Recently a reported 100,000 Americans joined Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz for a national conversation about breaking the partisan gridlock in Washington DC. It was another great example of the growing willingness of ordinary people to reclaim their power from those to whom they have delegated it, only to see it abused.

Schultz was a suitable leader for this conversation because he had recently organized CEOs from more than a hundred companies to halt contributions to U.S. political campaigns until DC office holders stop their political wrangling and behave in a financially responsible manner. He also encouraged those who joined him to spend their money to stimulate growth in their own industries.

Widespread Mobilization Below the Mainstream Radar

The national conversation was organized by a group called No Labels, one of a growing number of organizations calling for large-scale changes in a global social-political-financial system that is no longer serving most of those who live under it. Most of these efforts are being ignored by mainstream media, but are nonetheless doing powerful organizing that is transforming the practical definition of “peace.” Some other examples:

• The Earth Charter Initiative – an extraordinarily diverse, global network of people, organizations, and institutions that participate in promoting and implementing the values and principles of the Earth Charter. This document presents a comprehensive vision of a world that works for everyone.
• The Great Transition Initiative – another group offering visions and pathways for a hopeful future. In March, they issued a manifesto called “Beyond the Growth Paradigm: Creating a Unified Progressive Politics.”
• Push4Peace – an international media, marketing and fundraising campaign whose mission is to help aggregate and accelerate the work of multiple existing peace initiatives into a coordinated movement to inspire people everywhere to take action towards creating a culture of peace.
• The Shift Network – aims to empower a global movement of people who are creating an evolutionary shift of consciousness that in turn leads to a more enlightened society, one built on principles of sustainability, peace, health, and prosperity. They say that now is the time for an “upgrade to our planetary operating system.” Push4Peace and The Shift hope to reach out to over a billion people by the end of 2012.
• The Foundation for Global Collaboration and Peace – a New York State non-profit that aims to inform, engage and connect the global community by serving as a resource center for participatory peace, in order to promote equality, inter-community communication, cross-cultural collaboration, peaceful conflict resolution and global peace building.
• Rebuild the Dream – organizers of a “Contract for the American Dream” which has been endorsed by more than 130,000 Americans. This effort is closely allied to MoveOn.org.
• Ethical Markets – the brainchild of radical economist Hazel Henderson, this group offers the “Green Transition Scoreboard,” a set of social investment indexes,  and a wealth of other sustainability tools.
• A Future Without War believes that “we can, within twenty-five to thirty-five years from the time we officially resolve to do it, create a future in which war is not only unacceptable, it is abhorrent and obsolete.” Their plan is called “Shaping the Future – A Proposal to Hasten a Global Paradigm Shift for the Security and Well-being of All Children Everywhere.”
• Repeace and Beyond War are other similar organizations.
• Common Good Bank – a part of Common Good Finance – offers an exciting, innovative way to keep our money in our home communities and use it to work for the local common good.
• Move to Amend – is working to repeal corporate personhood and protect us from domination by corporate financial interests.

Evolve to Survive

These are just a few of the components of the vast network of people and organizations currently working to create a world that works for everyone. Entrepreneur Paul Hawken wrote about this diverse network in his excellent and celebrated book Blessed Unrest, but it has become more sophisticated and self-aware since he wrote. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, in calling Hawken’s book “the first full account of the real news of our time,” recognized that this network represents an evolutionary step forward which is absolutely critical to the survival of our species.

This evolutionary step is comprised of two paradigm shifts:

1. Moving from a growth paradigm to a sustainability paradigm,
2. Moving from a domination paradigm to a cooperation paradigm.

Using growth as the measure of success has been described as “the ethic of the cancer cell.” We now understand that unrestrained growth is no more sustainable for an economy than it is for a cell. There are natural limits imposed by resource availability and space which cannot, in the real world, be ignored forever. Attempting to do so in the quest for short-term profits threatens our species – as well as most of the others on the planet – with extinction. The meaning of “sustainable,” on the other hand, is that decisions we make today do not foreclose the ability of future generations to make similar decisions.

The historical arrow of human progress has pointed in the direction of wider sharing of power in human societies since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 AD moved us away from the divine right of kings. Corporate-led successes in reversing that arrow over the past 30-40 years are now asserting the divine right of capital, but the future of freedom, compassion, justice and strength lies in the direction of greater cooperation and sharing.

We must learn to measure every policy decision against these two crucial paradigm shifts. We must ask, “Will this decision make our community/region/nation/world more sustainable?” and “Does this decision allow those affected by it to have input into it?”

When we have learned to apply these measures instinctively, as some indigenous peoples have, we will be on our way to social maturity.  Φ

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks and founding editor of The PeaceWorker online news magazine.

Recently my email brought two items on the same day which, when I put them together, seemed like a strong message for Independence Day.

The first was a New York Times article (reprinted in The PeaceWorker on June 16) about how a British firm is preparing to bring appropriate technology to the U.S. to “do well by doing good” in the area of conserving energy. The second was the graph at the right showing the one area where the U.S. really is number one.

I Have a Dream…

What if – I thought – after 9/11 we had decided to revenge ourselves not on Afghanis and Iraqis who had done us no harm, but on Saudi Arabia, from which country the 9/11 attackers actually hailed? What if — assuming you don’t buy the “capture the terrorists” justification for the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq — we had decided to choose a different tool than war to defend our energy supply?

We could have spent some portion of the difference between the 2001 military budget of approximately $350 billion annually and today’s military budget of $700+ billion on developing a domestic green energy supply. It could have amounted to hundreds of billions a year and still left us with a larger military budget than the next 5 military big spenders put together (and remember: none of those big spenders are our enemies). It could have funded a Manhattan Project-style, trillion-dollar effort to attain energy independence. By today, it is likely that we would have achieved our goal, or at least have made great strides toward doing so.

We could have eliminated the waste from our entire national energy budget through intensified conservation efforts. We could have embarked on a nationally subsidized crash program of building and developing solar, wind, wave and biomass energy sources. We could have begun the transition to electric vehicles, while investing in high-speed trains and converting much of our freight from fossil-fueled trucks back to rail. We could have localized commerce, food production and labor, saving many jobs as well as energy. A trillion bucks can go a long way if spent anywhere but on the military.

We might have sacrificed our ability to conduct 3 wars at once, but after all, most of us don’t support those wars anyway and besides, since they are being fought mostly to assure our access to oil, we would no longer need them.

What We Got Instead

As it is, we’ve got a British firm coming to Pennsylvania to make big bucks by competing with homegrown energy conservation specialists for the conservation market, which they believe is a huge growth opportunity. “The United States was a nearly untouched market with 120 million homes, most of them very energy-inefficient — it was a massive opportunity,” said the company’s commercial director.

So who won and who lost? The winners were the military contractors who cleaned up on the wars and war prep. The losers? The rest of us. Oh, a few of us got jobs for military contractors, but as many of our other jobs as possible were shipped abroad where the labor was cheaper. Now we’re ten years further along and we’re looking at worsening climate change while the money to address it was squandered on a military that uses more energy than any other outfit in the world.

We got a military that spends about as much as all the other militaries on the planet put together. The worst problem with that is that “if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If you’ve put most of your marbles in the military bucket, every problem appears to call for a military response. While other countries are busily trying to get ahead in the global marketplace, addressing the world’s pressing environmental problems, finding jobs for their people and providing their citizens with universal health care, we have only one solution for everything – a war on something: drugs, terror, poverty, etc. – and none of these wars is going any better than the ones in the Middle East.

What to Do?

1. Believe in yourself. Americans seem to have lost the self-confidence that was once the hallmark of our nation the world around. We believed we could build a world-leading country and we did. We believed we could walk on the moon and we did. We believed we could become the world’s economic engine and we did. Can we now believe that we can make the changes the 21^st century calls for? These are challenging and difficult changes, but can’t we regain the can-do spirit that served us well in the past?
2. Get off your knees. It is time for us to stop begging our political and corporate masters for a little more this or a little less that. It is time for us to declare ourselves free of the slavery we have allowed ourselves to fall into and take power back into our own hands.
3. Join with your neighbors. We don’t need a national party or a global organization to direct our efforts. We have enormous people resources in every community and at every level. These leaders are we ourselves – not our politicians and plutocrats. Respect your peers and their efforts. The world is full of people who want change toward a world that works for everyone.
4. Dedicate yourself to at least one project that improves the world. The work is crucial, but the attitude of species and planetary loyalty is even more crucial right now. You’re more than welcome – and needed – in Oregon PeaceWorks’ projects, but if you are more drawn to a different kind of work, then do that!
5. See your work as part of a global effort to – literally – save the world. Read the vision that is articulated in the Earth Charter and understand the importance of the work you do it the context of that vision.

If you do these things, you will be:

1. Making a huge contribution to the evolutionary step forward that humanity needs to take at this point in its history.
2. Giving your children and grandchildren a better chance to live in the kind of world that human beings evolved in.
3. Helping humankind deserve a better future than we have made for ourselves over the past few decades.
4. Helping change the dominant paradigm from one based on growth to one based on sustainability and from one based on domination to one based on cooperation. That is the shift that our species needs to make, and make very soon. Φ

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks and the editor of The PeaceWorker online news magazine. He has been working for social change for half a century.

Fuller Points the Way

“To change something,” said futurist Buckminster Fuller, “build a new model and make

the existing obsolete!” That approach sums up the motivation behind Oregon PeaceWorks’ (OPW) Peace Visioning program – an innovative project seeking to articulate a new, sustainable American dream.

Just a few short years ago, the computer supplanted the typewriter. Computer pioneers did not set out to do away with typewriters. Rather, they built a better way to generate letters, reports and other written material. The rest of us – agreeing that they were onto something – quickly switched to the new technology. Their new model, as Fuller suggested, made typewriters obsolete.

Peace Visioning aims to do the same thing: make dysfunctional systems obsolete, not by resisting them, but by building a better model. The first step in that direction is for all of us to agree on what the model we want to build should look like.

Here are some important parts of the vision as I see it. See if you agree:

• Redefine national security to focus on environmental and financial threats instead of resource wars and terrorism.
• Craft world energy, transportation and food policy to reduce the CO₂ content of the atmosphere below 350 ppm – the global warming disaster threshold.
• Halt population growth and bring the number of humans within the carrying capacity of the Earth.
• Return industry and business to the role of servants of the people, not the other way around.
• Strip corporations of their privileged status as “persons,” which was accorded to them not by the Constitution, public vote or congressional action, but by misguided Supreme Court decisions.
• Dedicate ourselves to achieving the vision articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the founding document of the United Nations – which has been ratified by 191 countries, perhaps the crowning achievement of the 20th century.

You may say, as John Lennon put it, that I’m a dreamer. However, not only am I not the only one, but I think that if we all get behind a vision this powerful, we will be the majority. Instead of contenting ourselves with what some politician tells us is “achievable,” we must articulate what we really want and then insist upon it. The dangers that confront us at this point in our history are simply too threatening to accept anything less. Asking for less is not “realistic,” it is a disservice to ourselves and our planet.

The Vision Must Come From the People

Anyone who has participated in building anything knows that failing to get all stakeholders to “buy in” on the design is a recipe for delays, cost overruns and conflict at best and complete collapse of the project at worst. That’s why OPW’s Peace Visioning efforts focus on getting broad buy-in.

Probably many of us could put forth a peace vision that would make sense, but if it did not meet others’ needs, the result would be debate and disagreement.

That’s why OPW has held Peace Visioning brainstorming sessions in Oregon’s major cities and smaller communities to listen to others. The ideas generated by these sessions are posted on a Google document at http://bit.ly/pvbrainstorms. You are welcome to view them there.

We can make our dreams into reality by dedicating ourselves for the next couple of years to the basic organizing needed to build a consensus behind a comprehensive peace vision. We must avoid the temptation to expend all our energy in the day-to-day struggles, of which there will be many, and keep focused on the main chance – to redefine the American Dream in time for the 2012 elections.

OPW has begun the process of articulating a draft vision, which we plan to “shop around” to the many groups trying to build a better world. We will be looking for “buy in,” meaning two things:

1.      The group will use the vision as the long-range goal of its strategic planning as it formulates the work it will do on the issues it addresses.

2.      The group will connect its work to the vision whenever it does anything public.

A small group of individuals around the country has already signed up to participate in this task. If you are excited by this work, please join the Peace Visioning Think Tank Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/peace-visioning-think-tank. This group will take on the job of creating from many inputs a vision document that can be circulated for wide buy-in.

Many people who participated in OPW’s local MyPeace Project last fall had never asked themselves what the world they want to live in would be like. They found it an empowering experience. The next step is to help people everywhere to articulate their dreams and then translate them into reality. Φ

But wait: maybe it is not so obvious why this is “the best of times” for our country. Now, when tragedy and decline surrounds us on every side, we have a golden opportunity. It is the opportunity to rise up, as the determined, freedom-loving people we claim to be, and change the direction of the many forces that are carrying us away from everything we can honestly call “the American Dream.”

It is clear that large, greed-driven interests are poisoning the hopes and futures of virtually everyone else. A few symptoms of this social disease:

1.      Global warming threatens the ability of Planet Earth to support our species.

2.      Our economy is heavily dependent on weapons sales and wars while we import most of what we used to manufacture.

3.      Irresponsible banks were bailed out while the rest of us sink financially.

4.      Corporate opposition in Congress denies us universal health care – a standard in the developed world.

5.      A larger percentage of our people is in prison than in any other country.

6.      Many of our people no longer believe their voice matters or has any effect.

We can align ourselves in one of three ways:

1.  Do nothing. Allow ourselves to be controlled by the powers that be.

2.  Try to align ourselves with those powers so that we share the rewards of the elite.

3.  Join with the millions who will never be among the elite to build a different kind of world.

If our choice is #3, the first thing we are going to need is a clear vision of what we want that “different kind of world” to look like. Obviously we do not want it to look like numbers 1-6 above, but it is not enough to say what it will not look like. We must specify and agree upon what it will look like – and not just with respect to 1-6, but with respect to many other criteria as well, such as education, media, energy use, government, leisure, conflict resolution and security, food production, economics and more. All of these are interconnected in today’s world and we cannot fix one reliably without addressing all.

The good news is that all these issues – and many more – are already being addressed by groups of citizens all over the place. The missing piece of the puzzle is that these groups are working for their own narrow goals instead of viewing their work in the context of a broadly sustainable, cooperative worldview to which all have subscribed. That is, we need a comprehensive vision of the peaceful world we are trying to build, a vision that encompasses  nothing less than the restructuring of our entire society!

Does it make any sense at all to tackle such a huge undertaking? Here is the sense: it is what we all desperately need to survive and to realize the American Dream – the one we regularly pledge ourselves to: “liberty and justice for all.” Facing a choice between annihilation or slavery and audacity with courage, I choose the latter and invite you to join the effort.

Here’s now:

The Peace Brainstorming Project creates opportunities for groups to brainstorm together what they mean by “peace” and collect all the ideas grouped into sectors. These ideas are being entered into a Peace Visioning Database (which you can view online at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmK4CU6plyU2dEhOYUh4VDZXRHVRWWI3NXE5S2pNUGc&hl=en#gid=0).

The Peace Visioning Think Tank, a self-selected group of “visioneers,” will take on the task of drafting the comprehensive vision from the Peace Visioning Database and “shopping it around” seeking input and eventual consensus on the vision. When that has been done, every group can strategize not only to develop its own program, but also to fit its work into the comprehensive vision. Each group can also promote the comprehensive vision in everything it does. The key concept is Unity of Vision rather than the Unity of Action which we have never achieved.

We must all keep in mind that even though this is an enormous and daunting undertaking, it is a disservice to ourselves to ask for less than what we really need to survive. We “gotta do what we gotta do” to preserve our species and life on this planet.

How you can get involved:

1.      Attend one of our Peace Visioning Brainstorming Sessions. Ask us how.

2.      Spread the word. Peruse this PeaceWorking blog (http://opw.dreamhosters.com/wordpress/) for more information.

3.      Donate to Oregon PeaceWorks.

4.      Volunteer to help craft the draft vision or to “shop” it around. Φ

by Peter Bergel

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” says Proverbs 29:18. Certainly we are in danger of perishing today. If not from wars and nuclear weapons, then from global warming, peak oil, economic collapse or other threats. Could vision be what rescues us?

Peace or Antiwar?

The Tao Te Ching says, “Clearing your vision, you become clear.” This advice refers to the vision that tells us what our life’s purpose is and where we ought to be heading. When we lose sight of what is really important and worthwhile in life, we are apt to go astray – eventually far enough astray to perish as a result. It is the same for the peace movement.

For the most part, the peace movement is not really a movement for peace. Rather it is a movement against war, military spending, arms sales, and nuclear weapons. While all these struggles are important, one cannot build a world of peace merely by opposing what others are doing.

What IS Peace?

So what would peace look like, were it to “break out?” Surely peace would replace an aggressive foreign policy with worldwide cooperation, eliminate stockpiles of nuclear weapons, reorient our national budget away from domination by the military and our economy away from dependence on war. But this would be only the beginning. Peace would translate into sustainability and cooperation in many areas: production and use of food and energy, transportation, our relationship with our environment, conflict resolution at every level, education, recreation, business, health care, government, and justice.

Many of us know this in our hearts, yet we have not formulated this vision and collectively agreed upon it. Nor have we held up such a vision to explain to others the overall goal of whatever activism we engage in. Such a vision could connect all our movements and inspire those who are not yet part of them.

Strategy is Next

So step one is to formulate a collective vision. Step two is to “shop” that vision around to progressives seeking consensus. Step three is to use the vision to guide development of our strategy in much the same way as we would use our starting point and destination as guides to planning a road trip. It will no longer be necessary to try to recruit everyone to a single course of action; rather we will be united by our vision. Every action resulting from every strategy on every issue can promote that collective vision, so the public and decision makers alike will know that we are working for a goal far larger than whatever short-term objective each team seeks to achieve.

As we focus on – and continually emphasize – our vision, we will find ourselves selecting better, more compelling tactics – tactics that mobilize greater numbers and result in more successes. Each victory in any of our related struggles will be a victory for all of us and will bring us closer to realizing our vision of peace and sustainability.

Getting Our Hands Dirty

Oregon PeaceWorks (OPW) has embraced this challenge with enthusiasm. We have initiated projects at the local, regional and national levels to tackle it.

1.       Locally in Salem, OR, OPW is sponsoring the MyPeace Project. Members of the public, with an emphasis on youth, are being asked to imagine what peace would look like if it “broke out,” or alternatively to envision what peace means to them. They will then express their vision using some form of art. So far a mural, a photography project, a mime piece, music in several forms, a poetry project and a video project are underway. In October, the collective peace vision represented by all the art projects will be presented to the community through a series of public events such as concerts, film showings, exhibits, dramatic presentations and the like.

2.       OPW has begun negotiations with other groups to cooperate in sponsoring peace visioning brainstorming sessions in communities all over the state. These meetings will tease forth our best, most positive, most creative peace vision elements. Each will be recorded and added to an idea database which OPW has already begun.

3.       OPW has established a Google Group to serve as a hub for a peace visioning think tank at the national level. This group will work on drafting a comprehensive peace vision that can be offered to progressive groups of many kinds to obtain “buy in.” If you want to participate, obtain a free Google account by signing up at google.com. Then visit http://groups.google.com/group/peace-visioning-think-tank and sign up.

OPW welcomes your participation in any of these peace visioning projects.

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks. He has been a peace activist for almost half a century, during which time he has engaged in many tactics which he no longer regards as effective. You can contact him at 503-371-8002.

Brief Bio

Peter Bergel has been the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks, Oregon’s largest statewide peace and justice organization, since 2001. He was the founder and has been editor of The PeaceWorker news magazine since 1988. He has also been President of the Center for Energy Research since 1988. For three years he served as editor of Civilian-Based Defense, which reported on research and developments toward substituting civilians trained in nonviolence for defensive military force. He was also a founder and staff person of the American Peace Test, which brought thousands to the Nevada Test Site to offer civil resistance to nuclear weapons testing.

by Peter Bergel

The government and the Pentagon are right. Our national security is definitely at risk.

Afghanistan? Iraq? Al Qaeda? Small potatoes.

Yemen? Iran? Even smaller.

Nope, the big threats are not military. Nor can they be addressed by the military.

The big threats we face today are global warming, economic collapse, dwindling natural resources, population growth, pollution and the fascism that follows in their wake.

We can not afford to keep focusing our attention on the so-called War on Terror or the War on Drugs. In fact, we don’t have time or resources for any war at all. We need to think about human survival on this planet.

Global Warming

Even the Pentagon figured out that global warming was a problem a year ago. They finally realized that “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The disaster of hurricane Katrina ought to have awakened everyone to the havoc that can be wrought by warming-driven storms. That catastrophe caused far more damage than the 9/11 attacks, yet the former is not seen as a national security threat while the latter is. What’s up with that? What are we thinking?

Economic Plunder

And the economy? After it was indisputably plundered by the most venal criminals, bringing ruin to many Americans and enormous hardship to countless more, did we go on a global manhunt, track down the baddies and jail them? Uh, not exactly. We put them in charge of fixing the problem and bailed out their companies. Most were rewarded with huge bonuses. It was kind of like appointing Osama to lead FEMA. And the victims? Unfortunate collateral damage – nothing to be done about it.

If this is not a national security problem, I don’t know what is. If a gang of terrorists held up a group of U.S. tourists in a Muslim country, we’d send in the Marines. So why can’t Americans get protection here?

Natural Resources

Oil is not the only natural resource that’s starting to look like the “unobtainium” of the Avatar movie. Potable water is now at a premium in many parts of the world, forest land is threatened everywhere, metals are harder and harder to come by and energy is either scarce or poisonous – sometimes both. This is clearly another national security threat. What’s the response of the military and the government? Waste more of everything! According to The Progressive, “U.S. forces in Iraq during 2007 consumed 40,000 barrels of oil a day, all of which was transported into the war zone from other countries.”  And the Iraq War “added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world’s nations” an amount equivalent to putting 25 million more cars on the road. With protectors like these…

Population Growth

Our species is outgrowing this planet. This is not only a national security threat, it’s a global security threat. The obvious response is to curtail population growth using both short term and medium term strategies. The best short term strategy is contraception, while the best medium term strategy is educating women. Some government policies interfere with both. The right wingnuts who carry their religious fervor on behalf of the “right to life” to the point of threatening the life of every living thing on earth, both present and future, should be seen as traitors. They are undermining global security and can no longer be allowed to continue to do that.

Pollution

When the Club of Rome issued its “Limits to Growth” study in 1970, it concluded that, of the many threats it studied, pollution was the one most likely to “get” us first. This prediction is coming true day by day. The fish in our oceans are polluted with heavy metals, the water is so acidic that fish and other ocean life are dying, our soil is polluted by poisonous pesticides and herbicides, our wars spread nameless poisons, including radioactive ones, many of our industries do the same – polluting at every step from mining to transportation to processing to manufacturing – while the mass media pollute our minds. Each of these threatens the security of our country, our freedom and our health, but since the military can not solve the problem – indeed, makes it worse – little is done.

Fascism

When people are faced with crisis, they respond either by pulling together as a community and confronting the common threat, or they attempt to annihilate the threat by trying to kill it. Community action is famous for its successes. The war mentality is notorious for its failures. Nevertheless, wars are always profitable for a few and those few work hard to see to it that wars continue. So it is now.

One of the prices we pay for the war mentality is the conviction that everyone is out to get us. Fear is encouraged and anyone suggesting alternatives to it is silenced. This attitude breeds the repressive syndrome we call “fascism.” The dictionary definition is a “regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader.”

Since our government and its military has decided that the threats we all need to fear are terrorists and “rogue” nations, it is unpopular to point out that these threats are minimal compared to the threats enumerated here. It is even less popular to call for a massive shift in emphasis so as to confront the most serious threats and address them in ways that might actually make us more secure. Better to wait until these threats lead to resource wars – then the military will know whom to fight.

Time for Some Vision

It is time, and more, for those of us not yet in thrall to fascist thinking to articulate a vision of the world we really want to live in. Only then can we realistically craft a strategy to move toward that world from where we currently are. Individual struggles against this or that problem will be easily ignored or repressed using the tools of fascism. Only when all these struggles for justice, sustainability, peace, environmental balance and human rights are linked by a common vision will we have a chance of achieving any of them.

Peter Bergel is Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks and Editor of The PeaceWorker.

By Peter Bergel

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” says the King James Bible in Proverbs 29:18. Certainly the people are in danger of perishing today. If not from wars and nuclear weapons, then from global warming. If not from that, then from a series of other threats. Could vision be what rescues us?

Admitting That We Are Out of Control

The Tao Te Ching says, “Clearing your vision, you become clear.” This advice does not refer to eyesight. It refers to the kind of vision that tells us what our life’s purpose ought to be and where we ought to be heading. Some people use the phrase “moral compass.” When we lose sight of what is really important and worthwhile in life, we are apt to go astray – eventually far enough astray to perish as a result.

Likewise, when a society loses track of where it wants to go, danger is at hand.

Our society has chosen to measure success in terms of material wealth, yet most of its religions warn against this course – and for good reason. Wealth is notorious among the wise for not being a reliable path to happiness. Enough wealth for comfort and basic security may contribute to happiness, but after that, wealth seems to bring more worries than happiness. Worse, wealth creates divisions between those who have it and those who do not, leading to destruction of community. Worse yet, the pursuit of wealth tends to blind its pursuers to the damage they do to our life support systems as they place profit at the top of their moral pyramid. As Paul Hawken says in his book Blessed Unrest, “Too much of a good thing is not a good thing.” Attempts to maximize wealth, pleasure, security or power — rather than to optimize them – lead to addictions, which are, by definition, compulsive and out of control.

Hope in the Heart of Chaos

The most destructive form of wealth pursuit is that which is done in the corporate framework. At one time corporations were chartered by states and closely regulated. The corporate structure afforded their directors some financial protection, but the price for that protection was giving up some of the freedom that non-protected businesses enjoyed. It was a fair exchange and the system worked. Now corporations are legally considered “persons,” though they have no conscience and do not die – two key characteristics of real persons – and they have slipped their regulatory leashes.

The poster child for a corporation run amok is Walmart, the world’s largest corporation, which has been roundly criticized for running its competitors out of business by engaging in predatory practices, especially with regard to its suppliers and its labor force. But even Walmart appears to be waking up to its own contribution to global unsustainability. It has vowed to triple the efficiency of its truck fleet – the largest in the world, has committed to convert its operations to 100% renewable energy, and is going toward a zero-waste system. To demonstrate its sincerity in these pursuits, it has enlisted the help of dozens of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

If a giant like Walmart can change course in response to a sustainable vision, why should it not be possible for us to transform other unsustainable systems in our society? Hawken says, “If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize. In the chaos engulfing the world a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us.”

What Should Our Vision Look Like?

What we need is vision. We need to cast off the shackles of “the way we’ve always done it,” and loss of hope, and begin to imagine the world we really want to transform to. That word “transform” is key. Let us not think so much of “getting rid” of this or that. Instead, let’s adopt the paradigm that life itself places before us: don’t waste anything. Whatever is here should not be torn down. It must be utilized in new and sustainable ways to create what we really want. We will know what we really want if we allow ourselves to envision it.
I will suggest, following Hawken, some things I believe we can agree on:

1. The golden rule is a good guide for how to treat one another: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Even better, might be the “platinum rule”: do unto others as they’d have you do unto them.

2. All life is sacred. This does not mean that nothing will die or that nothing can ever be killed. It means that life deserves the utmost respect, care and reverence. If it must be taken, the gift must be repaid to life itself. Life can not be ripped off.

3. Compassion and love of others are at the heart of all religions and are worthy guideposts in our search for right livelihood.

Again following Hawken, here are 3 rules to guide our visioning:

1. The “cradle to cradle” concept calls for transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design so as to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free.

2. A corollary is the concept that waste equals food – every form of waste must be seen as the “food” for another system. This is how nature works. There is no “away” where we can throw that which we don’t know what to do with.

3. As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, we must live within our ongoing solar income. Plundering the energy savings of the planet has turned out badly and is clearly unsustainable.

Let’s play our game of life not as a finite game that can be won or lost, a paradigm that is at the root of the world’s woes today, but as an infinite game where the object is to keep playing.

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks

I have also excerpted what I consider the relevant material from both exchanges and have posted that as a page at the upper right corner of this blog.

Where We Started

In “The Peace Movement Needs a New Strategy” I offered these critiques of current peace movement strategy and its results:

1. We are still using the social change tactics that we have used for decades even though they are proving less and less effective as time goes on. We have definitely lost ground over the decades I have been active.

2. We invest a lot of resources in public education and we have been effective in that area. Yet we have not figured out how to effectively transform public support for our point of view into access to the levers of power in order to create real change.

3. When it comes to action, we are devoting almost all our movement resources to lobbying and demonstrating, even though our success levels in those areas have been minimal in recent years.

4. We are mostly an anti-war movement, not a real peace movement.

5. We don’t place enough emphasis on pointing out the flaws in war itself and the mentality that supports it. Rather, we confine ourselves largely to criticizing particular wars and addressing particular weapon systems.

6. We have been ineffective at stopping wars once their advocates have built up momentum for them. However, we can anticipate future resource wars (over oil, water, food, land, and raw materials) as a result of global warming. Now is the time to focus on those and work to head them off.

7. Most important, we do not have a shared movement-wide vision of the peaceful world we are trying to create. We have no collective answer to the question, “if peace broke out, what would it look like?”

Two Initial Suggestions

In “The Peace Movement Needs a New Strategy,” I made two initial suggestions:

1. Use cultural work (film, music, theater, art, etc.) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc) in a planned and targeted way to transform conventional wisdom and public judgments toward support for a more peaceful, sustainable world.

2. Use the same tools to encourage transformation of the popular perception of war from seeing it as “wicked” (terrible, but attractive) to seeing it as “vulgar” (terrible and absolutely unattractive).

Further Proposals

After participating in the dialogues mentioned, I now believe that prior to discussion of broad strategy initiatives, we need to clarify where we want to be heading – that is, we need a broad, shared vision of the peaceful world we want to create. (See point 7 above.)

With that in mind, some additional proposals are:

3. Convene brainstorming sessions in a number of towns to which thoughtful people with backgrounds in social change work and other relevant expertise are invited to group themselves by sector and throw out answers to the question: “If peace broke out, what would it look like?” Record all responses and use them to develop a comprehensive and unified vision of the future. Sectors would include, but not be limited to: Conflict resolution — local, regional, global Defense Housing Energy production and distribution Food production and distribution Transportation & shipping Environmental protection Education Recreation Economics/business/merchandising Medical care/wellness Government Justice/crime/human rights/civil liberties

4. Create an independent think tank to digest this material and assist with the construction of the vision.

5. Organize a “Visions of Our Future” series of seminars during which knowledgeable people with relevant expertise are invited to present their own visions of how a sector of the future can function sustainably and lead discussions about them. This can be done all over the country with the intent of generating a consensus vision of where we want to go.

6. Review the visions already developed by the world community and enshrined in international law, including the UN and Nuremberg Charters, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Four Geneva Conventions, and a series of derivative international covenants that have evolved throughout the intervening years addressing a variety of emergent issues (e.g., nuclear non-proliferation, torture, prohibited weapons, terrorism, global warming) as well as watchdog institutions (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Human Rights Commission). Electing international law as a base has the advantages of (1) painstaking development by a broad multi-cultural array of scholars, attorneys and political realists, (2) endorsement by most of the 192 nations comprising humankind, (3) potential for implementation with the force of law supported by reliable evidentiary documentation, and (4) no need to sell it to a breathlessly awaiting world. These international standards are pretty much what we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten: play fair; share with others; clean up after yourself; don’t take other peoples’ stuff and if you do, give it back; don’t hurt other people and if you do, say you’re sorry and make it up to them. (Thanks to Jack Dresser for this formulation.)

7. Focus more on motivating people than merely “educating” them.

Principles for Building a Powerful Strategy

Here are a few litmus tests against which we can measure the work we do in developing a new vision and strategy.

1. We must engage our adversaries on ground where we are strong rather than pitting our weaknesses against the strengths of our adversaries.

2. To do that we have to inventory our strengths – such as numbers, existing non-governmental work towards change, the tide of history, the self-preserving mechanisms of the planet’s ecosystem and our faith in basic human decency.

3. If a strategy depends critically on large sums of money to be effective, it will almost certainly be co-opted by our adversaries. They have a lot more money and are expert at manipulating it. Therefore we should seek strategic initiatives that do not require major funding or that can be funded by large numbers of people donating relatively small amounts.

4. We need to “think outside the box” in terms of both vision and strategy. We must free ourselves from the bonds of the status quo because we all know the status quo is not serving us well. Believing that we must continue to function within the status quo means hobbling our collective creative power.

5. Any major change will probably require a lot of time to be accomplished. This does not excuse us from beginning work on it right away. Responding from a crisis mentality has not, and will not, serve us well. Neither has devoting almost all of our energy to stopping something someone else is already doing.

Hopeful Signs

Many authors have noted that despite the grim threats confronting humanity on many fronts, there is already functioning an enormous number of small and large independent groups addressing a plethora of issues. Evidently a great many people understand that “something has to be done” regarding these threats. Pessimism is certainly warranted by the information science is serving up about the state of our world and our species, yet redemptive surprises have been experienced by almost everyone at some time or other in their lives. I think we have to take action with hope and determination and leave the rest in the Creator’s hands. We must do our homework and hope for a redemptive surprise.

“Doing our homework” is understanding and recognizing all the great work that people like ourselves are doing all over this planet in an effort to fix something that is wrong, damaged, immoral or could be better. And then we need to take that understanding and recognition and fuse it into a comprehensive vision that can guide our actions and reaffirm our connections with one another.

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks

A related concern: after decades of peace work, it seems to me that whenever we mobilize against a particular war we always start out behind the curve. The opposition already has its ducks in a row (or nearly so) and we never catch up. Eventually — many years later — the war winds down and we take credit, but by then huge losses of life and treasure have been suffered and the war mentality has been yet more deeply entrenched into the public’s worldview. We call ourselves the peace movement, but really we are mostly an anti-war movement. And we learn once again that when the war is over, so is the movement. This time around I think we need to give far more emphasis to what’s wrong with the whole war mentality. That should be integrated into every message we give. If it makes our initial sell more difficult to fence-sitting Congress people, so be it. We need to change conventional wisdom not just about Afghanistan, but about war as a means of conflict resolution and way to support our country. We have to confess to ourselves as peace makers that the tactics we’ve been using all my life are just not working today. We want to change public policy, of course, but we need to expand our mission far beyond winning votes in Congress (something we hardly ever do on really important issues anyway). For example: we never stopped an Iraq supplemental, never got the overall military budget reduced (even though we’ve stopped a weapon system here and there), and never got Congress to see that our main national security threats are not amenable to military solutions.

Wars of the Future on the Horizon
There are a bunch of resource wars (oil, water, food, land, raw materials) starting to take shape in our future as a result of global warming. NOW is the time to head those off — not when they’re staring us in the face. I think it is critical that we adopt this element into our out-of-Afghanistan efforts. General Patraeus’ and John Nagl’s 80/20 concept intrigues me because it would seem to provide a good platform from which to build out the message that war in general — not just this one — is not an adequate response to problems like those that took us to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Of course, legislative strategy is only one of our tools. Others typically include demonstrations, public education, media work, civil resistance actions These are all good, and surely a mix of tactical approaches is the only thing that has ever been successful for us.

Let’s take public education first. Last time (with Iraq) we did a great job of public education and relatively quickly found that the payoff was that polls reported our point of view ascending and soon achieving a majority, depending on how the questions were asked. At the same time, though we found relatively few joining our protests, civil resistance actions and lobbying efforts. Apparently we touched people’s minds, but not their hearts. They agreed with us, but didn’t care all that much.

We therefore need tactical approaches that direct themselves toward people’s hearts. This suggests cultural work (film, music, theater, art, etc.) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc). These tools have so far not been incorporated into our strategic vision much. I am not saying no peace movement folks are using them. I am saying we don’t have a coordinated strategy for using them.

Reaching the Hearts of the Public
What if the public was watching a sitcom every week about a group of social change activists — a show that was bringing up crucial issues in an amusing and engaging way (as The Simpsons has been known to do and the Smothers Brothers sometimes did too)? What if TV and movies featured some peace-oriented heroes (the MacGyver series of the 80s and 90s — which ran 7 seasons — is a good model)? What if top musicians were “layin’ it between the lines” as a Peter, Paul and Mary song of the sixties said and many songs of the period did? What if there were a rebirth of easy-to-learn-and-sing movement songs that could bind people together? What if pro-peace and sustainability themes were finding their way into high quality theater scripts? What if peace art was hip and profitable?

The peace movement could be devoting movement resources to making all this happen. In the 60s all these tactics took on lives of their own. If we were successful, we would be changing not only people’s intellectual opinions about war, but also their “gut feelings” about the value of peaceful approaches, the importance of hope and the efficacy of what is often cynically dismissed as “mere” idealism today. This cultural work could go a long way toward competing with the fear and violence-based entertainment messages that currently permeate our society.

Another possible area for development is suggested by this Oscar Wilde quote: “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascinations. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” How can we use cultural work to encourage that transformation from wicked to vulgar in the popular perception of war?

And when it comes to the social media, they are reaching into people’s lives in an incredible way. There are 200 MILLION Facebook users! Twitter is one of the fastest growing phenoms on the Web and the fastest growing segment of Twitter users is over 35! Yet we peace folk have relatively few users and the WeFollow site shows only about 100 Twitter users who have tagged themselves with the word “peace.” More important, we have no organized strategy for using these tools.

Avoid the Military’s Mistake

Why are we devoting almost all our movement resources to lobbying and demonstrating when our success levels are so meager in those areas? We criticize government for devoting almost all its security resources to a mostly counterproductive military, yet we are doing the same. We rarely win an important lobbying victory and our demonstrations are not drawing those whom we think are our supporters in anything like the numbers we need to be effective. I’m not suggesting that these tactics be abandoned, but I AM suggesting that we need some new tactics — tactics that get to people where they live and are fun enough to attract people for their own sakes.

Your comments are welcome.

Peter Bergel is the Executive Director of Oregon PeaceWorks