my reply. After it ran—with a picture of the uniformed Middie and me posing at the academy under a 15’ foot cannon that John Paul Jones allegedly fired—I suggested that if she really wanted a dialogue, come to my weekly class at Georgetown Law. She did, driving over every Tuesday afternoon the whole spring semester. I was touched by that.

She told me how odd it was. Students at the law school saw her walking around in her white uniform and concluding that she was a rabid militarist, while back at the academy her classmates suspected she had gone over to the other side, hanging out with all those longhair liberal subversives. She invited me to her graduation where I met her parents. The Navy stationed her in San Diego. Off duty, she began volunteering at a homeless shelter. At night, she went to law school. She’s no a civilian and a public interest lawyer.

19. What's the most surprising thing you’ve learned

in doing this work in the various areas where

you’ve focused your energy, i.e., schools,

colleges, prisons?

I’ve learned that St. Francis of Assisi was right: preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.

20. Among the above contexts, do you have a

favorite? Can you say why, if so?

With students, you can never tell. I have ones who made straight As and then went out and flunked life, and others who were half-awake back row dreamers but are now using their gifts fully to decrease violence and increase peace.

I saw it in my three boys. They all loved sports. Two of them so loved baseball that they paid little attention to their studies in high school or college. I didn’t worry. They had a passion for something. The energy of that passion can always be shifted. It’s the apathetic kids you worry about. Both boys played Division I college ball, one made it to the minors. But now they are both thriving as teachers and coaches. The old saying is true: do what you love and the money will follow. My third lad had a passion for politics and public issues. He now has his own company, one that helps Indian tribes deal with the Ungreat White Fathers in Washington.

In my classes, I try to teach desire-based, not fear-based, learning. I deemphasize grades, testing and homework. Those are all forms of academic violence—no trouble getting students to agree with that juicy little theory! All too often, schools process their students, as if they’re slabs of cheese going to Velveeta High on their way to Cheddar U and Parmesan grad school.

Schools have two kinds of teachers—those who want power over their students, and those who want power with. Students are looking for the second. Then you have teachers who want their students to learn how to think, which is fine. But the better teachers are those want the students to learn how to think—and learn how to care.

That’s where field trips come. I do as many of them as possible, because it’s experiential knowledge, not theoretical. We teachers are forever packing ideas and theories into the kid’s heads. They leave our schools idea-rich but experience poor. Unbalanced people. The remedy? Fields trips to the prisons, the shelters, the literacy centers, the battered women’s refuges. And then come back to the classroom and figure out want governmental policies are keep the poor poor, or the prisons jammed with the mentally ill and addicted who need treatment, not punishment. What political decisions are being made that direct the nation’s wealth to military programs meant to kill rather than to social programs meant to heal. That’s the hard part for students—making the connections between the reality of their service and the reality of politics, and then getting the skills to keep working at both.

21. What are the hardest parts of doing this work?

There’s nothing hard at all. It’s not even work. Mark Twain said that work is what we do when we’d rather be doing something else. It’s been a pure blessing that I’ve been paid to write. It came to about four million words for The Post, and a million or so more for magazines and books. Professionally, I wouldn’t have wanted to anything else. The same with teaching. At my three high schools, I’m a volunteer . My wife and I live simply, our boys went to public schools, I paid off our mortgage years ago from a court settlement over a bicycle crash—the D.C. government had neglected for years to fill the pothole that sent me flying. So the money worries are few. . The spiritual and emotional rewards are large compensations in themselves.

22. What are your thoughts on teaching peace as

part of the curriculum in school? Should we? Is it

more than conflict resolution? How do we do it?

It’s not hard to teach. Just read the literature of peace, ask the students to write about it, discuss it in class. You could create a course on Gandhi alone. Or Tolstoy. King. Dorothy Day. The Danish Resistance. Family conflict resolution. Nonviolent eating. The literature is vast. Students are always amazed how much of it there is.

I had a student at Georgetown Law three years ago named Nathaniel Mills. He had graduated the year before but came back to take the course—for no credit. He’d already passed the bar. But he was curious about pacifism and nonviolence. He threw himself into the readings. When the semester ended, a change came over him. Why did I become a lawyer, he asked himself, when he could be teaching peace. I suggested he come hang around the high schools where I was teaching. He did. Now he’s at two of them, teaching peace studies. He resigned from the District of Columbia bar. I was heartened by his dedication, although I shouldn’t have been. Nathaniel is an athlete. He competed on three U.S. Olympic teams as a speed skater. Few people make one team. He made three. The fire and self-discipline that took him to the top in sports is the same that brought him to the classrooms of two DC public high schools, which are among the poorest in the nation.

23. Do you see any trends toward more schools

incorporating peace curricula?

It depends on the local school boards, individual principals, the parents, plus student interest. I lecture a lot at colleges and high schools. I try to sell the idea that peace education ought to be a basic. Would we dare send our children through 12 years of elementary school and high school with no course in math or science? No. It’s 12 years of each. Why not 12 years of peace education, which you’ll use for the rest of your life in a way that won’t be using algebra, geometry or chemistry—if you ever need them at all. How often do you with your spouse or partner about trapezoids, bonkazoids, dorkazoids, crankazoids—do I have all these right? Yet we talk about conflicts all the time. A study from the American Psychological Association said that the average American family, when its together, has a conflict every eight minutes. And those are the functional families!

So peace education involves much more than taking on militarism or opposing the death penalty. It begins with who were living with. The leading cause of injury among American women is being beaten at home—by a husband, boyfriend, ex-husband, ex-boyfriend. Many women have more to worry about when they walk in the front door than when they walk out. I’m convinced that we could lower the rates of spouse abuse if schools taught the basic of conflict resolution with the same academic rigor that we teach math and the rest.

24. What sustains you in times like this, when the

threat of war seems to loom closer every day?

Don’t think about threats of war, think about the realities of war. By latest count, more than 50 wars or conflicts are raging around the world. The U.S. isn’t threatening war against the Iraqi people. That war has been going on since 1991, whether through regular bombing runs or the economic sanctions. Even then, that’s only one war zone. By latest count, more than 50 wars or conflicts are raging. An estimated 40,000 people are killed a month, mostly the poor killing the poor. Wealthy people rarely see combat. Think back to Vietnam. Only one member of Congress had a son who fought. George W. Bush supported the war, but it wasn’t for him. Richard Cheney was all for the war, but he won five deferments so he wouldn’t go. No did other war enthusiasts—Paul Wolfowitz, George Will, Pat Buchanan, .Newt Gingrich.

25. What do you think about the office of the

President of the United States when the person in

office chooses a military strategy because of his

belief in the “rightness” of that strategy – but

it’s far from a unanimously held belief among the

citizenry? What does a citizenry do when its

Commander in Chief is so committed to aggression,

and so dismissive of dissent?

I can’t get whipped into a frenzy about the war policies of the current president. Every president, going back to General George Washington, General Andrew Jackson, General William Harrison, General U.S. Grant, General Dwight Eisenhower, has been a believer in the war ethic. The founding fathers, who were militarists, made sure by getting the phrase “commander in chief” into the constitution, plus telling Congress in the early articles that it is empowered to declare war and raise money for the military.

And has it ever. The last fiscal year, the military budget totaled $355 billion. That number is too large, unless you’re an astronomer. Broken down, it comes to $972 million a day, which is still ungraspable, or more than $11,000 a second. $11,000. $11,000. $11,000. $11,000. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. $972 million a day is four times larger than the Peace Corps budget for a year. It’s five times the Teach for America budget for a year. The numbers are still a bit abstract. To make them real, the War Resister League reports that 49 percent of all federal discretionary funding goes to the military—or about $3,000 annualy per taxpayer.

And what are getting for all that money. Less and less security. We have the FBI to protect us, the CIA, the Pentagon and now the Homeland Security Agency. The military used to be run by the Department of War. Then in 1947, Congress changed it to the

Department of Defense—sounds much better. Pretty soon, it’ll be changed to the Department of Love—or under our pious and devout current commander-in-chief, the Department of God’s Children. The talk in Washington now is that the military budget will reach $500 billion a year by 2010.

George W. (for War) Bush is not the problem. Nor is the high spending Congress that oils the war machine. I’m the problem. I need to figure out how to be a better husband, a better father, a better writer, a better teacher. And all of us need to figure out what our commitments are and do more to fulfill them. On one of his good days, Gandhi had it right: “If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” Tolstoy—with whom Gandhi exchanged many letters—had the same thought: “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing themselves.”

26. What do you think it means about Americans when

approval ratings tend to rise after a president

enters or starts a war? Are we, at heart, more

attracted to might than diplomacy? How can we

change this, if so?

We can’t do much about today’s enthusiasm for a war president, but about the presidents in 2030 or 2050 or 3003 we can do a lot. Let’s begin to educate future presidents. Let’s educate future parents. Let’s educate future everyvbodies. We can’t change history but we can change the future. Go become a nuisance at the school board meetings. Organize parents to persuade principals to champion peace education.

Repeat the advice Prince Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian sage, gave to students: “think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to build that world. Demand that your teachers teach you that.”

I try to avoid using the word “war.” It comes from the old high German, meaning organized confusion. I’d rather use an accurate word, slaughter. So instead of the Second World War, or the Vietnam War or the Persian Gulf War, let’s be honest and accurate at least and say the Second World Slaughter, the Vietnam Slaughter, the Persian Gulf Slaughter.

27.In working with students of all ages and

backgrounds, what can you say about the “blind

spot” that allows us to believe we have the “right

and responsibility” to start wars?

When speaking to college or high school audiences, I do a spot quiz. I hold up a $100 bill. Whoever can identify the following six people gets the $100. I call out the names: Robert E. Lee. Ulysses S. Grant. Paul Revere. Nearly all hands go up. Then I call out three more names: Jeannette Rankin. Jody Wiliams. Emily Balch. The last three draw blank stares. I’ve done this quiz before teacher audiences. No one’s ever gotten the $100. Everyone knows about the men who break the pace but not the women who make the peace. We aren’t teaching peace or the peacemakers. So the blind spot remains.

I never worry about losing the $100. It’s safe money. I can always count on American education.

28. If you could ask one person from all of history

just one question, who and what would the person

and question be?

St. Francis: why didn’t you wear warmer clothes, eat nutritious food and take better care of your health, you mule-headed Italian, so you could have lived into your 80s and 90s and kept on troublemaking, and not died at 43? And no lame answer, please, that you were an ascetic. You want asceticism? Live to 100 and preach the gospel. If necessary, use Vitamin C!

29. All right, you oppose military solutions but what do you say, as a pacifist, when asked for your solution to 9/11?

For many, 9/11 became a license for the U.S. to go a killing spree, which it did the following month in Afghanistan. This was consistent with what Martin Luther King, Jr., said April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” He was right then and is right now. Since 1945, U.S. presidents and Congresses have dispatched soldiers to kill or threaten to kill people—mostly bombing—in China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Yemen. In no case did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result.

After 9/11, we had four options: military, political, legal and moral. Predictably, the military prevailed: got a problem, go bomb somebody.

The political solution: follow our own advice when we tell Israelis and Palestinians, or the factions in Northern Ireland, or the factions in Sierra Leone, or the factions anywhere—sit down, talk, compromise, negotiate, reconcile, stop killing each other. Sound advice. Why don’t we follow it ourselves.

This is dismissed as naïve: you can’t talk with evildoers like Osama, al-quaeda, or Saddam Hussein.

That was the thinking in the early 1970s when the evildoers and major threats were the Chinese Communists who had the weapons and hordes to take over the world. But then Richard Nixon went to China, talked, compromise, negotiated, reconciled and dealt. The Chinese sent him home with a bag of ping pong balls and two pandas, and now China is a trading partner. The political solution worked. Ronald Reagan, who in 1986, called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world,” went to Moscow. He talked, compromised, negotiated, reconciled and dealt. They sent him home with a bottle of vodka and now Russia is a close ally. Once again, a political solution worked.

Compared to the Chinese and Soviet dictators, bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are mosquitoes.

The legal solution: the last dictator to fall was Milosovec. It was well-organized students, not U.S. pilots bombing Belgrade, who brought him down. No one was killed in the two years of protest and resistance. Milosovec is not getting legal due process, on trial in The Hague for war crimes. The people who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 were arrested, convicted and sent to prison. They had due process. It could have worked with Saddam Hussein or bin Laden.

The moral solution: three days after 9/11, Bush and his war council went to the National Cathedral in Washington for a prayer service. A Catholic cardinal came, a rabbit, an imam, Billy Graham and assorted reverends offered prayerful succor. They recited Lord’s prayer, included the most ignored words in history” “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” On 9/11 some people did trespass in New York and Washington. We’re they forgiven? It was the opposite: let’s go kill them. If you’re going to say the Lord’s Prayer, mean it, but don’t use it in fake piety for your grubby political goals. The moral solution would have moved us to forgive the planners of 9/11 and then asked them to forgive us of all our violence—much worse when our decades of bombing people is recalled—and then say let’s start over, the old way of violence is not working.

U.S foreign policy is based on the izes: theorize, demonize, victimize and rationalize. Bush theorized about Iraq’s threat, he demonized Saddam Hussein, he victimized Iraqis at the other end of the bombing runs, and then rationalized it as the way to peace.

Two types of violence exist: hot and cold. Hot is felt, visceral, visual, obscenely cruel, immediate, and well-reported by the media: the World Trade Center, the Columbine High School massacre, the sniper attacks in Washington. Cold violence is unfelt, distant, out of sight and generally ignored by the media: the 40,000 people who die of hunger-related or preventable diseases every day. Executions on death row. The 12 million animals killed every day for food. But how can we be selective about violence? The victims are dead either way. Yet selectivity prevails. On 9/11, 9/12. 9/13 and all days since, 40,000 people died of hunger and preventable diseases. Why so little attention to that violence?

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