Peace-Love
Peace-Love
Don’t Give up on the Blessings of Freedom
John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead: All we are saying is give peace a chance." (John Lennon) Every year finds us struggling to reconcile our hope for a better, freer, more just world with the soul-sucking reality of a world in which greed, meanness and war continue to triumph. ... Thinking good thoughts, being grateful, counting your blessings and adopting a glass-half-full mindset are fine and good, but that’s not enough. This world requires doers, men and women (and children) who will put those good thoughts into action. ... Refuse to remain silent. Take a stand. Speak up. Speak out. Recognize injustice. Don’t turn away from suffering...
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Nov 23, 2021, 1:45pm
Peace-Love
End Military Extremism By Ending War
William J. Astore: James Madison warned Americans that long wars favored autocracy, eroded individual rights, and fed corruption, which would weaken democracy. ... In the latest report on military extremism, which I helped author, we uncover a harsh truth: America's 20-year global war only spreads terror further. ... If the first casualty of war is truth, the persistent casualty of endless war is the very integrity of democracy. ... It's time for Americans to become a new kind of extremist—extreme in their love of democracy, of justice, of virtue, of honor, of peace. ... Today's extremism feeds on war, anger, aggression, fear, hatred, and racism. ... To end it, we must first abolish war, reject lies, and embrace one another without rancor.
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Sep 4, 2021, 12:32pm
Peace-Love
Meditations on Loving the Land
Phil Knight: This is our home, the world that made us. Terra firma – solid earth. We return to the Earth when we die and, as we decompose, become part of Earth once again. ... Getting to really know and love a piece of land is a sensual experience and can be a hard one. In a place being overwhelmed by progress, it is dangerous but essential to love the land. ... We ARE the land, made up of all manner of minerals – our bodies contain calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, iron, zinc, iodine, chromium, copper, fluoride, molybdenum, manganese, and selenium. ... And water, of course, that incredible fluid that runs through our veins, makes up sixty per cent of our living bodies, and flows through all the veins of the Earth. ... For all that the Earth gives us, we don’t give a lot back. But we sure do take...
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Aug 18, 2021, 2:44pm
Peace-Love
Hiroshima-Nagasaki: The story they want us to forget
Bruce Gagnon: On a trip to Japan for memorial events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1984 I met many Hibakusha (survivors of the US bombing attacks in 1945). One told the story that after the bomb was dropped the US military would not initially allow medical personnel to come tend the injured. ... Instead US radiological teams came in to study the effects of the bombing on the people. ... The Japanese people were lab rats for the Americans to study. ... A soldiers story: 1945 ... He was a paratrooper. His unit was put on a transport plane and dropped into the mushroom cloud ... The troopers were then medically tested...
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Aug 6, 2021, 12:15pm
Peace-Love
Making War Obsolete
John Repp: We should have abolished war after World War II. ... That war was so lethal and so destructive, even before the dropping of the atomic bombs, that had people understood that there is a real alternative to deadly violent conflict, humanity might have taken another path. ... Why have we not abolished war? ... The mythology of conventional history as told by the dominators rules our minds. ... There is a practical nonviolent substitute for war and violent revolution. ... Civilian-based defense is the idea that a carefully prepared program where an educated and trained citizenry could defend a country using tactics like mass demonstrations, strikes of all kinds and economic shutdowns...
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Jul 28, 2021, 12:26pm
Peace-Love
We Can Only Win Without War
Robert C. Koehler: "Love alone," wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, "is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them up and joins them by what is deepest in themselves." ... What if "love" doesn't refer to some hopeful fantasy but, rather, a reverence that transcends the human ego, that connects us beyond ourselves to all of life . . . even to what we fear? ... What if attaining such a connection is the essence of empowerment, rather than bombing and killing what we fear (along with a few innocent bystanders who happen to be in the way)?...
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Jun 25, 2021, 3:57pm
Peace-Love
Life in Revolutionary Times: Lessons From the 1960s
Nathan J. Robinson: In the 1960s, people around the world fought for revolutionary change. What can we learn from them? ... ’60s radicals did change their society for the better. They didn’t create a utopia, and many of their projects failed. But the country, and the world, were better off because of the work that hundreds of thousands of individuals put in, because of their creativity and their refusal to accept that the way things are is necessarily how they have to be. ... We need to figure out what went wrong and what went right, and to understand that what went right can happen again, if we make it...
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May 29, 2021, 4:34pm
Peace-Love
What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?
Jeremy Lent: A society based on natural ecology might seem like a far-off utopia—yet ... the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice. ... As long as government policies emphasize growth in gross domestic product and transnational corporations relentlessly pursue shareholder returns, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe. ... We need to forge a new era for humanity—one that is defined, at its deepest level, by a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior...
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Feb 19, 2021, 3:30pm
Peace-Love
A Multipoint Plan to End War as We Know It
William Astore: 1. Stop the U.S. from building new generations of nuclear weapons and downsize the vast existing American arsenal, while launching global negotiations to work toward the elimination of all such arsenals. ... 2 If the president wants to set an example when it comes to demilitarizing this over-armed, over-polluted planet of ours, reducing both the military’s fossil-fuel emissions and its poisonous munitions would be a powerful way to start. ... 3. End this century’s forever wars and radically downsize this country’s unprecedented global network of military bases....
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Feb 4, 2021, 3:54pm
Peace-Love
Why We Can’t Give Up on the Idea of a World Free From Nuclear Weapons
Vijay Prashad: On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) became international law for the 122 states who signed the agreement in July 2017. ... “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to... Develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” ... Nine countries of the 193 member states of the United Nations possess nuclear weapons. Two of them—the United States of America and Russia—have more than 90 percent of all the 13,410 warheads. ... None of the nine nuclear weapons states have joined the TPNW...
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Jan 28, 2021, 2:16pm
Peace-Love
Overfunding of U.S. Military Is Driving Climate Change and White Supremacist Culture of War Crimes
Jack Delaney: The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has used its mammoth budget to enable war crimes, racism, and bigotry. While simultaneously squandering resources, the Pentagon is a leading catalyst behind climate change. ... The DOD and military-industrial complex ranks as the largest non-nation-state when it comes to pumping carbon emissions into the environment. ... Climate change is the result of neo-colonialism, militarism, and exploitation to maintain the bottom lines of Western private industry. ... The Cold War adversary in the form of the Soviet Union no longer exists...
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Aug 26, 2020, 3:07pm
 Peace-Love
Lockdown 2020
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
Mar 28, 2020, 10:40am
Peace-Love
The Christmas Truce of 1914: Proof that Peace is Possible
Thomas Knapp: As 1914 drew to a close, Europe had been at war for months. ... On December 24, 100,000 soldiers from both sides of that line decided to create some peace on Earth. ... They decorated their trenches with holiday spirit. They sang carols to each other across “No Man’s Land,” then walked into the space between their trenches, met, smoked and drank together, and exchanged what gifts they could round up. ... A similar truce occurred on the Eastern Front between Austro-Hungarian and Russian troops. ... But for a brief moment peace reigned, proof that the already hardening hearts of opposing armies could at least temporarily melt and that soldiers could treat each other as human beings rather than as mortal enemies....
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Dec 24, 2019, 11:49am
Peace-Love
Creative Education and the Flowering of Goodness
Graham Peebles: Education is potentially the most powerful means of bringing about a major shift in consciousness, within the individual and by extension society; a movement away from narrow ideas of self that feed selfishness, division and material greed, to an inclusive view of life rooted in the recognition that humanity is one ... We are forever brothers and sisters of one humanity, and from the realization of this essential fact flows all that is good: sharing, social justice, collective responsibility, freedom and peace. ... The greatest single obstacle to the establishment of an undistorted relationship with oneself is fear. It is a debilitating poison that sits at the core of a plethora of inhibiting, suffocating conditions... (Krishnamurti )- the purpose of education “is not to produce mere scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace.”...
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Dec 3, 2018, 12:15pm
Peace-Love
Priorities of the Time: Peace
Graham Peebles: Creating a world at peace not only demands putting an end to all forms of armed brutality, it also entails building peace within communities, in the workplace, educational institutions and the home, in the natural environment and, most importantly, it requires the inculcation of harmony within all of us. ... Specific values and conclusions are daily poured into the minds of everyone, virtually from birth, conditioning the consciousness and behavior of people around the world; the media (including the internet), institutionalized education and organized religion being the main outlets for such propaganda. ... At the heart of any alternative system should be the inculcation of the Principle of Sharing; sharing not only of the food, water, land and other natural resources, but of knowledge, skills and opportunities...
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Sep 21, 2018, 2:06pm
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