Updates on peace work

Reinvigorating myself by looking at fallujahinpictures.com blog. Shows you what one person, working part time, can do.

This blog will be an account of the work I'm doing to implement the mission of Imagine Festival. Imagine Festival is a music and workshops festival that is to tour around the country at university areas to start with, plus an anchor performance / workshop / retail / cafe space in Los Angeles. Its mission is to get people together to imagine what the world is like at peace, then take the steps we need to get there. I've been working on it for almost three years now.

It struck me on election night, as the results poured in and I got a call from my repub friend who was still my friend after 2 years of arguments, that the election was a huge fight over who gets to hold the steering wheel, when no one has really articulated where we're actually trying to go.

"We must go right! No! We need to go left!... Wait, where are we going?"

That's what I intend to help create with Imagine Festival... an idea of where we're trying to get to. I have an instinct that we really have a lot more ideas in common around that than we realize.

I have another instinct that the road to get there won't be the paved one going left or the paved one going right, but the unpaved road hidden right before us at this hostile-looking T junction. There is a road there... we just can't see it yet.

Part of the work of Imagine Festival is to create visible, vibrant networks of people actually doing the work to make peace an operating principle in our society. There are a lot of incredibly successful programs out there already, they just don't make the news and they're not adopted into our ways we teach our children. That can change.

This next month, I'm going to organize a group meeting with my congresswoman to discuss with her the creation of a Department of Peace -- a bill that will be dropped soon by Dennis Kucinich. This department will be a major step forward for this nation. More about the Department of Peace to come. You can find out more at www.dopcampaign.org in the meantime. Check back soon!