Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Leah Wells

  • Building a Culture of Peace

    Building a culture of peace means that we begin educating our young children on personal, local, national and international issues of conflict and violence. All too often, education and dialogue is reserved for undergraduate, post-graduate and professional circles, ignoring the vast resource of youthful enthusiasm and exploration which high school-aged students can provide. The institutions of government, military, and popular media wage educational campaigns to inundate young people’s lives with violent images and wasteful propaganda. If a culture of peace is what we want to provide for the future generations, then we must begin to explicitly *teach peace*. In the United States, this may mean restructuring the academic calendar to make learning at school more permanent rather than seasonal, and it may mean challenging our system of “accountability” where we are teaching our kids to test rather than teaching them to learn and think.

    Furthermore, kids learn by example. So if we want them to learn nonviolence and healthy conflict management, we as a nation must become more vigilant in creating compassionate policies for education, healthcare, foreign countries, immigration, nuclear energy and weapons of mass destruction. As a high school teacher of nonviolence, I tell my students that if they want to know where their priorities are, they should track where they spend their money. Does it go to transportation expenditures, to new clothes or movies, or does it go to charitable causes? Students see where their governments’ priorities are when they learn of the disparity between the defense budget and the education budget.

    *Leah C. Wells is Peace Education Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Help Shed Public Light on Pictsweet Farm

    I could tell you about the canned food drive that my students in the Solution to Violence class organized at St. Bonaventure High School in support of the Pictsweet farm workers.

    A union organizer and mushroom picker visited my classroom a few weeks ago and told their stories of meetings with bosses, supervisors and high-level officials, of working through the manure fire despite health hazards and of the hardships in working for an oppressive and inconsiderate corporation.

    My Compassionate students-in their final week before graduation, when most other seniors had finals, graduation parties and college on their minds-were making posters, announcements and changes in their psyches and in our community on behalf of people whose cause needs to be heard.

    I could tell you about the companies who continue to buy Pictsweet mushrooms in spite of the boycott against the company.

    Pizza Hut, Sam’s Club, Red Lobster and Papa John’s are just a few of the businesses whose patronage allows Pictsweet management to continue to take advantage of its workers. Yet Vons has taken heed of the injustices and has agreed to stop buying Pictsweet mushrooms.

    The March fire was the result of a pileup of unused compost. The compost piled up because of the boycott’s success-and yet, Pictsweet management refuses to negotiate with its workers even in the face of an environmental catastrophe that affects the soil, water and air of our community. Although various companies have canceled orders of mushrooms, Pictsweet continues its operations with business as usual, and the mushrooms are picked, packaged and then discarded. Pictsweet management has repeatedly denied requests to negotiate with the workers.

    I could tell you how corporate globalization has gone local.

    Powerful corporations capitalize on keeping their consumers ignorant about where their food and services originate. We are not accustomed to questioning the working conditions or lives nor the attitudes or practices of the institutions that regulate the industry. Unfortunately, we are absent when the supervisor condescends to tell the workers that they smell when they come to negotiate or when the organizers and workers are made to wait indefinitely for an appointment to discuss the lack of a contract.

    We are not present when supervisors deny compensation for on-the-job accidents, and we are not around when the vision of Pictsweet workers deteriorates due to inadequate lighting on the hats they wear. Profits are more important than people when workers must continue working, ignorant of the fire’s hazards even as the rest of the community had been informed of its dangers six days prior.

    As a community, we can fight the systemic injustices that transpire at the local level, with Pictsweet, and at the international level, as seen in the unjust policies of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund. “Human need, not corporate greed” is the rallying cry of those working to bring accountability to big business.

    I could tell you about the integrity of the media and about the importance of objectively and comprehensively covering the scope of the injustices transpiring at Pictsweet.

    But instead, I will tell you how you can help. You can respect the livelihood and integrity of the Pictsweet workers by boycotting the aforementioned companies. You can support the United Farm Workers by insisting that a contract between the workers and management be reached. You can demand that the workers be given a raise greater than the last-a three-cent-per-hour increase in the late 1980s. You can support the fund-raisers at Café on A in Oxnard, the proceeds of which go toward helping the cause of the workers. You can help raise awareness in your own community and let other people know the transgressions of Pictsweet.

    Like my students did, you too can make a difference.

    *Leah C. Wells is Peace Education Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Human Rights in the 21st Century

    The people of Iraq have been denied basic human rights since the Economic Sanctions were imposed in August of 1990, and the international community has done little but watch and wait. The United States and United Kingdom have bilaterally acted to deny the innocent people in Iraq clean water, electricity, materials to rebuild their devastated national infrastructure after the Gulf War, and most importantly, food. Every United Nations organization pertaining to health, agriculture and children has reported on the detrimental effects of the sanctions on the most compromised populations, the children, the sick and the elderly.

    To address the issue of human rights, the international community must take a stand on the situation in Iraq. Many countries have already violated the sanctions, like France, Russia, Ireland and Syria, showing that support for the sanctions is crumbling. The international community must show the backbone to support human rights because the concept of human rights transcends ideologies, religions, and national borders. If ever there were a case for taking a strong stand in favor of human rights, Iraq is it. How can countries investigate the egregious violations of human rights in this isolated country when travel and communications with its residents is in all cases ill-advised and in some cases illegal? How can the international community ignore the World Health Organization’s reports that over half a million children have died, and more than one million total, as a direct result of the sanctions?

    Is this the policy we choose to set as a standard for supporting human rights in the twenty-first century?

    *Leah C. Wells it the Peace Education Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • To Address Gang Problem, Abandon Ageist Ideas

    Adults have no monopoly on problem solving. If policing, prison and other conventional methods aren’t working, maybe it’s time to ask young people what they think should be done and really listen to what they say.

    I began teaching classes in nonviolence theory and practice in a maximum-security juvenile facility near Washington, D.C., in 1998. The young men and women incarcerated there were being detained for myriad crimes: gang-related issues, shooting family members or violence against siblings or peers, for example. These young people had a few things in common: They were all people of color, all poor, all with low levels of literacy. Yet these qualities did not impede their ability to internalize the values and tenets of active peacemaking. As I worked with these young women and men, we all began to uncover the true meaning of nonviolence: listening to each other, validating each other’s experiences, figuring out how to make things more just, and becoming more in control of our emotions and responses to anger and violence.

    By many people’s standards, I should not have been there teaching the people whom society deems unlovable, unteachable and unreformable, and who are at the end of a heavy-handed legalistic punitive society, all victims of finger-pointers rather than problem solvers. Yet the nonviolence classes at this juvenile prison worked because of faith in the creativity and self-expressiveness of each young person. I entered the jail ready to hear their stories in their own words and to address the issues most affecting them, like physical abuse at home, substance abuse and escalating verbal conflict.

    In my estimation, violence stems from misunderstanding, which comes in comfortable positions who make decisions affectinfrom lack of communication, which comes from ignorance in the true sense of the word–and ignorance is combated only through education and dialogue. To truly get at the root of a problem, as a society we must abandon our ageist ideologies that adults have a monopoly over access to community building and problem solving. We must reincorporate young people back into the loop. This begins by listening to them and straightforwardly addressing their concerns and grievances.

    In the first presidential debate, George W. Bush labeled “at risk” kids as “kids who basically can’t learn.” This stereotype haunts kids, especially minorities, making escape from these externally imposed confines more precarious. What is it like to be heard and understood? What is it like to be an adult with stature, a stable life, a voice and clear language and thoughts to express that which pleases and displeases? What must it be like not to be discounted based on race, age, appearance, location or other transient factors? Perhaps before our communities can make progress toward more peaceful relations, we need to hear and accept the daily complications that make life perilous for kids, in their own words and language, absent judgment and malevolent suspicion.

    The recent smattering of gang-related shootings in Oxnard opens a door of potential dialogue for a long-standing and gravely important problem. First, designate a permanent means of addressing the complicated issues surrounding gang violence in Ventura County by institutionalizing classes in alternatives to violence specifically for gang members, creating a safe space for them to learn concrete methods of conflict management. Peace is not static; it is a forever-changing dynamic that requires finesse and negotiation and consistent maintenance. Peace is not the lull between explosions. To create a lasting peace, we must equip our young people with the teachable and learnable tools necessary to make competent, broad-minded decisions.

    Next, give these young people the chance to be articulate and play an active role in making their communities better places. Offer the option of intra-gang and inter-gang facilitated dialogues by an impartial third party. Gandhi provides a wonderful guideline for such an encounter: Describe all that is shared in common against the one unshared separation, claiming a different gang. Allow them to become policy-makers and set the guidelines for creating safer communities. Ask them how to begin making things as right as possible rather than handing down mandates that might not address the real issues of why the gang violence has recently escalated.

    If heavier policing, stricter sentencing and more time in juvenile hall or prison are not making a positive difference, then we ought to ask those directly involved what they think ought to be done. Their answers might just surprise us.

    * Leah C. Wells is Peace Education Coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She teaches a nonviolence class at St. Bonaventure High School and is director of the Southern California chapter of Nonviolence International. She is youth coordinator for Season for Nonviolence 2001.

  • Learning About Peacemaking Is a Step Toward Ending Violence

    Orginally published in the Los Angeles Times Ventura County Edition

    Martin Luther King, Jr. said that our choice is not between nonviolence and violence, but a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence. Statistically we are told that crime has steadily decreased for the past eight years, however we also feel an increasingly random, yet eerily personalized, degree of susceptibility to being victimized. Our neighborhoods and schools, once thought inviolable, are now the target of more bold perpetrators. And yet we have a choice: be a part of the problem or a part of the solution.

    But what’s the solution?

    How do we fix our ‘gated community’ mentality, mend our broken relationships, care for the castaways in society, and work toward achieving solidarity, tolerance, and peace? By making a commitment to educating the next generation of leaders, our young people, in the ways of nonviolence. If our human species is to survive, we must change the way we are doing things. Many of us feel helpless to fix our own personal troubles, much less rid the world of nuclear weapons, abolish the death penalty, make a more egalitarian economy, and protect global human rights. Violence originates in fear, which is rooted in misunderstanding, which comes from ignorance. And you fix ignorance through education.

    Violence is like a dandelion-filled yard. We tug at the stems and step on the flowers – and rather than ridding the yard of this nuisance weed, we beget more of them. Yet when we pull up the flower by the roots, we have isolated the problem and fixed it. Nonviolence education is like this. Educating young people about how to deal with the problems they face on a daily basis, as well as how to organize to fix world issues, is the most effective means to solving the endemic violence which has infiltrated nearly every corner of society.

    Through a structured, semester-long curriculum, students from junior high through college can read about the foundations, successes, and actors in the nonviolence movement. Exposing a young student to Gandhi and Thoreau can cause a permanent commitment to living a life of nonviolence. At the very least, it allows students to examine the institutional paradigms which govern their lives, like selective service registration, disparity of allocated funds for violent causes versus nonviolent ones, or perhaps conscientious purchasing power and food consumption. Nonviolence education stresses the availability of alternative options in conflict, like mediation and creative dispute resolution. Making an educational commitment to studying peace in our violence-inundated world is the very least we owe our future generations to whom we have left a legacy of destruction and might-makes-right domination.

    Societal trends seem to be working against the nonviolence cause. For example,our government allocates $289 billion for the Pentagon, and only $25 billion to Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Our justice system continues to be punitive rather than restorative, with little or no rehabilitation occurring in detention facilities despite the obvious need. New laws penalize communities and provide nothing for the welfare of victims nor restore the dignity of offenders, like the juvenile justice legislation Proposition 21 which was passed on March 7. We teach our children capitalistic consumerism yet tell them nothing about the lives of the workers who slave to assemble designer clothing, nor do we tell them about the animals which suffered to create fashion or food, nor do we inform them of the environmental impact of the trash which they create. And by no means do we tell them that these situations are inextricably linked, either.

    Yet there is hope! Learning about peacemaking is the first step to righting these inegalitarian situations. Students become aware that injustices exist; they then accept these injustices as tangible and real. Next, students must absorb this information in a utilitarian way; finally, they are ready to take action. The beauty of nonviolence curriculum is that it is available to everyone: it works at Georgetown University, as well as at maximum-security juvenile detention facilities. Deep-thinking is highly encouraged, and reflective and action-oriented writing is often assigned to students in nonviolence classes. Because this material speaks to students as co-proprietors of authority, rather than as subordinates, they tend to internalize the pacifist messages quickly and discreetly. It subtly permeates their thoughts and actions.

    We cannot continue to cheat our students by doling out tidbits of revisionist history. They deserve to know about Jeanette Rankin, Dorothy Day, and Oscar Romero. Institutionalizing nonviolence remains the goal, and to clearly send that message we must bring this peace studies class to our school boards and curriculum committees, and maintain persistence and fidelity to the cause of peacemaker education.

  • Non Violent Curriculum for Kids

    Orginally published in the Los Angeles Times Ventura County Edition

    The degree of violence in our world today, represented in our media via the television, newspapers, and internet, is deplorable. We are continuously handed pre-formulated thoughts that bombing, divorcing, and fighting are the only ways to solve disputes. With overflowing prison populations, guns in school, and escalating domestic abuse, it is no wonder that profound powerlessness and despair fester within our culture. What do we do about these problems? How do we go about reversing the cycles of inegalitarian practices which oppress so many? Whom can we solicit to address the questions of bringing peace to our disquieted world? I think I have the answer.

    Nonviolence education is a systematic curriculum designed to awaken students’ minds to the possibilities of thinking outside the ‘might makes right’ paradigm, allowing them to view global human rights as a part of their own cause, not something distinct from their own personal life experience. Peace studies education teaches the view of history from those who have worked for radical social change and fighting injustices; it promotes the values of constructive conflict prevention and resolution as well as nonviolent resistance and direct social action. Students acquire a comprehensive view of the current global situation by learning the links between poverty, religion, economics, governmental policies, technology, environment and education. In exploring alternatives to violence, students gain knowledge about their life choices, for example selective service registration. They also gain a context for their daily lives, like investigating the origins of the products they purchase and consume, i.e. whether they were tested on animals sprayed with pesticides, or what the lives, wages, and treatment of the producers are like. Peace studies education gives students the tools to constructively deal with the problems they encounter on both a personal and worldly level, as well as helping them to understand their responsibility for elevating the collective human experience.

    After teaching a revolutionary and widely successful class through the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. last year in an urban high school and a juvenile prison, I can see a change in students’ attitudes: a motivation to mobilize toward the common cause of improving the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. Colman McCarthy, who directs the aforementioned Center, suggests that peace rooms be designated in all schools for the resolution of disputes, and that programs be implemented so that students can become ‘peer mediators’ who serve as impartial negotiators for conflicts between fellow students. Why is peace studies not a mandatory class in school, especially when it reaches the core of how to interact and get along? What is so subversive about teaching the origins of the Hague Court, rooted in the early peace churches of Colonial America? Why is there suspicion with regards to questioning where our tax dollars go? Why is conflict management not an integral part of our school curriculum, like math or science?

    There is more money in a wartime economy than peacetime.
    We can fund an eighty-billion-dollar war, but not nonviolence classes. We can supply over three-fourths of the weapons used in the nearly forty ongoing conflicts worldwide, overtly profiting from the massacre of others, but no money can be found for teaching conflict management. At high school commencement speeches, we tell our graduating seniors to go out and be the peacemakers of the world, and yet we withhold the tools necessary to do so. Learning to co-exist with others is a fundamental component to surviving in life, and it does not necessarily come naturally or easily, especially in a world where images of violence are the norm to the point of desensitization. Our government, our leaders, our schools continuously tell us that there is just not enough money to expand the curriculum to incorporate peace studies.

    We owe it to our children to teach them that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. By implementing nonviolence classes, we can subvert the far-reaching problems associated with intolerance and mishandled anger. When we explore nonviolence curriculum we can address the problems of injustice and teach young people how to make the world more egalitarian. To effect real change and truly make a difference, each parent, each teacher-parent association, each school board, and most importantly, each student should lobby for peace studies education in each school.

    Leah Wells is a high school teacher in Ventura County, a member of Amnesty International, and personally committed to spreading nonviolence curriculum throughout our schools. She volunteers with Interface in the Youth Crisis Intervention department, as well as with the Juvenile Detention division of Ventura County.