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I agree with the need to establish a meaningful history by leaders & workers who build peace. Certainly, the culture of war-tools has dominated the history books. But I believe much of this work must be rooted in the daily economics of common people around the globe. It seems that a large percentage of fear & violence is based in the real & perceived needs for basic safety & wellbeing... and this is what we all attempt to build for ourselves & our families when we go to work each day. If we can't connect our global justice/peace work to the everyday environment of working people, we leave our struggle in the hands of the corporate media who will continue to glue together the needs of typical workers with their market driven desires & understanding of daily events, politics & the resulting relationships between them. The commercialized acculturation of freemarket greed is so entrenched in the daily consciousness of everyone here in the global North/West as to require a fundamental shift in those "real world" intersections of time & money that drive each other. I think we can learn from one clear example of success, however, in dealing with this gloomy dilemma: the ecology/environmental movement. After a number of decades of slow growth, environmental consciousness is now something that everyone from all areas of the political spectrum can relate to. Environmental degradation seems to have its most noticeable roots in the growing factories & landspoiling of early modernism. When the 60's culture of more integrated, holistic approaches began looking into ecological waste & devastation, it was perhaps easier to see a definite trail of industrial pillaging that had gone on for almost a century. And so now, I wonder, can we begin to use this same paradigm in shedding light upon the complex interactions of globalized exploitation & economic plundering that are so well embedded in the same consumer ideology that delivered ecological destruction? Just like the environmental movement, why can't peace work focus society's attention on the commodity-greed-culture that fosters so many of our political & international conflicts? Is it primarily a battle for the common airwaves & big media sources that feed off these very problems? Just some thoughts about the big picture of big business opportunism & it's professional abilities in drowning out good ethics with commercialized perspectives & media shell games. These seem to be the protected future battlegrounds of the sacred struggle to bring peace in a climate of freewheeling globalization that breeds & feeds upon the commodity paradigm. It can be challenged, but I feel we've got to do so on an "everyday" level of economic issues that all people can relate to, not just the political & social strata that work as the activists & healers of today... we've got to energize a broad dynamic of grass-roots folks in planting the seeds of peaceful work and change. |