A New Language For Peace

Yesterday I was interviewed for the third time. The Oakland Post printed the interview (Day Four post). I haven’t heard back from EFE and I am curious as to wether or not the fellow I met from Indiana will find anything further to do with our conversation. 

Pushing up the Nojoqui grade along Alisal Road from Solvang to the Pacific Coast I refined my mission statement a bit. Many people that I have met along the way have responded with frustration with the deniers in government. they believe that we must address climate change. There has not been much response to my peace message. I am trying to develop a language by which we can address what in my mind is the most critical foreign policy issue, wether or not civilization will continue at our current level of development or will we, as Einstein once believed, go back to the Stone Age because we allowed our development to destroy our world. 

Who will make this decision for us? The industrialized Northern Hemisphere spent the 20th Century fighting two world wars and then another 40 years of cold war to institute a global economy for us all. There still are those, in fact the majority of those that we elect, who believe that we must exert control through military power. But Iraq, for example, was very willing to sell its oil, there was no need for that war. 

We need a new language to confront the fear that others in far corners of this world want to harm us. The globe has no corners, not anymore. Its round and covered by an industrialized economic system whose efficiency has made war and much labor obsolete. But that efficiency perseveres with the 20th Century notion of conquest. We must confront that notion with the prospect that when the seas rise we will no longer be able to feed ourselves. 

The new isolationists deny climate change and refuse to engage the rest of humanity in our struggle with this condition. They preach fear and threaten others away from our borders with our military. Americans must demand alternatives to military solutions to what are essentially at their roots economic and environmental problems. This is what we must say to our evangelists or war, if their plans do not address our real survival issues then, no we won’t fight your wars!!!