The Learning Curve of Peace

“Why are we violent, but not illiterate?”

This question, originally posed by writer Colman McCarthy, was asked at the Midwest Regional Department of Peace conference, which was held last weekend outside Detroit. It cuts to the core of our troubles. The answer is agonizingly obvious: “We’re taught to read!” Could it be we also need to be taught, let us say, calmness, breath and impulse control, practical applications of the Golden Rule? But until we know enough to ask these questions, violence, like ignorance, is just a fact of life.

Oh, humanity. In Russian, the word “mir” means “earth”; it also means “peace.” We know the answers. They’re hidden in our language. We long for peace with every fiber of our being, yet we spend countless trillions annually pursuing its opposite, as though determined in our perversity to be the worst we can be, to squander our enormous intelligence chasing fear and rage to their logical conclusion and annihilating ourselves.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to H.R. 808, the bill to create a cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace. It was first introduced by Dennis Kucinich in 2001, and reintroduced in every session of Congress thereafter. It has some 70 co-sponsors in the House right now — thanks to the tireless grassroots lobbying efforts of members of the nationwide Peace Alliance — but remains a long way from passage, or even congressional debate. That’s almost beside the point, however. At this stage, the legislation is a focal point for spreading awareness and getting people (members of Congress and everyone else) to start asking the right questions.

“From the growing rate of domestic incarceration to increasing problems of international violence, the United States has no more serious problem in our midst than the problem of violence itself.”


More at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/20

Sorry, but that is a sad reality of life. Lions eat sheep, sheep don't eat lions. If you have 100 peaceful people and one violent one, then that one will rule the others, unless he is stopped. Selective counter violence is very effective at stopping human predators from their evil.

Our culture is lopsided.