Heal Violence by Creating Department of Peace
By Marianne Williamson
The Detroit News, Saturday, June 7, 2003

This past April, Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio introduced legislation that would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace. I -- along with thousands of others -- have lobbied our congresspeople and advocated the idea however possible to friends and associates.

The goal of the department would be to coordinate conflict-resolution and peace-building efforts both domestically and internationally, providing the president with a much broader array of options for handling violent situations than are normally presented to him. Would we be so quick to apply police and military solutions to our collective problems, if we had peaceful alternatives deemed every bit as effective and sometimes even more so?

" We will not solve the problems of the world," said Albert Einstein, "from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives. People cause our social problems, and people are more than merely material beings. To address the causal issues regarding these problems, we must deal with more than material factors.
Violence is reflected in physical action, but it emanates from the human heart. Any approach to the cessation of violence must involve emotional, psychological and spiritual factors, if the approach is achieve more than mere eradication of symptoms.

Social and political disease is similar in many ways to biological disease. Decades ago, mainstream medical understanding was radically altered by new realizations regarding health and healing. People began to realize that an allopathic treatment of symptoms, while often the short-term solution to a medical problem, does not necessarily create long-term healing. To be healthy, we must do more than treat sickness; we must pro-actively cultivate our health. Millions of Americans have turned to nutrition, exercise and myriad forms of complementary healing techniques -- from acupuncture to visualization -- to foster and maintain healthier bodies. Surely, the best way to treat disease is to prevent it from occurring.

A holistic approach to healing does not represent an alternative model to Western medicine, but a complementary model. It does not supplant traditional medicine, but augments it. And so it is that we could use a complementary approach to politics as well, one that recognizes not just the symptoms of our problems, but their root causes. A Department of Peace would honor the entirety of a human -- our emotional, psychological and spiritual issues as well as merely our material ones. And in doing so, it would address more deeply the entirety of our problems.

Especially after the tragedy of Sept. 11, Americans have every right to expect and demand whatever action necessary to create security for our children and ourselves. But conscious Americans also realize that terrorism is a multidimensional problem requiring a set of multidimensional solutions. It is not like an operable tumor, but more like a cancer that has already metastasized to various parts of the body. We cannot just zap the problem and expect it to disappear forever. We must heal it at the level from which it emerged.

The Department of Peace would take a more human approach to healing our society, looking not merely for ways we can destroy an enemy, but for more powerful ways to create new friends. While the State Department engages in international diplomacy, there is no domestic parallel. There is no department seeking to harness the power of a nonviolent heart.

There are 50 co-sponsors of the Department of Peace bill, with 218 necessary to take it to the next step in the legislative process. I think our legislators often underestimate the maturity of the American mind, when it is called to consider events from a deeper perspective. We understand that, ultimately, violence alone cannot end violence. There is only one force greater than hatred, and it is love.