Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: youth organizations

  • Notes from the Road

    Earlier this month, I participated in Make Our World 2000, a joining of minds between international youth peace activists. The event was held at a scenic retreat center just outside of Malibu, California. A group of remarkable, concerned southern California residents — and activists in their own right — convened the event and enlisted the assistance of the Global Youth Action Network to encourage young activists to attend, facilitate discussion, and develop a plan of action.

    Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

                                                                       -Margaret Mead

    Much was accomplished in the few days we spent together, and a number of larger themes surfaced. We spent valuable time getting to know one another, summarizing our purpose for heeding the call to attend, sharing meals, and hiking together in the Malibu hills. We brainstormed on how we could combine forces, better support one another, and create an international youth platform addressing and linking multiple social justice issues. We recognized the accomplishments of previous meetings with similar goals, yet seized the moment at hand to synthesize, organize, and contribute our individual and collective energies to the youth movement.

    Diversity is a cornerstone in building this movement! Unfortunately, a number of our allies experienced difficulties in securing the proper approval and means to attend the event. Their presence was sorely missed! In their absence, the group acknowledged a relationship between structural, global, macro-level injustice and individual, micro-level suffering.[1] As a means to find solutions to identify and act on solutions to end such suffering, the group recommitted itself to having a greater representation of indigenous peoples, people of African descent, and people of Asian descent at our next gathering, tentatively scheduled for June 2001.

    The facilitators and the group as a whole created and maintained a comfortable and flexible environment that allowed for changes to the agenda. One such change and subsequent discussion validated the point that often times activists work in isolation and/or lack adequate mentorship and support. Knowing this, all individuals working for a sane and safe world must better support one another, expand our network, and use new technologies to reinforce the sense of community.

    [Together we can be] 1,000 candles burning as bright as the sun.

    -Jimmy Hurrell

    I will spare you the specifics on the proposed projects out of respect for group members as we continue to discuss appropriate action steps and with the realization that Make Our World 2000 was just one very important step out of many more to come. Please check back with us soon at https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com for an update on Foundation efforts to develop a network of other youth organizations around the world working on issues complimentary to our own. Don’t worry. You won’t have to wait long!

     

    [1] Jonathan White, a sociology professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, visited the Foundation in November 2000 and discussed one example of such injustice – hunger – with area high school and college students.

     

  • Peace and Security Begins with Youth

    At the age of 21, I was invited to travel to Japan from 13-21 November 2000 and speak in the Youth Forum of the Nagasaki Global Citizens’ Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. It was an extreme honor to be a speaker at the Assembly. For me, the trip was more of a pilgrimage to the crime scene of the last atomic bomb dropping and it reminded me why I chose to work on nuclear abolition. Being in Nagasaki was a time to commemorate and honor those who have suffered so long from the production and development of nuclear weapons and energy.

    More than 200 young people and adults attended the Youth Forum held at Shiroyama Elementary School, a symbolic place for the workshop because the original was devastated on 9 August 1945, when the atomic bomb, code named “fatman” was dropped on the city. I was asked to speak at the Youth Forum because I believe that young people have a tremendous responsibility to effectuate the change needed to abolish war and all weapons of mass destruction. Peace and security are age-old issues that have been around since the advent of war. The existence of war and nuclear weapons evidences our insecurity and our inability to understand how our actions affect others. As human beings, we desire to be secure, yet we have some-how deemed it in our nature to live in fear of each other and therefore we try to justify our urge to resolve conflicts through violent means. Today, we have the greatest opportunity to make peace and security a reality in this globalized world and we as young people have the obligation to achieve it.

    Like many young people in countries that are termed “developed,” I did not grow up truly understanding the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the existence of Earth and its inhabitants. In fact, to the contrary, I grew up falsely believing that we need nuclear weapons to protect us and that war was necessary to resolve conflict. However, when I was 12 years old, I had the opportunity to visit Guatemala for the first time. In Guatemala, I experienced first-hand the devastation that war and weapons cause. It was there that I first began to understand how fortunate I was to grow up in a prosperous country where most people live free from the threat of war. However, it was not until I was studying Spanish and Global Peace and Security at the University of California at Santa Barbara that I realized how the belligerent, arrogant and willfully ignorant behavior of “developed” countries prevented “developing” countries from ever realizing lasting peace and security.

    After graduating from UCSB in 1999, I became the Coordinator for Abolition 2000, a global network of more than 2000 organizations and municipalities working together to achieve a nuclear weapons convention and redress the environmental devastation and human suffering caused by the nuclear cycle. There are many people around the world who believe this is possible and many of the international leaders of the nuclear weapons abolition movement participated in the Nagasaki Assembly. Despite growing international consensus for nuclear weapons abolition, there are very few young people who know about the nuclear issue and even fewer who are actively working to abolish nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, many young people do not understand that the nuclear cycle affects them and will continue to affect them for many years to come.

    The Youth Forum of the Nagasaki Assembly demonstrated that young people do care about making a difference, especially after they gain consciousness of an issue. Knowledge may give individuals power, but it also obligates responsibility. As young people we are responsible to share what we know about peace and security issues with our friends, our families, our communities and all those with whom we come in contact. We must realize that as individuals, the knowledge we have gives us the power to make a difference and we must not be afraid to stand up and be a voice for positive change. As Mahatmas Ghandi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Learning about an issue is the first step to realizing the responsibility we have as young people, but knowing is simply not enough. We must also actively work to achieve the secure and peaceful world we envision.

    At the close of the Youth Forum, I asked the participants as young people and as citizens of Nagasaki to be a strong voice for the abolition of nuclear weapons and to remind the world of the horrors that these indiscriminate weapons cause. The citizens of Nagasaki can speak from experience of the unjustness and devastation of the use of nuclear weapons.

    As a token of my appreciation, I gave each participant of the Youth Forum a packet of sunflower seeds to plant as a symbol of hope and a vision of a world free of nuclear contamination. Sunflowers became the symbol of the nuclear abolition movement on 4 June 1996, the day the US, Russia and the Ukraine celebrated the last missile being removed Ukrainian soil, making it a nuclear weapons free country. William J. Perry, former US Secretary of Defense stated on this day, “Sunflowers instead of missiles in the soil will ensure peace for future generations.” On the inside of the sunflower seed packet, was a petition calling upon the leaders of the nuclear weapons states to immediately begin negotiations to abolish nuclear weapons and redress the environmental degradation and human suffering caused by more than 55 years of nuclear weapons testing and production. The participants were asked to sign the petition and to return the petition to Abolition 2000 in care of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which has collected signatures on this petition from more than 13.4 million individuals world-wide.

    During my speech, I also encouraged the young people to be involved politically. Many young people, especially in the US, tend to be apathetic to how their government acts. But governments only have the authority to rule based on the will of the people it governs. We must constantly remind our governments of their responsibility to us their citizens as well as their obligation to citizens around the world. Many participants made a commitment to write letters on a regular basis to their Prime Minister, urging him to support a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons.

    It is very easy to be apathetic to peace and security issues as, unfortunately, many young people are, but even taking the smallest action will make a world of difference. As youth, we have the greatest challenge, but also the greatest potential to create a world that is just and secure for all.

  • 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.