Building Peace in the 21st Century

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

It was a humbling experience to join more than 1,000 Rotarians and other peacemakers at the 2020 Rotary World Peace Conference this January. It gave me hope to see both young and old attending to learn from each other how to make the world a more peaceful place.

Let’s start with the 160 assembled presenters comprised of not only Rotary Peace scholars and Good Will Ambassadors, but representatives from the Peace Corps, CARE International, the UN Refugee Agency, The Carter Center, and even a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

They shared their expertise on how to advance peace in a world of increasing dangers not only from global warming, but populations threatened by human trafficking, child abuse, spousal abuse, cyber-bullying, war trauma, sexual harassment, and violence prevention in our cities, homes and schools.

There were ongoing workshops throughout a weekend held by violence prevention experts and ‘peace activators’, such as Aussie Steve Killelea’s Institute for Economics and Peace that has created the Global Peace Index and Positive Peace Report which rank nations for their attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.

Of particular interest are those countries and regions that have been able to increase their Gross Peace Index in 2019: The Ukraine, Sudan, Egypt, North Macedonia and Rwanda. “The 2019 GPI reveals a world in which the conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade have begun to abate, but new tensions within and between nations have emerged,” said the Global Peace Report.

The Global Peace Index showed the first improvement in 5 years, in part because Rotary with its 1.2 million members has improved health outcomes, giving some $250 million in grants to peace organizations and projects, such as developing drinking water facilities and health clinics in many of the same countries as the Peace Corps.

Rotary clubs have made a major effort in creating a more peaceful world. My local Montecito, California Rotary Club, for example, has raised more than $200,000 in financial aid for a small valley in the South Lake Kivu District of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to help women and children in particular recover from the devastating civil wars and rebel militias’ ongoing rape and pillaging that has killed thousands as they fought over the rich supply of so-called conflict minerals like Coltan, a rare mineral essential in cell phones.

But what raised my hope for a more peaceful world above all was the 250 high school Rotary Interact Club members from Southern California and Arizona that were there to learn and train in conflict resolution skills.

Where else should we put that hope for peace but in our children who will inherit this world?

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Peace

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

Daily Kos

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and his loss is felt even more than 50 years later as we continue to fight wars both foreign and domestic. He was organizing a march on Washington when he was killed. Who knows what might its effect have been on the Vietnam War if he had lived and mobilized America to end the war sooner?

King called it the Poor People's Campaign, said a Daily Kos commentator on Monday’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He wanted to dramatize the suffering of the nation's poor by bringing them to the capital. Poor people would live together on the National Mall - the long strip of land between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial - and engage in widespread civil disobedience. King wanted to force the federal government to deal with poverty.

MLK gave a speech on 4 April, 1967 to over 3,000 at New York’s Riverside Church that is memorialized at Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.  King’s address emphasized his responsibility to the American people and explained that conversations with young black men in the ghettos reinforced his own commitment to nonviolence.

The Vietcong's TET Offensive of January 30, 1968 had just happened, which was when Americans first realized that we weren’t winning the Vietnam War. Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indianapolis, gave an impromptu speech on learning of his death:

“What we need in the United States is not division;: said Kennedy, "what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months later on June 5, 1968, just after he was declared the winner in the South Dakota and California presidential primary of the 1968 election. It looked like he would ride the Kennedy tide to become President, instead of Richard Nixon, who managed to prolong the war until 1974 and his impeachment.

These were our visionary leaders of that time we remember for what they stood for—that one day we may realize their hope for a peaceful America.

Harlan Green © 2019

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen