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You Are Doing It
Here is the website for the People's Initiative for Departments of Peace, the international movement to make peace "an organizing principle of society." (Dennis Kucinich) To me, that means getting a seat at tables of power to voice the best interests of peace. To date, the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Italy, and Nepal have such governmental initiatives with nongovernmental initiatives in every corner of the planet.
Here are the specific suggestions named on the website for actions you can take:
Immediate Actions
Write to your head of state, government representative, city council, and local representatives stating your opposition to the use of violence and war as a means of resolving crisis. Ask for a meeting with them. Encourage your local city council, state or provincial representatives, and national government to establish a Ministry for Peace or Department of Peace to commit the community and its government to finding effective and constructive ways of transforming violence and promoting healing through peaceful means.
Always RememberContact your local school board and national ministry or department of education and call for the introduction of peace education at all levels of the school curriculum.
Promote and organize dialogues across borders and between communities, cultures, and religions. Do the same within your own community, bringing together people of different backgrounds and religious and spiritual faiths and ideological beliefs. Focus on those elements of your belief and value systems that emphasize and promote values and cultures of peace, nonviolence, respect, understanding, dialogue, unity of life, and the celebration of diversity.
Organize and act to have your village, town, or city declared a village, town or city for peace. Then, as a next step, reach out to villages, towns, and cities in other parts of the world, forming twin cities for peace, promoting exchanges, dialogue, and mutual learning across borders, cultures, religions, and civilizations uniting together for peace.
Prepare a petition or statement opposing the use of violence to respond to conflict and calling upon political, economic, social, religious, cultural, and military leaders and your fellow citizens to act responsibly, refuse to take part in violence, and work for peace.
Speak to your family, neighbors, and colleagues about what is happening. Listen to them, to their feelings, to their concerns. Dialogue here is a vital tool, and for dialogue to occur it must be based upon mutual respect and listening.
Create a peace organization or movement to study, learn, and carry out what can be done for peace and the transformation of conflicts by peaceful means at the personal, interpersonal, social, and global or international levels.
Reach out and contact local peace organizations, women's groups, human rights movements, youth organizations, and other civil society organizations and encourage them to become involved and to demonstrate, stand up, and work actively for the peaceful resolution of current conflicts and to the conflicts and crises that gave rise to it. Ask them how you can be involved and offer to help.
Organize training programs, teach-ins, lectures, seminars, educational events, fairs, celebrations, and activities for peace and for teaching, learning and sharing skills in peacebuilding, conflict transformation, community empowerment, reconciliation, and dialogue.
Organize discussion and action groups within your school, your community, and over the internet for learning, sharing, discussing and acting together, trying to understand what is behind the conflict and violence, and the impact of violence upon your/our communities and lives, as well as what can be done and what is needed to transcend violence and work actively and constructively for peace.
Organize and carry out peace demonstrations. Show people that there are alternatives. Prepare placards, signs, and handouts that show clearly your deep sympathy for all the victims of conflict, and that state categorically your opposition to violence, and that offer suggestions and proposals for what can be done and how others can get involved.
Unions, ship and dock workers, truckers, pilots, airlines, and shipping companies can refuse to transport any and all forms of military equipment, soldiers, and weapons for making war/death.
Write letters to the media asking for reporting that includes focus on proposals and suggestions for nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution. Send a press release to the media about every activity you do.
Refuse to be silent.
Editor, propeace.netGet involved and take action.
Insist on what you know to be right.
Speak your truth.
Say no to violence and yes to nonviolence.
You are the one who can make it real!