Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. Arundhati Roy
You cannot find peace by avoiding life. Michael Cunningham
Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems? Bill Watterson
You have peace, the old woman said, when you make it with yourself. Mitch Albom
Every person needs to take one day away, a day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Maya Angelou
This past Friday at the UN was the annual commemoration of the International Day of Peace. The day was marked, as has been the case in past years, with a brief ceremony at the Peace Bell which included hopeful remarks from SG Antonio Guterres and newly-minted General Assembly President, Ecuador’s María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés. The day was also dedicated to a system-wide memorial to honor the late Kofi Annan and an unscheduled (and mostly dismal) Security Council meeting on the still-deteriorating humanitarian situation in Yemen, a situation invoking (as happens too-frequently in this chamber) little truth-telling about the broken politics and massive weapons sales that now leave millions on the brink of famine and despair.
To say the least, the mood of these Friday UN events could not have been more different. The Peace Bell ceremony happily called to mind Ms. Espinosa Garcés stirring first remarks to the General Assembly as president, remarks punctuated by commitments to ocean health, to persons discriminated against based on gender or disability, to preserving and enhancing the cultural and “knowledge” diversity of the United Nations, to expanding the role of youth in conflict prevention, to adaptation to the climate change we should have done more to prevent, and to strengthening the role of the General Assembly as “codifier of the most salient aspects of international law.”
“Life is better,” she rightly noted, “when all can live on an equal footing.” In this, the importance of the UN – in principle if not always in practice — was directly affirmed. Ms. Espinosa Garcés reminded delegates that, whether we wish to see it or not, “we are making history in this place” and must learn better to do so in a “responsible and caring manner.” As such, she insisted that what goes on inside this UN bubble must become “more relevant for everyone,” more of a factor in terms of improving daily life for all whom we presume to serve in this place.
It was to our mind a helpful blueprint of sorts towards a more peaceful world; a blend of elements some of which are about our norms and policies, some of which are about ourselves — how much we actually care about the fate of others and the planet as a whole, how attentive we are to the implications of our decisions (and especially our non-decisions) on the people whose lives our decisions impact, for better and for worse.
We have been in the business of suggesting, proposing and prodding on peace for many years now. And what we have come to learn is that this “peace business” is a truly breathtaking, multi-dimensional task. It is surely, as we and others have warned over many years, in part about disengaging from our longstanding infatuation with weapons: the misery they threaten and permit, the needless diversion of funds (which we need to fix the world) to unsustainable arms production and modernization, the mindset that coercive solutions to conflict and breaches of international law should remain a default response no matter how often we proclaim allegiance to preventive diplomacy and negotiated settlement.
But peace is thankfully moving to higher ground, requiring us to lay down more than our weapons. We are now tasked with putting aside our narrow-mindedness masquerading as “focus,” our propensity to discriminate outside our self-appointed “tribe,” our lifestyle choices that require greater and greater amounts of self-indulgence, our propensity to punish and humiliate as a substitute for reconciliation and healing, our lack of courage to face challenges rather than inundate consciousness with distraction.
These other dimensions of “laying down” represent an essential but heavy burden for those of us who have (by personal choice or professional duty) acclimated to the values that now drive so much of our social and political life. Stay cool. Get yours. Keep your distance. Live in your head, not your heart. Focus with envy on those who have more, not with compassion on those many more who have less. Justify and defend all decisions, regardless of their embedded absurdity. Contextualize reliability and promise keeping. Hide from threats to truth and safety rather than hold a compassionate, creative and determined ground.
If peace is to stay safe and dry above the murky floodwaters of our current, collective dysfunction, we need now to learn how to navigate those waters more skillfully and mindfully. We must, as my friend Marta Benavides puts it, stop our frenetic “doggie paddling” and remind ourselves how to swim. And this reorientation of our current policy panic surely requires, as suggested by Maya Angelou, periods of reflection to ensure that we can stay above the floodplain and make the most of our peacemaking activity; to take occasional leave of those people and processes that ostensibly “can’t live without us,” so that we can “consciously separate the past from the future,” separate in such a manner that the ties that once bound our aspirations and actions are restored and energized more by what is coming than what has been.
May it then be as suggested by Arundhati Roy, that “another world is coming” despite our space weaponry and other collective foolishness; despite our self-serving “opinions” and policy-options; despite our failures of nerve when confronted with almost unimaginable inequalities of power and income, marine life “feasting” on our plastic waste, and refugees searching for safe and dry ground for their often-traumatized children.
She can sometimes hear the breathing, she claims, breathing that signals the prospect of a more peaceful and abundant life for our planet at the back end of our current madness. We must make time to hear and share that sound as well. And remember how to swim.
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