Peace in 100 Years!

November 16, 2014

If I told you I have a plan that would bring world peace in 100 years, a plan so clear and credible that you were convinced it would work if enough people would follow it, would you be willing to do your part even if it meant changing jobs, life styles or communities? 

A friend of mine from Santa Barbara, who died recently, was working on such a plan.  I asked his widow if she would share his work with me, but she said “Sorry, I can find nothing.”  Dead end.  But the idea is fascinating to me for several reasons:

1.  Putting a target date of 100 years on it gives it a sense of being achievable as well as a sense of hope.  Even if it’s not in our lifetime, our grandchildren would enjoy it.  World peace is not even spoken about these days, much less on the agenda of any political party.  It’s time to break the silence.  Except for the Quakers, the term is almost obsolete.  Our culture has adopted military might as the primary way of solving conflicts.  Arbitration is rarely successful.

2.  To my knowledge, there is no overall plan toward that end, so the idea of a comprehensive or larger plan is fascinating.  The last peace movement of any size occurred during the Viet Nam war but it died after the mission was completed because it was just an “end the war” movement; not a comprehensive plan for lasting peace.. 

3.  There is a lack of vision and hope today as the world spirals toward violence and destruction everywhere you look.  If there were a flicker of vision in the right direction, we might dare to hope again.  Not since Bill Price and Dick Barnet brought their visions of peacemaking to the world have we even heard the word mentioned.  We are once again, it seems, in the dark ages, but this little glimmer of light from my friend Walt Gray refuses to go out in my mind.  “Peace in 100 Years”.  It has a nice sound.  Who will I pass it on to?  What is needed for it to burst into flames?  Scripturally, is there any other teaching that surpasses it?  Isn’t World Peace the same thing as The Kingdom of God on Earth? 

So, where does that leave us?  What is the grand plan?  Since my friend Walt Gray left no details, we have to start from scratch.  To make myself clear, I am aware that I am no grand strategist.  All I can do here is offer some ideas and a few strands of hope that might lead someone to pick up the ball and carry it forward.  It’s obviously a daunting task. 

Nevertheless, if the idea is to be kept alive, and I hope it will be, we must begin somewhere.  So, here’s my thinking so far.  First, the plan must be rooted deeply in truth and justice.  Let’s begin here at home.  We have been blessed with a wealth of natural resources and early visionary leaders who laid out a constitution that seems worthy of sticking to.  With these gifts from God we should be well on our way to world leadership in our search for peace.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.  Far from it.  The basic reason for our failure is that we have two fatal flaws in our foundation.  The first is our completely unjustified and horrific treatment of Native Americans and its appalling history that we have tried to bury and disguise in our history books.  We broke treaty after treaty with them and finally marched them off to the hinterlands, the worst places in our continent.  The second fatal flaw is slavery and its consequent effect on us today.  No nation can ultimately survive with such deeply buried handicaps, with such a faulty foundational history.  We are today in a state of constantly covering up our sins by superficial outreach to minorities and to the needy.  Until we deeply and truly confess these sins and make genuine restitution, we are doomed to failure.  This is not only spiritually true but historically indicated.  Think of the Roman Empire built on domination by military force.

These two cracks in our foundation are the basis for our inability to become world leaders in peacemaking.  The political scene today is so flagged with squabbling that Congress can hardly pass a simple measure to keep the government going.  We are trying to build a house of peace on a badly cracked foundation.  So our grand scheme for World Peace in 100 Years must begin with this premise: restore the foundation first and build the whole plan on it.  The foundation in this case is the story, the history of our country.  We must, it seems, retell the story, but accurately.  Howard Zinn has done a good job of this with his “A People’s History of the United States”, which is “must” reading.  However, as important as it would be, getting that book accepted in US History classes is at best the work of two decades.  But re-telling the story is not enough.  We must also make a deep and thorough confession of our inherent responsibility for our treatment of the American Indians and the black people we enslaved and continue to denigrate and treat poorly today.  This must be followed by a fair and just program of restitution for the survivors left today.  This, I believe would go a long way toward restoring the foundation.  It might get done in half century if we really got to work on it.

That, I believe, is the basic foundational change necessary for our nation to be leaders in a world peace movement.  The following are other necessary changes that, built on a solid foundation, will move us along the road to a lasting peace.  The first is getting more women in positions of power in our government as well as in other organizations such as churches and NGO’s that help to change the direction of thinking and belief in this country.  Women have a unique perspective and feeling for peace and justice that we’re missing in our evolvement.  We’re off to a good start on this change but progress must continue for years.  Maybe a couple of decades would do it. 

Churches should be at the center of the basic change that is needed.  Gordon Cosby was a pioneer for such a change, rescuing the church from its deadly direction of endless meetings on money, position and interpretation of the Scripture.  Of course, this re-direction of the church is only beginning.

So, after the re-constitution of our foundation these three areas: women in more leadership roles, a renewing of our educational system, and evolvement of the church toward Jesus’ teachings would be a good start.  Let me add briefly a few more areas that need to be part of the grand plan.

Changing the idea and general acceptance of the inevitability of war as the ultimate means of settling differences.  It strikes me that we spend an awful lot of time saying how much we appreciate the sacrifices our brave warriors have made and reading about the wounded and their lives, but almost no time in planning ways to prevent all this suffering and tragedy.  World peace and peacemaking must once again become part of our vocabulary and our agenda..