The 2007 Field of Dreams Speech
So peace means peace now. It means peace in what you write into your weekly planner, in how you carry it out, in every single conversation you have – whether it’s with your boss, your cranky child or the person cleaning your office at 7 p.m. and making you feel self-conscious that you’re still there instead of home with your family or going out with your friends so you can meet the right person and have a family someday.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it’s the presence of justice.” So if peace is our goal, and there’s always going to be more work to create the justice we need in our society to reach it, then at the least we can all put our heads together about what that work is. I’ve put together 10 concrete Strategies for Waging Peace with the help of Andres McAllister and Tyler Atkins and Sania Frei-Harper of our board that you can practice in your everyday lives. I’m going to read just two related to the theme of tonight’s talk:
- Never strike at the heart. Preserve human life and always let others preserve their dignity. When you destroy what is sacred, you destroy the sacred within you.
This strategy reinforces the theme of this talk, that we have to come together as a society against violence. Whether it’s taking place in Blacksburg or Baghdad or Washington D.C., taking someone’s life because you feel they’ve wronged you is just plain wrong. And, as we’ve discussed, it will create many more wrongs.
- Know that your point of view is exactly that – the point at which you view the truth. Respect that others have different points from which they view the same truth.
This last strategy is also critical for peace. The biggest problem in most of our lives is looking back at us in the mirror. Confucius once said, “To know that you don’t know is the beginning of knowing.” Life is about this quest for truth, not a quest to take the lives or abuse those who perceive the truth differently.
My challenge to you is to come up with other strategies and practice them in your everyday life. Not just pie-in-the-sky ideas, but real strategies you look at daily and translate into concrete tasks in your planner.
CSL board member Tim Gray of Freddie Mac has designed a special website called www.thefireinside.org where you can post these strategies for our community and the whole world to consider. [To view the 10 Strategies for Practicing Peace, click on ‘World Peace’.] You can also share your views on other social issues such as the environment, racism and gender issues.
CSL’s Board has asked our musical guests for the evening – Kamel, Hacene and Abdel of the band Gibraltar – to sing a song for peace. We believe this song, and this special version of it, is the song for today. This song paints a picture of where the world, both East and West, needs to be heading, a Vision for the future we can start transforming into our reality not tomorrow, but today.
So let’s start the evening’s entertainment with a song for peace. Thank you.
[The band Gibraltar – from Morocco and Algeria – begin a version of John Lennon’s Imagine by the artist Khaled, sung in both Arabic and English.]
