From the Director
"The true message in myth--as in life--is that if you simply kill a monster, it will only come back to you in a different way," storyteller Rachel Pruitt explained in a recent issue of Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures . She was instructing children in myth-making. At the climax of a story when you actually face the monster, she told the children, find ways to transform it. Don't just "blow the monster away."Transformation--inner, interpersonal, and cultural--was the theme of the BRC's spring conference series, "From War Culture to Cultures of Peace: Challenges for Civil Society." As an attitude of "blowing away the monster" held sway at home and abroad--from Kosovo to Littleton--a serious experiential inquiry into an alternative way of being in the world unfolded here in Cambridge. And children, it turned out, were at the heart of this transformational endeavor.
After the third conference (and our second parallel peace camp), I watched the channel 56 ten o'clock news air footage of NATO bombing missions over the Balkans. Then the news segment cut briefly to a dialogue with our young peace campers. I realized--since the story condensed so well a reality in which I was immersed--what organization and skill go into making even the briefest of TV news segments. Experiencing a rare personal moment of hunger for more positive TV viewing, I couldn't help wondering what it would be like if such formidable media talents were more often brought to bear on the task of illuminating the contours of fragmentary peace cultures struggling to emerge in our midst.
Peace campers enliven the Cultures of Peace series.
One speaker at the end of the third conference remarked on what he called the beauty of the conference's three segments--on family life, economic justice, and spirituality. Do these topics suggest the entirely new constituencies, he mused, that need to be drawn into a renewed American peace movement, deeper and more lasting than the peace movement of the 1960s? An encouraging thought--and a big challenge!
The founder of the Boston Research Center, Daisaku Ikeda, speaks of the power of personal determination to change the world. His latest peace proposal warms to this theme when he says, "Each of us must awaken to our unique mission as protagonists in the transformation of history." There's that word again--transformation. History--leading to today's well-established culture of war and violence--can't just be blown away, either. We must transform it. As Margaret Mead pointed out: War is a cultural invention, not a biological necessity. To end war, we must replace it with another cultural invention.
You'll find in the pages of this newsletter stories of many inspiring grassroots movements, a wealth of social enterprises responding to this challenge to transform history: Global Action to Prevent War, Stonewalk, the National Summit on Africa, and others. For those, like us, intent upon "transforming the monster," more details on our magnificent spring conference series can be found elsewhere on the BRC website. Thank you to everyone of all ages who came to our series, for making the gathering itself a culture of peace, a new beginning for the Center and a new beginning for me.
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