At a meeting on Monday, April 3, a dozen or so of us began discussing Peace Circles as a structured way for folks to focus upon a really important issue, and then to identify a way to solve it, and then begin coming up with creative action they themselves can undertake that will begin moving our country toward a solution to the very problem they began to focus on. I used the idea of Peace Education Action Commitments for Everyone, or P.E.A.C.E. Circles to signify five phases of the focusing-to-actions-for-everyone process. We had hardly begun our discussion when we had to end, and we promised to continue.

At the meeting, I found myself a bit ambivalent about whether to focus most on the five-session model, or on the problem it was designed to address, or on how the structure of the model actually addressed that problem by changing its components. The problem as I saw it was not only war, violence, and terrorism, the latter a response to violence, but was a broader culture that accepted, tolerated, and even preferred violence as the most trusted way to solve its conflicts. This culture pervades our country and its politics. Most leaders and followers of both parties seem to subscribe to it and in practice support it.

In our political system, our elected leaders tend to cater to the electorate, and thus follow the lead of the electorate, rather than leading them. To effect a change in our politics, we thus have to begin with a change in our culture at a grassroots level. Hence the idea of involving ordinary folks in basic discussions of what's going on, what they think about what's going on, and what they might want to do to change what's going on. At a grassroots level, we have access and opportunities to begin a process of change and growth in values, priorities, and understanding.

Changing but a few minds, of course, would result in little change overall. But if each person who undergoes change recruits but five more folks into a similar opportunity for change, then change gets amplified exponentially. From 5 to 25, to 125, to 625, to 3025, etc. From a handful to dozens, from dozens to hundreds, from hundreds to thousands, from thousands to tens and hundreds of thousands, to millions, to tens and hundreds of millions. The key to large-scale change is relatively simple: each persons recruits another handful. That's all it would take. Instead of a few people doing a lot, a lot of people would each do a little. In theory, one could thus change the way much of the country thinks, circle by circle, by 2008.

But a lot else would change too. People would become accustomed to a new way of problem-solving, a new form of group action, new attitudes toward both self and towards others, a new appreciation for what people can do in groups when they put their minds to it. We would likely end up with a healthier democracy. People would have learned a way to break big and recurring problems down into fundamental resolvable ones.

MTO