CK Archives 2004

Date: March 23, 2004

Publication: Port Folio Weekly

Author: D.D. Delaney

Peace 101

Colman McCarthy is a journalist, a teacher, and a non-violent social activist not quite like any other.

            As a journalist (he worked for The Washington Post from 1968 to 1997), he has interviewed such contemporary social-justice icons as Nobel Peace-Prize winners Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias Sanchez, and Mother Theresa.

            As a teacher, he offers courses in peace and peace making at Georgetown University’s School of Law, the University of Maryland, American University, three Washington DC high schools, three elementary schools, and in prisons. He is the founder of the Center for Teaching Peace, a resource outlet for schools seeking to initiate peace studies programs, and lectures widely on the topic, “How To Be and Effective Peace-Maker.”

            As a non-violent social activist, he extends his principles to animals, advocating vegetarianism and an end to the slaughter of 20 million animals a day for human food. In loyalty to those same principles, he also proposes abortion.

            His professional intent: “to use whatever skills I have to ease suffering in the world,”

            McCarthy shared his practical suggestions for achieving a more peaceful world at Holy Family Church in Virginia Beach before a modest gathering on March 12.

            Very simply, he says, non-violence, in theory and in practice, needs to be thought, beginning in early childhood.

            In one illustration he uses in his academic lectures, he offers $100 to any student who can identify six historical characters. The first three are known by nearly everyone: warrior Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul Revere. But no one ever collects the reward, which, he says, he’d gladly relinquish is any student could identify Dorothy Day (founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement), Jeannette Rankin (the only U.S. Representative to vote against America’s entry to both world wars), or Thomas Merton (mystical Catholic monk and prolific writer on spiritual and social themes).

            When it comes to peace, he says, we are a nation of illiterates. Where in school is a student exposed to the pacifist writings of Thoreau, Tolstoi, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Ammon Hennacy, the Berrigan brothers, Helen Nearing, Day, or Merton? How many students visit homeless shelters, soup kitchens, prisons or factory farms and slaughterhouses as part of their curriculum? When are students coached in alternative responses to conflict situations at home or on the playground? How many parents and mentors encourage children to choose careers of service over personal material gain?

            In McCarthy’s classes, all of the above are the focus, not the footnote.

            He addresses violence as an epidemic. “The average American family, when it’s together. Has a conflict every eight minutes,” he says. “And they’re the functional families.”

            “The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten up by someone they know. One third of women killed in America are killed by men who once said they loved them”

            The American military’s $355 billion annual budget “is too cosmic a number” to grasp. It breaks down to $972 million a day,” still inconceivable (and four times more than the Peace Corps gets in a year”). But at $11,000 a second” we might begin to comprehend how overwhelmingly our society is committed to violence.

            Meanwhile, “44,000 people a month are dying in 59 current wars worldwide, 70 percent of them fought with U.S. made weapons.”

            On the other hand, in the past 20 years nonviolent resistance toppled “six brutal governments” in Poland, the Philippines, Chile, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and, last year, in the former USSR republic of Georgia “without tanks, armies, or gun.”

            Ultimately he says, the “change comes from below, not from above.” It’s the organized action of the people that reforms government policies. Ideas that seem “spacy or flaky” today “will be normal in 2080.”

            Therefore, he tells his audiences, “Start. Get peace studies into the schools.”