Steve Burns: Why do we have war instead of peace?

It's a big question, I know, but I'm inspired to ask big questions but the recent release of a War Resister's League report, “Where to from here?” which attempts to asses the state of the peace movement based on interviews with 90 peace and justice organizers.

One quote in particular caught my eye. Patrick Reinsborough, of the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project said, “...the antiwar movement doesn't have many staffing opportunities. What happens then is nonprofits working on other issues scoop up the best organizers and activists. That is a real consideration for training and leadership development in the antiwar movement. It's different if you're training college activists who have an orientation towards worker's rights. There's a very good chance that the best, high-capacity folks are going to get jobs with labor unions if they want to. It's the same if they have an environmental orientation. That's just not the case with antimilitarism work.”

I think this is an essential point. Why do we have war instead of peace? Because making war is the job of very many people and making peace is the job of very few people. The U.S. has about 1.5 million active-duty military personnel, and another 2.2 million are employed in manufacturing the equipment and weapons needed to fight wars. And, of course, those weapons manufacturers employ thousands of lobbyists to represent their interests. On the peace side of the scale, add up all the half-time and even quarter-time jobs in all the peace organizations in the country, and you'd get... a thousand people, perhaps? United for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest peace coalition, employs about a half-dozen people on staff.

The fundamental source of this imbalance is that the benefits of war-making are direct and easy to identify, while the benefits of peace are diffused among the entire population. The company that makes billions selling helicopter gunships is highly motivated to allocate a few percent of that income to a crew of lobbyists to ensure the contracts keep coming, while the parent whose child isn't killed in the war that doesn't happen never thinks to write a check to a peace movement that prevented the war from happening (assuming for the sake of argument, that a peace movement could actually prevent a war from happening).

None of this is meant to disparage all of the amazing work that's done for no pay at all by the millions of Americans who struggle for peace. But it stands to reason that if peace-making is something we fit in between our other commitments, while war-making is something that millions are allowed to devote their full energies to, then the result is likely to be more war and less peace. And anyone who's ever looked around the room at a peace-movement organizing meeting and seen our characteristic mix of college students and retirees can tell that there's a “missing generation” - people at their peak of ability and energy, off doing what they need to do to raise and support a family.

Must it be always this way? If our society was capable of a rational allocation of resources, certainly not. The Iraq war has been estimated to cost our country at least three trillion dollars before it ends. Could a million paid peace organizers, placed in a million communities in our country, have organized enough opposition to defeat the Congressional vote that sent us into that war? If we paid those million peace organizers a million dollars each for their work, we'd still have saved $2 trillion. That's a bargain, by anyone's standard.

But cost-benefit analysis, however persuasive, won't create peace jobs from thin air. One answer, championed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, is the creation of a Department of Peace. However laudable this may sound, there are some obvious problems with this idea. Since it seems to be the business of our government to go to war, it should be the business of peace activists to stand in opposition to the government. Could we expect government employees to do this? And what about the risk of creating a deadening “peace bureaucracy” that squeezes the vibrant life and grassroots initiative from the peace movement we've got now?

I have a different idea. It's a crazy idea, but I ask you to hear me out. Imagine that 2% of the adults in Anytown USA, a small town of about 10,000 people, decide that they're so fed up with endless war that they're willing to take a radical step. These 100 people agree to donate 1% of their annual income to a common fund, and with this money, they hire a full-time organizer. They're so committed to this idea that they also agree to attend a weekly meeting at which the paid organizer reports on the state of the peace movement and the work of their newly-created peace organization. In fact, they're so committed to peace that they decide that they will even bring their children to these weekly meetings, in order to pass on their desire for peace to the next generation.

What have I just described? Would it help if I added that the weekly meeting of this peace organization takes place on Sunday morning? Yes, this model for creating an army of a million paid peace organizers is so impractical that a million communities in our country make it happen every week. It's your local church, and it provides a powerful antidote to the argument that “we don't have the resources” to create real, family-sustaining jobs in the peace movement. Go into the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, for example, and you'll find a storefront church sustained entirely by the donations of its members, working-class folks who are donating much more than the 1% that our imaginary Anytown residents are donating.

No, the peace movemen can't offer you eternal salvation in return for your 1%, but we can offer some benefits in the here-and-now that your local church can't match, like a country with the resources to provide universal health care and a free college education, and thousands of not-dead young people at home instead of in Arlington National Cemetery.

But aren't the Anytown residents taking the easy way out? Aren't they simply fobbing off their peace work on a paid servant? I think the opposite is more likely to happen: with a paid organizer to make the phone calls, reserve the room, arrange the meeting with the Congressman, our Anytown peace activists can leverage their efforts, and would likely become more active. Besides, wouldn't people who had committed a substantial amount of money to a peace organization be willing to do more to ensure that it was successful? Don't church members do more charitable and volunteer work precisely because there's a paid minister who's able to encourage, direct, and focus their efforts?

Often, those of us in the peace movement argue that people need to “step it up” in terms of their willingness to sacrifice for peace. Usually this argument is made by the advocates of direct action, who call on us to step outside our legally-permitted-march comfort zone and risk arrest at a defense plant or Senator's office. But I think of “step it up” in terms of this question: Do we want peace enough to do what your average Methodist or Episcopalian does?