On waging peace
06/16/2010

Iraqi vet and peace activist Paul Chappell, who heads the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's Peace Leadership Training Program, says that waging peace requires just as much training, recruiting, strategic analysis, discipline, and commitment as waging war.  It is far from a passive enterprise.  Gandhi, too, bristled at the term "passive resistance."  He said, "Satyagraha (soul force) proceeds on the active principle of love, which says, 'Love those that spitefully use you.'  I find it difficult in spite of my conscious practice of it for the last 50 years."  And Chappell quotes Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights activist of the '60s, who said, "Nonviolence means fighting back, but you are fighting with another purpose, and other weapons.  Number one, your fight is to win that person over, and that is a fight; that is a struggle.  It is much more challenging than fisticuffs."

I watched Paul Chappell engage in this struggle on my last peace vigil in Santa Barbara in May, as I reported in an earlier blog.  Paul listened studiously for some 45 minutes with a Tea Partier.  At the end of their conversation, the man thanked Paul for truly listening and was willing to accept a copy of Paul's book, "The End of War."

On Memorial Day weekend while Paul was helping Santa Barbara Veterans for Peace take down the crosses at the beach in a display called "Arlington West," the Tea Partier approached Paul and said he'd read his book and it had changed his mind.  "War is not the solution," he said.  "We must try other means first."  He said he had many friends who are Republicans and that he would be sharing his new perspective with them--and perhaps Paul's book, as well.  Paul won one.  He won one man over...and that man will win over others.

During an interview yesterday for "The Sun" magazine, Paul said to me, "If you don't understand your opponent's point of view, you can't think strategically."  Yet how often do I think I understand my opponent's point of view--to the point of impatience with it--and fail to listen?  And when he sees I am no longer listening, I lose him.  He recognizes that I am no longer in relationship with another human being; I'm relating to an object.  I've dismissed him, so he dismisses me.  He must know I care to care what I know.

It is clear to me that Paul's effectiveness with this man was the result of his patience; his respect; his willingness to truly listen and find common ground--at which point he was able to introduce new information, which were ultimately able to transform the man's thinking.