By Lisa Earle McLeod
www.ForgetPerfect.com

We women have entered into an unspoken, but very well known and completely dysfunctional conspiracy with our men.

We want them to be big strong heroes, yet we criticize them when they resort to violence.

We’re mortified if our husband punches out a guy in a restaurant.  But if the same man shoots down a bunch of enemy planes, he gets his own a parade.

I come from a long line of military men, and I’m very proud of the service they and others, have provided for our country.  But recently it’s begun to dawn on me that we’ve put these guys in a bit of a double bind.

If you know anything about men, you know that despite their sometimes baffling ways - in their hearts - most men truly want to please the women they love. In fact, the desire to please and protect women drives much of male behavior. But we women have somehow given them the mistaken impression that we’re impressed when they kill each other.

In the past it may have been absolutely necessary to have a guy who could protect you against a big bear. But if you think you’re going to be safer living in a world where men continually apply their talents to perfecting the art of war, ask any mom in Iraq how safe she’s feeling these days.

I know there’s evil in the world, and I would never argue against the need for a strong defense, but I think it’s time to put more resources against peace.   And it’s time we women gave our men the chance to be real heroes for generations to come.

I just attended a conference in Washington DC in conjunction with the bill being introduced to create a United States Department of Peace.

The bill, HR 3760, provides for a Secretary of Peace who would sit on the President’s cabinet and a Peace Academy, a sister institution to our military academies where America’s best and brightest could be trained in the cutting edge techniques of non-violent conflict resolution.

I personally think the idea to create a Department of Peace is long overdue.  Everybody knows - you get what you focus on.  And if nobody is put in charge of something it never happens.

Peace has been a human aspiration since the dawn of time.  But it’s funny, whenever you talk about peace, people often assume you’re anti-military at best, or some sort of anti-American, president hating nut at worst.

However, I see it as just the opposite.  A country that wants peace needs to support our leaders in creating it.  My grandfather, who’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery, didn’t spend a lifetime in the service so that we could go on repeating the same mistakes.

Many people have criticized the current and other Presidents for starting wars. Yet have we ever really ever provided any of our Presidents the proper resources for creating peace?

A president with no infrastructure for peace is like a CEO with no finance guy. He may have a marketing guy, an operations guy, and a techno guy but if he doesn’t have a CFO, is anybody going to be surprised when the books don’t balance?

It might surprise you to know I attended the Peace conference with my dad, a former Navy man. And we sat next to a West Point grad as we listened to a number of notable conservatives describe why they think the Department of Peace is a good idea. 

Just as taking care of your health is cheaper than surgery and education is cheaper than prison, proactively pursuing peace is preventative maintenance. It’s a fiscally prudent solution that could save us a pile of dough.

But for me, the most compelling reason for a Department of Peace is personal - I’m tired of watching smart men die. If I see one more face of one more mother’s child whose precious soul was murdered during the atrocities of battle, I think I’ll throw up.

I’m sure this bill is going to be debated to death in Congress, and I don’t claim to understand the inner workings of government bureaucracy. 

But I do know that there’s one thing every woman in America could do right now that would change the course of history forever. We could decide that peace was sexy.

We could let our men know that as much as we appreciate and honor the sacrifices they’ve made, we love them too much to watch them keep killing each other.

We woman have more power than we know. If we decided to rewrite the job description of a hero, the world would change overnight.

Men at Peace- I’m so turned on I can’t stand it.

Reprinted with permission from:

Lisa Earle McLeod Nationally syndicated columnist and the author of
Forget Perfect