Dept. of Peace & Representative meetings in Jan

I am close to setting a date to meet with my Congresswoman, and I anticipate, several other Representatives at the end of Jan next year. These will be meetings to discuss the Department of Peace -- a bill introduced by Dennis Kucinich with a growing number of co-sponsors. More information about this powerful legislation can be found at the Department of Peace Campaign. Some highlights include:

• Hold peace as an organizing principle in our society;
  
• Endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights;
  
• Strengthen non-military means of peacemaking;
  
• Work to create peace, prevent violence, divert from armed conflict, use field-tested programs, and develop new structures in non-violent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict;
  
• Address matters both domestic and international in scope;
  
• Submit to the President recommendations for reductions in weapons of mass destruction, and make annual reports to the President on the sale of arms from the United States to other nations, with analysis of the impact of such sales on the defense of the United States and how such sales affect peace;
  
• Encourage the development of initiatives from local communities, religious groups, and nongovernmental organizations;
  
• Facilitate the development of peace summits at which parties to a conflict may gather under carefully prepared conditions to promote non-violent communication and mutually beneficial solutions;
  
• Develop new programs that relate to the societal challenges of school violence, guns, racial or ethnic violence, violence against gays and lesbians, and police-community relations disputes.
  

If there is any legislation that would be worth even a lifetime of effort to become law, this would be it. It would create a powerful counterbalancing momentum away from the war belief we hold currently: that war / violence is inevitable and therefore acceptable.

I wrote an article about the rationale for the Department of Peace. I'll post it soon.

This legislation would collect under one umbrella several scattered domestic and international programs that are designed to reduce violence. As the Department of Homeland Security argued for the value of centralizing departments to improve coordination and communication, so too, the Department of Peace would improve coordination and communication among these existing programs.

It would also appropriately fund exceedingly effective field-tested programs that have been shown to have strong measurable impact at reducing violence in schools, prisons, and local communities.

People who are skeptical about peace challenge me -- peace means doing nothing. On the contrary, "peacework" is hard work -- doing the work that promotes connection, self-worth, community and effectively teaches the skills -- and they are skills -- so that peace-based ways of resolving conflict become second-nature. The programs that the Department of Peace would fund show us time and again that once learned, these skills are transformational and they WORK.