What is peace?

Today we introduce our second one-minute video.

In this one, two of our staff members in San Francisco, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Noura Khouri, talk about why they work together to bring peace to Israel and Palestine and about how they would define peace.

Thank you to William Baptist III for helping produce this video.

Peace isn’t just the absence of war. It’s the presence of an adequate, secure supply of food and clean water. It’s having skills to earn a livelihood – and the freedom to do so. It’s learning to work with your former enemies and learning the skills that lead to resolving conflicts rather than escalating them.

The American Friends Service Committee works for peace every day in small ways. We show young men and women here in the United States honorable alternatives to military service. We provide food to at-risk Palestinian children and fuel to run power generators at hospitals in Gaza. In Jordan, we and our partners fit severely injured Iraqis with artificial limbs that give them hope for a better life. Five years after the devastating tsunami in Indonesia, our staff members are still there. We’re still working in Aceh, a region torn by civil war even before the tsunami struck.

Yes, we’re asking for donations so we can raise $1.9 million, the amount the U.S. government spent on the military EVERY MINUTE in 2008.

To us, it’s a big sum. We think it is to you, too. But it’s a drop in the bucket for the military.

William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, said, “Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.”

Help us make converts. Watch our videos, send them to your friends, and please, please donate to One Minute for Peace.

Peace Indicator: $49 million

In an effort to tell positive stories we are starting a weekly Peace Indicator. Our idea is to find simple figures that show progress toward peace in the world.

This week’s Peace Indicator: $49 million

A meeting between USIP and the China peace delegation co-hosted by AFSC and CPAPD March 2009.
Photo Credit: Terry Foss

The Obama Administration’s budget request for the State Department includes $49 million for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in 2010. This is a huge increase over last year’s $31 million budget.

USIP is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution funded by the US government. USIP provides programs to promote peace and stability through nonviolent means. They try to get involved before, during, and after conflicts to do everything they can to help prevent and heal conflicts.

USIP also conducts research into new tools to support peacemaking throughout the world. While $49 million is still far too little for the government to spend on this type of work, the large increase is still a hopeful sign.

The idea for the Peace Indicator came from NPR’s Planet Money podcast which starts each episode by providing a simple economic indicator. Their indicators range widely from obscure financial figures to the number of car salesmen that called a listener in response to one email (5).

We’d like to have a similar wide range of indicators, but we’ll need help. If you have can think of any simple figures that show progress toward peace, please tell us about them.

Why Rosie’s our girl

Rosie, our One Minute for Peace poster guinea, shares a lot in common with many of us here at the American Friends Service Committee: she’s vegetarian, she doesn’t talk a lot, and she’s cute and cuddly.



OK, I made that last part up.

Let’s be up front about this: We’re determined to raise $1.9 million for peace. Sound like a lot? Not to the U.S. government, which spent that much every minute in 2008 on the military – and which plans to spend a whopping 57% of all discretionary spending on the military next year.

But how could we make those mind-boggling numbers seem real?

Videos!

We discussed a number of ideas for one-minute videos when we started this campaign: earnest, off-the-wall, humorous, and possibly demented.

Everyone had excellent points about what type of videos would be best, but we couldn’t come to consensus. So our web team did the next best thing: Aaron, Ralph, Terry, and Carl went out and created their own videotapes. (I stayed here to write.) Some are earnest. Some are off the wall. Some are humorous.

None are demented.

We’ll put up a new video every week for your viewing enjoyment.

But there’s a catch. (Oh, come on – you knew there’d be a catch from the get-go.) We want you to respond. Post your own videos on YouTube or other video services. Comment on this blog. Respond on our YouTube site at www.youtube.com/oneminuteforpeace.

Most of all, we hope you’ll open your hearts – and wallets – to help us raise One Minute for Peace.

Coming soon to a peace blog near you: What we could do with $1.9 million.