Peace One Day

I completed the first leg of my ongoing 1000 Cranes for Peace project this week with my students generating the final 300 cranes needed in just a couple of days. In fact we have already started on the next thousand. We will be sending the cranes to Hiroshima for August 6 - the anniversary of the US dropping the atomic bomb on their city.

I started this project after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last December and I feel that this project is even more pertinent and important today. War will always be controversial and our own personal politics will polarize communities into extreme factions. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One man’s inhumane torture is another man’s justified force. At some point we have to realize that all our perspectives have merit and the only way to resolve the differences in these perspectives is by first empathizing with our perceived adversaries. I’m not sure if this is even possible without dialogue. It just seems that we are so busy fighting that we are not considering any other alternatives. If our ultimate collective goal is peace and security for our families, I would think we already have enough common ground for which to begin. Sometimes the diplomacy being used at the world level is no different than the tactics I used in the playground conflicts of my youth. “She hit me first!” was the usual justification for swift retaliation which fueled the “You hit me harder!” snappy retort for the inevitable escalating comeback.

I am teaching children today who have never known their country to be at peace. That concept has really hit home for me and it scares me. What if they just accept this as a fact of life and have their world perspectives and overall general outlooks evolve from this baseline? What type of future is in store for mankind if the leaders of tomorrow never experience peace or are not educated on the alternatives to war?

A project like folding 1000 paper cranes may not generate instant massive change but it definitely is creating awareness in my young students of a huge movement that is supported by people who do not accept war as the only solution to conflict. It is also connecting them to young people all over the world, including countries where beliefs and ideologies are different than theirs, and showing them that at the end of the day our values, our hopes, and our dreams are not so different after all.

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”  - Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968)