What Peacemakers Can Do

Don Scherer

dschere@bgnet.bgsu.edu

Dear Friends,

Feel free to circulate this broadly, but note that I wrote it so those who may wish to suggest contrary or complementary ideas can contact me.

Don Scherer

dschere@bgnet.bgsu.edu

What Peacemakers can Do

• Give blood.
• Volunteer to support the clean up.
• Donate to the relief effort and to the victims’ families.
• Hold a vigil in an Arab-American community.
• Be mindful of the Americans who died on September 11, 2001.

• Be thankful for opportunities to care and support both those dear to you and those whose need you sense.
• Attend a benefit concert, then leave in silence, but looking into the eyes of nearby strangers, engaging them.
• Be kind to each other, for within each of us stir great demons.
• Use less petroleum.

• Affirm leaders who denounce prejudice, hatred and revenge.
• Like those who crashed the plane in Pennsylvania, deflect the power of hatred to inflict suffering.
• Let not fear make you the monster you deplore in the violence of others.

• Learn about the fear of Japanese Americans during World War II and the emerging fear among in the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities today.
• Be thankful that America has expressed its regret for the World War II internment camps of Japanese Americans.
• Be mindful of the foreign nationals killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
• Think of people very different from yourself and hope that your blood can meet their need.

• Flaunt not the unbridled use of petroleum in the face of your enemy;
• Nor display the sexuality of your advertisements, wanton before a watchful world.
• Pray you do not numb yourself to the needs of the world’s most vulnerable.
• When will you meet someone struggling in grief since September 11?
• Give blood two months from now.

• Commend lifestyles that reduce reliance on petroleum; live near your work.
• Invite members of an ethnic neighborhood to dinner where you explain the hospitality of your own eating traditions.
• Accept their invitation in return and use your hospitality to enlist the goodness within each other.

• When you hear people say, “Our Enemies,” remember how indefinite their number is.
• Write a letter to the editor about Ghandi’s success as a non-violent leader.

• Be thankful for opportunities to console and comfort those who suffer.
• Pray for your enemies.
• Pray for your self that you may be nearly as good as you like to think yourself.
• Bear the costs of your own actions.

• Discuss how to use the strategies of Martin Luther King, Jr. to combat hatred in the USA.
• Research the success of the Marshall Plan.
• Research the reconciliation movement in South Africa.
• Learn from the failures of retaliation against terrorism in Ireland and Israel.

• Seek legal means of punishing terrorism as a crime.
• Be mindful of those innocents, dead this month from American bombing in Iraq.
• Let the punishment fit the crime.

• Learn about the patriotism of Japanese Americans in World War II and the emerging patriotism in the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities.
• When you hear people say, “Our Enemies,” remember that whenever their murderous intentions change, we need no longer count them as enemies.
• Pray for your self that you do not project your own anxiety and pain onto others.
• Puzzle why our adversaries are willing to kill themselves to harm us.
• Pray for our leaders to enlist the power of people to transform the conflict in which we are immersed.
• Support leaders who have the humility of their convictions.

• Love each other in communities of care.
• Schedule your giving of blood every fifty-six days.
• Help your community become the good-hearted sister city of an impoverished community in a small country.
• Form a network of communities and individuals sharing their quest for peace.
• Be of this mind that the goodness of our communities should be seen in what we contribute to each other.
• When you hear people say, “Our Enemies,” pray for the opportunities and the will so to live that their will to hate and murder dissolves.
• Let evil be overcome by goodness.
• Spread the word that we want to be the people who practice mercy, love justice, support one another, minister to the vulnerable and return not evil, but goodness, for evil.