Putting Peace into the Holiday Season

We here at Peaceworks wish you and yours joyous, peaceful holidays, whichever ones you might celebrate. We hope, as it grows colder outside, that your home will be filled with the warmth of loving, caring family and friends.

We also hope that the holiday season can be a time of "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All."

We know that our world today is rife with conflict; that massive commitments of money and human lives are continuously turned over to war and the preparation for war. What is saddest is that we have grown to take this for granted. Like a frog in a pot of water that is heated gradually, our society has, to a great extent, come to take an Orwellian state of Permanent War as the norm, even as it is destroying us. 

Continuous war not only costs far too many lives and leaves so many more physically and psychologically scarred. It also threatens our very survival. 

• It does this in part because it makes enemies, and this then feeds a cycle of violence. 
• It also means failing to come to grips with the nuclear threat. By failing to abolish nuclear weapons in a universal, mutual and verifiable fashion, we make nuclear war, at some time in the future, far more likely. 
• Throwing many hundreds of billions down a non-productive rat hole is perilous to our economy as well. By failing to invest in people, infrastructure and appropriate technologies, we do a disservice to the nation. By fighting these wars on borrowed money, we run up our children's and grandchildren's credit cards. 
• Finally, by normalizing aggressive war-making and its tragic consequences for millions of people, we compromise our basic shared ethical framework. By accepting this illegal and immoral behavior on the part of our government, we become collectively complicit in the crimes.

On a more positive note, when we keep the vision of a peaceful future alive, and work for it day-in and day-out, we have a basis for hope. When we go beyond holding the vision to sharing it, we make an even greater difference.

We encourage you to share with others the notion of "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All." And, when you do, in some kind way, let your loved ones know that this is not an idle cliche, but rather a statement of what is needed now for our collective survival and betterment. May this heartfelt affirmation of peace and justice for all spread far and wide.

And, again, make them joyful, peaceful holidays.

Help Needed with Signature Ad

We are collecting names on a peace signature ad that will run in the Columbia Daily Tribune on Friday, August 6. The statement calls for ending the wars, building a peace economy and moving forward on mutual, verifiable nuclear disarmament. We aim to have at least 1,000 names and hope to raise sufficient donations to pay for a full page ad. 

GET YOUR PETITION FORM:  If you can help collect names, please download a signature form below. Note that the petition form comes in either an 11-inch or a 14-inch version. If you have legal length paper, it's best to print this in 14" format, as you get more names to the page. If you can only print 11" this works too, it just takes more paper. The statements are, of course, identical.

COLLECT SOME NAMES:  We encourage you to collect names at your house of worship, at organizational meetings, from family members, friends and neighbors, at parties, events, etc. If you can help with public petitioning, please let us know this. If you know of events we should be collecting names at, please share this info with as much lead time as possible.

GET THEM IN TO US:  We will be collecting names through July 25. Please bring or send your signatures to the Nook as soon as is feasible, so we don't end up with a logjam doing entry at the end.

HELP US PAY FOR THE AD:  A full page in the Tribune costs nearly $2,000. So we also really need financial support to help pay for the ad. Donations are optional, but most appreciated. You can bring money with you, send a check with your mailed in signature, or make a contribution on-line, and earmark it for the ad.

We thank you!

Download Petitions Here:

• Download 14-inch version (PDF)

• Download 11-inch version (PDF)

We Need Jobs--We Need a Peace Economy

Endless war is bleeding us, and it’s also bleeding our economy. A War Economy not only brings death and destruction, it is also terribly wasteful. Lives are wasted, and so are our tax dollars. Military contractors rake in massive profits, while our economy withers on the vine.

Spending as much each year on the military as the rest of the world combined is extremely foolhardy. We can’t afford to squander hundreds of billions of borrowed money, year after year. There is no benefit in terms of national security, and we end up with nothing to show for it except a mountain of debt.

Productive investment in a Peace Economy not only provides the basis for a prosperous future, it also provides more badly needed jobs today. A 2007 study by University of Massachusetts economist Prof. Robert Pollin revealed:

The number of jobs provided by spending $1 billion:

Mass Transit: 19,759

Education: 17,687

Healthcare: 12,833

Construction/Weatherization: 12, 804

Military: 8,555

With official unemployment near 10 percent and the actual rate much higher, let’s get smart and spend our money wisely. Join Peaceworks in sending a message to Pres. Barack Obama and Congress: We need jobs. We need to invest in our communities. We need to end the wars abroad. We need to move forward now to create real security and a prosperous future for ourselves and our children.

To contact the White House call 202-456-1111 or click here for their web form.

To contact Congress call 866-220-0044 or 202-224-3121 or go click here for the House or here for the Senate.

To get active in working locally for a Peace Economy, contact Mid-Missouri Peaceworks at 573-875-0539 or e-mail us.

Some Thoughts to Consider on the Seventh Anniversary of the Iraq War.

Our nation is one of vast potential and promise. We are richly endowed in natural beauty and resources, fertile lands, abundant water in most parts of our nation and vast renewable energy resources, capable of providing energy independence.

We are also richly endowed with a diverse population. Drawing on cultural traditions from around the world, we have the wherewithal to create a future that blends the best of many strands of the human experience.

Our constitution and our rule of law provide a framework for civil liberties, human rights and civic participation. What we have isn't perfect, but over the past two centuries we have struggled to improve upon it. There is, at the very least, the political space for expression, and the potential to organize.

This said, we are also a nation in which money talks loudly, corporations have undue influence over public policy, and most decisions are made with an eye to the next quarter's earnings statement or the next election, rather than toward our long term sustainability and well being.

Moreover, we have, for seven decades--ever since World War II--maintained a Permanent War Economy. The United States, with just 4.5 percent of the world's people, is spending approximately as much as the other 95.5 percent do combined.

Many hoped, when the Cold War ended twenty years ago that we would convert to a peace economy and get on with addressing pressing human and environmental needs. Instead, over the past two decades our nation has remained highly militarized and actively engaged in strategies to assert and maintain global geopolitical dominance.  This was the case in the 1990s, and it was ratcheted up significantly in the wake of the crimes of 9-11.

The Obama administration has maintained a remarkable continuity, demonstrating, once again, the bipartisan nature of U.S. militarism and foreign policy. They have escalated the Afghan War and increased the size of the Pentagon's budget. The basic objectives of U.S. foreign and military policy under Obama are basically the same as under Bush, and they are not creating security for our nation.

In fact, our current course is morally bankrupt and is driving our nation rapidly to financial bankruptcy as well. We are spending hundreds of billions each year to fight wars that are not legal, that do not address legitimate security concerns, that kill and maim innocents and make enemies for our nation. These wars involved hundreds of thousands of our young men and women, leaving a large proportion of these citizens physically and psychologically scarred. And we do it all on our kids' and our grandkids' credit cards, as every penny spent to fight these wars is borrowed.

This has to stop.

We are the ones who need to make it stop.

The time for involvement and action is now.

And what is needed is sustained activism. The current system works quite well in the short run for powerful interests that profit from it. They won't give up their profits, power and privilege without a struggle. We need you. And we need you to consider making space in your life for activism on a sustained basis. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out in a week, a month or a year. We need to be in this for the long haul and commit ourselves to building an effective, informed and empowered grassroots movement all across this nation that can challenge the underpinnings of our misdirected policies.

If you share our sense that these to-the-root changes are needed, we invite your active and ongoing participation. We also welcome your ideas, your input and your questions