Teaching Peace in a Violent World (California Lecture)

Dear Susan:

This is the lecture I gave at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Feb. 15, 2008. It’s much the same as the others. I do about 30 talks a year.

Edit any way you like.

Peace, and a little extra—

Colman McCarthy

As a journalist in Washington since the mid-1960s, I’ve had lucky breaks landing interviews with some of the world’s enduring peacemakers. Among them were Desmond Tutu from South Africa, Mairead Corrigan from Belfast, Adolfo Perez Esquivel from Buenos Aires, Mother Teresa from Calcutta and Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh: all Nobel Peace Prize winners. There were also those who deserved Nobels: Sargent and Eunice Shriver, Dorothy Day, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Joan Baez, Jeannette Rankin, Philip Hart, Mark Hatfield, Mubarak Awad and a long list of others.

Toward the end of the interviews, which is often when you get the most candid answers, I would ask a pair of basic questions. What is peace? And how can each of us increase it while decreasing violence.

On the definitional question, agreement was reached. Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we’d all be good at it.

The second question almost always had the same answer: go where people are. All that’s happening is people and nations having conflicts--and solving them knowingly and morally with nonviolent force or unknowingly and immorally with violent force. No third way exists.

I heeded the peacemakers’ advice: The sure place to find large numbers of people is in America’s 78,000 elementary schools, 32,000 high schools and more than 4,000 universities, colleges and community colleges. In the early 1980s, I went to a public high school near my office at The Washington Post to ask the principal if I could teach a course on alternatives to violence. Give it a try, she said: but there’s a problem, the school is poor and can’t afford to pay you.

I didn’t come for money, I said. I’ll volunteer. That semester, 25 juniors and seniors at the School Without Walls enrolled in my course “Alternatives to Violence.” It wasn’t difficult to teach. We started with the literature of peace, reading Gandhi, Tolstoy, Einstein, Thomas Merton, Jane Addams, Gene Sharp, A.J. Muste, Jesus, Francis, Amos, Isaiah, Buddha , Sojourner Truth, Addin Ballou, George Fox, Barbara Deming, Dorothy Day, John Woolman and a long list of others. And that was on the first day! Then we really got into it!

After rattling off those names, unfailingly and often bafflingly, a student would call out, “how’d you ever hear of all those people? How come we haven’t heard of them?”

They hadn’t heard because they had gone to conventional schools where everything except peace is taught. To drive home the point, and drive it visually, I pulled out a $100 bill. I held it high and announced a spot quiz. Identify the following six people and you get the $100. Teenagers focus rather quickly when a try for easy money is offered. I began the quiz: who is Robert E. Lee? Most hands rose. Then Ulysses S. Grant. Most hands again. The same for Paul Revere. By now, capitalistic fantasies of an after-school spending spree were rising.

Just three to go for the $100, I said. Who is Emily Balch? No hands go up. Who is Jeannette Rankin? Blanks on that one. Who is Jody Williams? Silence.

I’ve given the $100 bill quiz before hundreds of high school and college audiences. I’ve done it before large audiences of teachers. No one has ever won the $100. I never worry about losing it. I can always count on American education, and how it assures that the young are well-informed about militarists who break the peace and ill-informed on those who make the peace.

The course went well that first year. Teaching peace was as easy as breathing. I was invited to teach a class at another school--Bethesda-Chevy Chase High in suburban Washington and then to Wilson High in the District of Columbia, again volunteering. Within a few years I found the time and energy to teach peace courses at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, the University of Maryland and the Washington Center for Internships. Since 1982, I’ve had more than 8,000 students in my classes. Since leaving The Post in 1997, I currently teach at seven schools in the Fall, six in the Spring and two in the Summer.

That first school, by the way, was perhaps the poorest in America: it had no cafeteria, no gym, no auditorium, no athletic fields, no lockers, poor heating and in recent years no clean drinking water. Something else was noteworthy: the poorest school in America was also the closest school to the White House. Five blocks away. We keep inviting presidents to come by. None have. George W. Bush has been especially busy, traveling the land giving speeches on school reform, as in Leave No Child Untested. My students don’t feel slighted. They aren’t into big shots. They favor long shots, because they know that’s what they are. So they work twice as hard to make it in life.

Peace education is in its infancy. In 1970, only one American college was offering a degree in Peace Studies: Manchester College, a Church of the Brethren school in Indiana. More than 70 colleges and universities currently offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in conflict resolution, with more than 300 offering minors and concentrations. Although the message is getting through, that unless we teach our children peace someone else will teach them violence, no one should be deluded. The day is far away

when the teaching of peace is given the academic attention that goes to conventional subjects. My high school students will graduate with only that one course in peace studies. Counting elementary school, they will have been in classrooms for 12 years. Would we ever let students go through 12 years of school with only one math course? Or only one science course? And yet, we keep telling the young that nothing is more important than peace. It’s natural for them to be disbelieving, otherwise school boards would see that the study of peace was given as primary a place in the curriculum as any other essential subject.

Even muscling one course into one school takes some extraordinary flexing. A while back I was invited by a school board to speak about peace education. After 20 minutes, I thought I was making progress. Board members listened politely and asked relevant questions. My goal was to move the board to get one peace studies class into each of the county’s 22 high schools. Just one course. One period a day. An elective for seniors. Nothing grandiose.

I was already a volunteer peace teacher at one of the county’s high schools, so I wasn’t whizzing in as a theorist with a lofty idea but let someone else do the work. At the end of my talk, a board member confessed to having a problem. Peace studies, he said. Is there another phrase? The word studies was okay, but peace? It might raise concerns in the community. I envisioned a newspaper headline: “Peace Studies Proposal Threatens Stability in the County’--with a sub-head, “School Board Nixes Bizarre Proposal.” And this was in an allegedly liberal bluer than blue county.

Unable to rouse the school board, I tried the school system’s curriculum office. It was an end run, and there’s always an end to run around if you look hard enough. I had edited a textbook, “Solutions to Violence,” a 16 chapter collection of 90 essays that ranged from Gene Sharp’s “The Technique of Nonviolent Action” to Dorothy Day’s “Love Is the Measure.” After some half-dozen meetings with assorted bureaucrats, papercrats and educrats, as well as meetings with principals and social studies teachers at several high schools, I began to realize that public schools are government schools. Teachers are government workers. Caution prevails. It took six years to get the book approved. I’d already been using it in my own course all that time, slipping it in like contraband. Fittingly, I’d start each semester by reading and discussing Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty Civil Disobedience.” Dutiful me.

Whether in the high school, college or law school classes, students would usually divide into two groups. One would bond intellectually, and often quickly, with Gandhi’s belief that “nonviolence is the weapon of the strong” and agree with Hannah Arendt that “violence, like all action, changes the world but the most probably change is to a more violent world.” Another group came in loaded with doubts, which I encouraged them to express. Nonviolence and pacifism are beautiful theories, they said, but in the real world there are muggers on the streets and international despots on the prowl. So let’s keep our fists cocked and our bomb bays opened.

All I asked of the skeptics was that they think about this: do you depend on violent force or nonviolent force to create peace. Not merely peace in some vague “out there,” but, first off, in our homes. I had a student pull me aside on leaving class after we’d spent a week on Gandhi’s essay “The Doctrine of the Sword.” It’s good to learn about that, she said, but what about the war zone in her home, where her mother and father regularly battle each other emotionally, verbally and often physically. How do we stop that war?

Valid question. Perhaps if her parents had gone to schools where nonviolent conflict resolution skills and methods were systematically taught, the living room wars might never have erupted. The leading cause of physical injury to American women is being beaten by a man they are living with—husband or boyfriend, ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. The emotional violence between couples can only be imagined. I’m convinced much of it could be prevented if our schools taught the basic skills of mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution. It’s easier to build a peaceful child than to repair a violent adult.

Peace teachers have no illusions that exposing students to the literature of peace

and the methods of nonviolence will cause governments to start stockpiling plowshares, not swords, or that the young will instantly convert to Franciscan pacifism. But what isn’t illusory is that when effectively organized nonviolent force is far more powerful than the gun or bomb.

Where has it worked? In only the past quarter-century, at least six brutal regimes have been overthrown by people who had no weapons of steel but only what Einstein called “weapons of the spirit.”

On February 26, 1986, a frightened Ferdinand Marcos, once a ruthless and U.S. supported ruler of the Philippines but now just another powerless rogue, fled to exile in Hawaii. As staged by nuns, students and human rights workers--many of them trained in Boston by Gene Sharp—a three year nonviolent revolt brought him down.

On October 5, 1988, Chile’s despot and another U.S. favorite, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was driven from office after five years of strikes, boycotts and other forms of nonviolent resistance. A Chilean organizer who led the demand for free elections said, “We didn’t protest with arms. That gave us more power.”

On August 24, 1989 in Poland, the Soviet puppet regime of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski fell. On that day it peacefully ceded power to a coalition government created by the Solidarity labor union that for a decade used nonviolent strategies to overthrow the communist dictator. Few resisters were killed in the nine year struggle.

The example of Poland’s successful nonviolence spread, with the Soviet Unions collapse coming soon after. It wasn’t oratory by Ronald Reagan or the pope that first stoked the end of the Cold War. It was the heroic deeds of Leach Walensa and the nonviolent Poles he and others organized. They didn’t bring the Soviets to their knees, they brought them to their senses.

On May 10, 1994 former prisoner Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa. It was not armed combat that ended white supremacy. It was the moral force of organized nonviolent resistance that made it impossible for the racist government to control the justice-demanding population.

On April 1, 2001 in Yugoslavia, Serbian police arrested Slobodan Milosevic for his crimes while in office. In the two years that a student-led protest rallied citizens to defy the dictator, not one resister was killed by the government. The tyrant was put on trial in The Hague, but died before a verdict was reached.

On Nov. 23, 3003 the bloodless “revolution of roses” toppled Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. Unlike the country’s civil war that marked the power struggles in the 1990’s, no deaths or injuries occurred when tens of thousands of Georgians took to the streets of Tblisi in the final surge to oust the government.

In the mid-1980s, who would have thought this possible? Yet it happened. Ruthless regimes, backed by torture chambers, were driven from power by citizens who had no guns, tanks, bombs or armies. They had a superior arsenal: the moral power of justice, the strength of will and the toughness of patience.

Yet we still see these victories as flukes. Theodore Roszak explains: “The usual pattern seems to be that people give nonviolence two weeks to solve their problems and then decide it has ‘failed.’ Then they go on with violence for the next hundred years and it seems never to fail or be rejected.”

During these years of nonviolent successes, the failures of violence were rampant. The United States government, which Martin Luther King, Jr., in his prophetic sermon on April 4, 1967 in Riverside Church in New York City, called the “world’s greatest purveyor of violence,” prowled the world trying to heel it with bullets and bullying. The pattern of dominance and intervention was set after World War II. As compiled by historian William Blum, these are the countries--and men, women and children living in them--that American pilots have bombed since 1945: China (1945-46), Korea (1950-53) China (1950-53) Guatemala (1954) Indonesia (1958) Cuba (1959-60), Guatemala (1960) Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-74), Cambodia (1969-70), Guatemala (1967-69), Libya (1986), Grenada (1983), El Salvador ( 1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-2008) Sudan (1998), Afghanistan (1998-2008), Yugoslavia (1999).

After discussing that list in my peace classes, I give the students a multiple choice quiz. In how many of those countries did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result of the U.S. killing spree? Choose one: (a) none (b) zero (c) not a one (d) naught (e) a whole number between -1 and +1.

No one has ever flunked the quiz! Pick a, b, c, d or e and it’s a guaranteed A!

That’s one way to give a lesson on the failures of violent conflict resolution. Another is to read the essay by Daniel Berrigan from his autobiography, “To Dwell in Peace”: “Blood and iron, nukes and rifles. The leftists kill the rightists, the rightists kill the leftists, both, given time and occasion, kill the children, the aged, the ill, the suspects. Given time and occasion, both torture prisoners. Always, you understand, inadvertently, regretfully. Both sides, moreover, have excellent intentions, and call on God to witness them. And some god or other does witness them, if we can take the word of whatever bewitched church.

“And of course, nothing changes. Nothing changes in Beirut, in Belfast, or in Galilee, as I have seen. Except that the living die. And that old, revered distinction between combatant and noncombatant, which was supposed to protect the innocent and helpless, goes down the nearest drain, along with the indistinguishable blood of any and all.

“Alas, I have never seen anyone morally improved by killing—neither the one who aimed the bullet, nor the one who received it in his or her flesh.”

A crucial part of peace education is to combine ideas with action. Conventional teachers, either through inertia or fear of not producing students who score well on the latest exam dreamed up by testocrats, keep pumping theories into the minds of students. The result? People who are theory-rich but experience poor. Unbalanced ones, and too often grade mongers who have forgotten Walker Percy’s line, “you can make all A’s in school and go out and flunk life.”

One solution is service learning, the growing movement to move students out of classrooms and into the scenes of poverty and despair. I’ve taken my high school, college and law classes into prisons, impoverished schools, the shelters and soup kitchens—sometimes to be of real service, other times merely to see, smell and feel what it’s like to be broke and broken. Those are the places to understand the truth of Sargent Shriver’s call: “The cure is care. Caring for others is the practice of peace. Caring becomes as important as curing Caring produces the cure, not the reverse. Caring about nuclear war and its victims is the beginning of a cure for our obsession with war. Peace does not come through strength. Quite the opposite. Strength comes through peace.”

I took my Georgetown Law students recently to a women’s shelter, about a mile from the school but economically a universe away. Some Carmelite nuns, skilled in the works of mercy and rescue, serve about 40 homeless women. I take my classes there often, to see a sermon rather than hear a sermon. When we arrived late afternoon we went to the dining room where the women were hunched over their soup and saltines. The class looked on in wonder. Who are these women? How did they fall to the streets? The law students, some quicker than others, got the picture. These are people outside the law. These are people for whom the law represents only one thing: the failure of love.

While speaking with one of the Carmelite nuns, I said that I’d like to help out: I’ll go back to my neighborhood to collect some food and clothing for the homeless women, and bring it in next Saturday.

“Oh, how wonderful ,” said the nun. “I can’t tell you how deeply touched I am. I love it when you NPR and C-SPAN liberals come around with your Volvos filled up with food and clothing. It moves my heart. It’s indescribable.”

The good nun, I fear, had a cynical side to herself, which occasionally flared. It was the beginning of Lent, so she was probably doing penance by eating lemons for dinner which put her in a foul mood right about then. But she recovered: “If you’d really like to help, just go talk to that lady in the corner.” She pointed to a bedraggled, wrinkled skinned woman, sitting alone. She had the misery of the earth in her sunken eyes. “Just talk to her?’ I asked. “That’s all?” “Yes,” the nun said. “You’ll be doing plenty. We are doing fine with food and clothing but we don’t have enough people who will just come in and talk with the women. The hardest thing about street life, especially for women, is the loneliness.”

Many of the law students did sit with the women that day, just to talk. Many went back on their own for regular visits, to learn these were human beings, not bag ladies. When I catch up with my law students five, 10 or 20 years later, I ask them what they remember from my class. I expect they’ll tell me about that brain-stretching day when we all discussed the nuances of the 9th and 14th amendments. For some reason, they forget that. Instead, they talk about the time we went to the homeless shelter. It woke them up and shook them up. Many went into poverty law, or public interest law or welfare reform law or lady-in-the-corner law.

The lesson that day goes to the core of peacemaking, as told to me once by Mother Teresa: “Few of us will even be called on to great things but all of us can do small things in a great way.”

I work with a girls boarding school that is blessed with an enlightened headmistress who cancels classes every Wednesday and sends her students into Washington for internships. This is experiential, not theoretical, learning, not to be flushed away after the last exam. For the past few years, I have had two or three girls from the Madeira School help teach my classes in one of my public high schools--Wilson High which has six police stationed in the halls, each officer carrying a high-powered weapon and wearing a bullet-proof vest.

High school administrators tend to see non-classroom learning as unproductive. Keep teenagers, especially seniors and juniors who need to be prepped for college, cooped in sterile idea-driven classrooms, especially the AP classrooms that will secure them room and board in the Ivies and Little Ivies. Too often we process students as if they were slabs of cheese—enrolled in Velveeta High, on their way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella grad school.

Serving food to homeless people, tutoring illiterate prisoners or mentoring a Special Olympics athlete is useful but it can remain idle charity unless twinned with an awareness of politics. At a basic level, and well away from party platforms, focus groups and candidates’ promises, politics is about one reality: who decides where the money goes. Which policy decisions keep more money flowing to military contractors to build weapons and less to building contractors to build affordable housing for the working poor? Which politicians sanction packing our prisons with people who are drug addicted or mentally ill and who need to be treated, not punished? Which lobbies allow tax laws to be written so loopholes get widened for corporations, while rules for home foreclosures get tightened? Which policies allow the Peace Corps and Americorps budgets to languish and let the military budget flourish? Which politicians allowed military spending to rise more than 60 percent since 2001, while everyday in the Third World more than 35,000 people die from hunger or preventable diseases.

Why does all that keep happening? Finding answers is the tough part of peace education, learning the connections between the inequities and the structural violence behind them.

A full semester, not a few days in a peace class, could be devoted to the politics of money. The current military and security budget, according to the Center for Defense Information, a Washington non-profit staffed mostly by former military officers and Pentagon workers, is $878 billion. Unless you are an astronomer, the number is too large to grasp. Breaking it down, the spending comes to about $2.5 billion a day—a sum that is 10 times more than the Peace Corps budget for a full year. $2.5 billion is still ungraspable. It totes to $28,000 a second. $28,000. $28,000. The seconds tick. $28,000. $28,000.

Even that number can remain abstract. It’s the government’s money, we think, forgetting from whom the government collects the loot. Depending on your tax brackets, an American family can pay $5,000, $10,000 , and often more, in annual federal taxes that is directed by Congress to the military. Martin Luther King, Jr., in that same Riverside Church sermon, saw it clearly: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Every year some 10,000 citizens break free and refuse to pay federal taxes that go to war. They are not tax cheats or tax evaders. They are acting out of conscience, a kind based on the idea that if killing people is not the way to solve conflicts then so also is paying soldiers to do the killing. Conscientious tax refusers are more than willing to pay their full share for any federal program, except ones that sanctions killing in the name of national security. No conscientious tax refuser has ever taken a case to the Supreme Court and won. It’s rare that a case gets past a lower court. The reason? Nowhere in the Constitution can the word conscience be found. It’s not there, even though you’d think Jefferson or Madison might have slipped in it when the Founders were nodding off after a long day.

After 9/11 peace teachers found ourselves challenged by students who asked, foremost, how should we have responded?

Congress had three options--military, political and moral--to resolve the conflict. Predictably, the military prevailed. Got a problem? An enemy? Go bomb somebody. The House and Senate both approved bombing the people of Afghanistan, presumably to wipe out the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Out of 535 members of Congress, only one voted no: Barbara Lee of Oakland, California. Her stand brought to mind Jeannette Rankin. On December 8, 1941, the Montanan was the only member of Congress to oppose U.S. entry into World War II, saying as she did in 1917 when voting against entering World War I: “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.”

The political solution was to follow our own nonviolent conflict resolution advice, as when we tell Israelis and Palestinians, or Shiites and Sunnis, or factions in Kenya or differing sides anywhere: talk, compromise, negotiate, reconcile and stop killing each other. Sound advice, so why didn’t we follow it ourselves and talk to Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Such a notion is dismissed as surreal or hideously naïve: you can’t talk to evil doers, especially satanic ones like Osama

That was U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War when evil doing Chinese Communist government was demonized for its plans of world conquest. But then Richard Nixon went to China. He talked, compromised, negotiated, and reconciled. Today China is not only a major trading partner with the United States but is loaning money to us. Ronald Reagan, who in 1986 called the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” went to Moscow soon after. He talked, compromised, negotiated and reconciled. Russia is no longer an enemy.

Putting aside for a moment their regressive record on other issues, two Republican presidents did indeed provide a model for nonviolent conflict resolution.

A moral solution could have come three days after 9/ll when President Bush, his war council and members of Congress assembled in the National Cathedral in Washington. Not a pew was empty. Assorted reverends, including Billy Graham and a Catholic cardinal, took to the pulpit to offer prayerful succor to a president who believes that “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world.” At the service’s end, the Lord’s Prayer was recited, including the most ignored words in history: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Three days before, some people did trespass. Were they forgiven? It was the opposite: let’s go kill.

The moral solution would have moved us to forgive those behind 9/ll, and then ask them to forgive America its long history of invasions that have been far more systematic and violent than the September one-day crime spree. Had Desmond Tutu been invited to speak that day, he might have suggested--as he did five months later in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston—that violence solutions to conflicts are doomed: “The war against terrorism will not be won as long as there are people desperate with disease and living in poverty and squalor. Sharing our prosperity is the best weapon against terrorism.”

Much the same thinking has been long advanced by the War Resisters League: “We shall live in a state of fear and terror, or we shall move toward a future in which we seek peaceful alternatives to conflict and a more just distribution of the world’s resources.”

In 1985, my wife and I founded the Center for Teaching Peace. Supported by foundation grants and a growing membership, our work is to persuade and assist schools at all levels either to begin or expand academic-based programs in peace education. If you want to give peace a chance, first give it a place in the curriculum.

Progress is happening. At one east coast high school that uses our textbooks, all juniors are required to take a peace studies course. This was once a Catholic military school. In Philadelphia, a publicly funded peace school opened its doors two years ago. “In a city in which too many of our young people and families feel threatened by violence, it’s time to study and practice peace,” a school official told The Philadelphia Inquirer. In Davis, California, the three-year old Teach Peace Foundation is getting traction.

I heard recently from an English teacher at Niles West High School, Skokie, Illinois: “I’m writing to let you know that our district, somewhat miraculously, approved a peace studies course…I ordered your two collections of peace essays several years ago, and you wrote back an encouraging letter. It took a long time to get a course started here, with many institutional hoops to go through. Two other teachers and I put a proposal together, which was at first rejected. It was too ‘social studies’ oriented. We are all, incidentally, English teachers. Our second proposal, titled ‘The Literature of Peace,’ was accepted by the school board. This was the miraculous part.”

One of my former Georgetown Law students resigned from the D.C. bar five years to become a high school peace teacher. For several years, Leah Wells, a Georgetown University graduate, was my teaching assistant in two Washington schools and a prison. Then she then went to the big leagues, joining the staff here at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She also taught peace courses at a Ventura high school and then put together a widely used 70-page teachers manual. Leah is now going for her doctorate in peace education. I’m proud, too, that my three grown children are involved in social justice work. My son John teaches a peace studies course at Wilson High School, from which he graduated.

Over the years, I’ve visited hundreds of schools to lecture on peace education, pacifism and nonviolence. I can report that the hunger to find alternatives to violence is strong and waiting to be satisfied. If members of the peace community don’t make it happen, who will?

If you want to make a difference, start to be different. Embrace the philosophy of pacifism and the methods of nonviolence. Go change the world but, first, make sure the world never changes you. If you want to radicalize your life and make choices based on the truth that the cure is care, the only word that really matters is a simple, one-syllable word: START. START. START.