Dictionaries offer two definitions of “peacemaker”: someone who settles disputes and problems by negotiating and mediating, and a second kind of “Peacemaker”—a Colt single-action revolver popular during the late nineteenth century.
American voters keep bringin’ on the gunslinging version of peacemaker—belligerent, reactionary leaders who turn taxpayers’ pockets inside-out to fund their immense arsenals, endless wars, unwieldy spy bureaucracies, and sprawling armed forces, who make no one’s day–and untold enemies–with their cocky boy-cowboy approaches to diplomacy.
I want new leadership that will keep the peace, not disturb it.
Only visionary leaders can provide the understanding, acceptance, and appreciation necessary to unify the planet’s polarized cultures—Africans, South Americans, China, the Muslim world, and the West. Only idealistic leadership can inspire each of these cultures to achieve its own unique ideals, hopes, and dreams, while respecting and supporting the quality of human life everywhere. Only non-violent leadership can address the century’s most urgent problems—the ravages of disease, injustice, hopelessness, greed, hunger, environmental degradation, natural disasters, ignorance, addiction, prejudice, imprisonment, nuclear proliferation, crime, poverty, conflict, corruption, migration, war, terrorism, and violence.
Albert Einstein said, “”You can't solve a problem with the same mind-set that got you into the problem in the first place.” Yet we keep trying to address 21st century problems with the same kind of 19th century peacekeeping that got us into trouble in the first place.
When our founders wrote the Constitution, they charged future leaders with serious peacemaking roles. And just exactly what does it mean to us, today, to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, establish justice, and insure domestic tranquility?”
American peacekeeping today is all about invading and conquering distant lands unlucky enough to have rich resources and strategic value; imposing international political and economic conditions advantageous to Americans; treating idealistic global cooperatives, movements, and legal bodies as convenient extensions of American hegemony; promoting justice primarily for white, wealthy, incorporated, and preferably male Americans; and insisting on America’s right to do whatever we want, to whomever, whenever, wherever.
We don’t need any more moral bankrobbers who stare down imagined enemies at the point of a gun. We need spiritual political leadership in the mould of Gandhi, Mandela, and King, peacemakers with faith in the power of love, and the moral courage necessary to bring the world together, who will establish a cabinet-level Department of Peace, work to keep our nation in harmony with all God’s children in every nation, and help secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves, our posterity, and all mankind.
Yippee-ki-yay, brother.
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