PERHAPS you have noticed that when it comes to excess and empty noise, I am not the most tolerant person in the world. Take the subject of peace, for instance.
On almost any given day, including Sundays, I receive e-mails from near and far that inform me of various peace seminars, peace retreats, peace picnics, peace dances, peace calendars and peace speeches.
Interspersed are requests for volunteers to hold antiwar signs at various intersections and placards that ask for a passing horn-honk to indicate that a motorist is, after all, for peace, even though he is too busy to do more than honk.
Once in a while someone like Cindy Sheehan pops up and there is a flurry of movement centered on her as she challenges war in the name of her war-killed son, but even that fades away, and her advocates disappear like birds scattered into flight. I wrote in the style of an angry dog one day recently that there was no organized peace movement of any consequence in this country and that infrequent instances of placard-carrying protesters chanting "No more war" are the equivalent of using a water gun to fight a firestorm.
Then I heard from Wendy Greene. While there may not be a massive antiwar movement, she informed me, there is indeed a peace movement. She added: "Big difference."
She was talking about an effort to establish a Cabinet-level U.S. Department of Peace and Nonviolence to achieve harmony between street gangs, spouses, nations, various ethnic and religious groups and others inclined toward maiming or killing one another. Big job.
The idea was so intriguing that I met with Greene one day at Inner-City Arts, located in a large warehouse-like building in the middle of L.A.'s skid row, where she works part time. Greene is also director of outreach for the Peace Alliance, a national nonpartisan organization dedicated to the establishment of a Department of Peace.
Admitting that I had never heard of either the alliance or its goal is certain to bring admonishments for my failure to keep informed. The group, I am told, has a database of about 40,000 supporters and is involved in an effort to have a bill passed in Congress to establish such a department. Now in committee, it is being sponsored by 75 members of the House and two member of the Senate.
"Peace is nonpartisan," Greene declared in the bold manner of a true believer but then was forced to admit that all but one of the sponsors so far, if not all of its 40,000 supporters, are Democrats. The single non-Democrat is an independent. Given the current temper of the nation, that shouldn't surprise anyone.
