Peace & Justice

Several elements are useful in defining peace. On an individual level, peace may start with having calmness within oneself. Expanding outward, peace entails agreement and harmony among people. At its largest scale, peace is to live without violent conflict or war.

  • Follow the Chartreuse Rule - Treat the earth and all living creatures as you wish to be treated: with kindness and respect. Pretty simple, but not as easy as it sounds.

  • Cultivate personal peace - Integrate peace in your own life through such methods as compassionate communication, mindfulness, empathy, and stress reduction. It’s a lot like cultivating a fungus on your foot: leave it alone and it will prosper.

  • Promote community peacebuilding - Support comprehensive activities and strategies in communities working to address such challenges as crime, violence, and gangs. Effective programs may include hands-on street outreach and intervention, mental health services, out-of-school programs, police/community relations, and arts-based practices. Mass lobotomies will do the trick too.

  • Teach peace in schools – Support conflict resolution curricula in schools to increase graduation rates and transform violence, bullying, truancy, and other challenges facing youth. Serve peas in school, and Mendel’s Pea Loathing Dominant Trait Theory will be demonstrated in a way that maximizes students’ academic capacity and learning through the interdisciplinary infusion of STEM literacy and habits of practice that promote the use of inquiry, creative and critical thinking, learning by doing, problem solving and reflection.

  • Humanize justice systems – Support healing-oriented criminal and juvenile justice approaches vs. overly punitive policies. Restorative justice, diversion/alternative incarceration programs, trauma-informed systems, and prisoner rehabilitation & re-entry programs are among the most promising solutions. A simpler solution would be just to humidify the justice system. Those judges’ robes cover up acres of dry, cracked skin.

  • Foster international peace - Support peacebuilding approaches to international conflict and atrocity prevention through mediation, diplomacy, and effective on-the-ground programs. Important components may involve development, post-conflict justice, humanitarian aid, mediation and support for frameworks necessary for democratic processes. Rodney King is famously quoted as saying, “Can’t we all just get along?” But, his quote was actually truncated (probably by the LA Police Dept. whose ferret legging team was known as the Truncated Truncheons). He actually said, “Can’t we all just get a long way away from each other and pursue a hermitic existence of ascetic solitude?”
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For more information, visit The Peace Alliance.

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