Newsletter #6 |
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Newsletter #6 |
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#6 Economic Change (Oct 2007)This newsletter comes with a theme - Economic Change. "Shifting our Economies" is one of AFWW's nine cornerstones of a campaign to abolish war because a huge portion of the global economy is based on the war industry. In full knowledge of what we want to accomplish and as swiftly as is practical consistent with maintaining defense requirements, we must consciously and steadily shift resources from the staggeringly vast sums of money now used to dream up, build, sell, deploy, and use weapons to kill each other to investment in tasks required to bring an end to the killing.
Creating those better conditions is the work of the eight other AFWW cornerstones. Accomplishing those necessary tasks and other desirable goals, for example, those related to global environmental challenges, takes money. Summary of all nine cornerstone tasks. Food for Thought "Endless money forms the sinews of war." ~ Cicero, Philippics. Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC) "Let them march all they want as long as they pay their taxes." ~ Alexander Haig, U.S. Secretary of State, 1982 in response to Washington marchers. "If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be as violent and bloody a measure as it would to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood." ~ Henry David Thoreau "We seem always ready to pay the price for war. Almost gladly we give our time and our treasure - our limbs and even our lives - for war. But yet we expect to get peace for nothing." ~ Peace Pilgrim There is across the globe a growing sense of concern, even of panic, that we humans need to make a major shift in our way of living. Any great change must involve economics, for "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." ![]() Students and the Shift
On October 19th and 20th, The Student Peace Alliance will hold its first Student Peace Alliance National Conference, hosted by Brandeis University. Their theme is: Our Generation Calls for Peace. Note below that the students will include looking at the Economics of Peace. Featured speakers are Betty Williams Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1977 for organizing work through Community for Peace People, to promote peaceful solutions to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland. Arun Gandhi - Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. Trish Jones - A leader in the field of peace and conflict resolution education and President of the Conflict Resolution Association (CRA). Will Spencer - Coordinated the National Peace Academy Campaign that lead to the establishment of the United States Institute of Peace. There will be experts in diverse fields from the Arts and Peace, School and Gang Violence, and the Economics of Peace. The hippies of the 1960's wanted world peace but thought that all you needed was love. This generation knows that hard work will be required and they are rolling up their sleeves to do it. (EW, EYM, FC, PNCR, SOE). From The Peace Alliance Newsletter, 2 August 2007. ![]() Riane Eisler's Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics
If we are to shift our economies, we immediately are led to ask, shift them to what? The 2007 book by social historian Dr. Riane Eisler is, to our delight, the answer to that question. She reviews the essentials of socialism, communism, and capitalism, all of which result in and emerge from a dominator model of living. She urges us to set our sights on a shift to an economic system she calls partnerism. As Eisler herself notes, it will take time and intense effort by many experts to fully shape the actual economics of partnerism-a caring economics that includes financial value for the work of care-giving. It will, she further notes, take an equal or greater effort to implement the changes. But her view provides of vision of what a new economics can look like. Skeptics will say that humans are too selfish to ever make the paradigm shift she describes. An ever growing weight of research on human nature indicates that, to the contrary, humans have evolved to be cooperative when their environment favors cooperation (for examples and references supporting this cooperative view of human nature see the essay on Essential Human Goodness). Our economic and social task is to change the rules by which we live, and The Real Wealth of Nations limns the direction we should go in the next major human cultural shift, a return to social and political partnership between women and men-a change that is spreading rapidly and that AFWW calls the Egalitarian Revolution. Read a review of Eisler's book ![]() Women, Power, and Peace: Women Active in the Shift
AFWW was represented at this year's "Women, Power, and Peace" conference at the Omega Institute in upstate New York in mid-October. Organized by the institute's co-founder Elizabeth Lesser and writer and activist Eve Ensler, the meeting gathered over 700 creative and powerful women and roughly 50 men ready to respond to the growing need for peace and the revolutionary work of women in the peace process. Carla Goldstein, director of the Women's Institute at Omega describes this as "a historic gathering for peace that included three of the six living women Nobel Peace Prize winners and many other courageous women from conflict zones around the world." In her talk, Lesser explained that "women all over the world are stepping out to challenge the old power paradigm. That is, one of patriarchy and limited concern for the planet and human rights." What these women and men are focused on is the SHIFT - our need for fundamental change in how we, the global community, live our lives and how we can speed the process of change. Report on the conference and it's many notable participants |
The Shift Movie
A longing for a shift in our way of living rises across the globe, a longing for a means to escape the violence of war and the destruction of natural habitats that sustain us. A longing for "paradigm shift" from dominator models of living to partnership models. Perhaps the source of this longing is a spiritual awakening. Perhaps it is survival instinct bubbling up. Whatever the cause, to see that the idea of SHIFT has arrived globally and big time, treat yourself to this inspiring video. The Shift Movie A Future Without War Believe in it. Envision it. Work for it. And we will achieve it. QuickLinks The Shift Movie Great SOE Groups Essential Human Goodness |