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Honor Your Work: A Study in Micro, Meso and Macro Peacemaking

I have returned from Portland, OR for the 2007 General Assembly. I would like to express how wonderful it was to see what UU Congregations are doing out there to promote peace and justice. I met lots of amazing people who are performing excellent work on all levels of peacemaking. I also met a lot of people who did not realize how much peacemaking they are doing right now.

Many people I have met over the past week would tell me something like, “I want to get involved, but I don’t know where to start.” Or they would say, “My congregation wants to talk about peace but we are apprehensive about being vocal around the war.” I decided that when I met people who say things like that, I would ask them a question: What are you doing right now to promote peace? It is an easy enough question to answer. After some coaxing, I finally would reveal the good work they were already doing.

I heard stories about Welcoming Congregations working to promote dialog around Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender/sexual, and Queer issues. I found groups working on Anti-Racism/Anti-Oppression work. There are churches that work with local homeless shelters. There are fellowships with community gardens. These are all peace issues. While they may not seem like much in the scale of global conflict, it is doing a lot on an interpersonal level.

Let’s take a moment to investigate the multifaceted aspects of peace. I am sure we will look at this again sometime. Peace theorists and researchers look to peace, conflict and violence on a three fold level: micro, meso, and macro. Each of these levels has certain characteristics. Without working on one level, the efforts on another can be lost.

Micro relations are interpersonal. For conflict, this could come in the form of an argument or fight. Micro level peace work focuses on giving individuals the skills for resolving conflicts without resorting to violence. This could be as small as tutoring a student or as large as conflict resolution training and nonviolent communication skills.

Meso relations are community wide. This is the level where power structures can really take form. We see meso relations in terms of family structures, churches and religious institutions, and school systems. Here we can even go as broad as global institutions such as the media or political systems. Meso level violence can be as small scale and apparent as localized crime to as ambient as racism and sexism. Meso level peacemaking works with the communities in order to challenge those power structures. They could include community gardens, interfaith/cultural dialog, or prison ministries. A good word to remember the meso level is “institutions”. A good image to remember it is this: where the micro and macro overlap.

The final level of relations is Macro. Macro relations are not only international, they are also intercultural. Here we see the globalized manifestation of violence, conflict and peace. It, in many ways, is the global manifestation of meso level relations. War, environmental degradation and global racism are all macro level forms of violence. Macro peacemaking works in coalitions to challenge the regimes of cultural and institutionalized violence. Here is the international/intercultural level of relations.

When we begin to look at peace, conflict and violence on micro, meso and macro levels, all work for justice becomes work for peace. To challenge the power structures that promote violent conflict through education, community building and global understanding is a work for peace. So be proud of the work you and your congregations are doing. It is up to you to find the spaces that need to be mended. It is impossible to be working on all levels at the same time, but on all levels we must work. While one group is working on ending the war in Iraq, another is working on feeding the homeless and the hungry. While one group is tutoring children at a struggling school in a rough neighborhood, another is fighting oppression in their homes.

There is so much work to be done. Honor your work. Honor the work of others. Celebrate victories. Each individual victory for justice is a collective victory for peace. And, the most difficult recognition of all, recognize that people are doing what they are doing because they can do nothing else. Individual paths take us in individual directions. Coalitions bring different goals and tactics together. And while it may bring conflict, it also brings diversity. Recognize your micro, meso and macro conflicts and work on your micro, meso and macro peacemaking. Find what calls you and follow your passions. Because as Henry Louis Mencken said, “If you want peace, work for justice.”

Why Study Peace?

The UUA is currently beginning its second year of a four year process known as the Congregational Study Action Issue (CSAI). Within this period, UU congregations and communities will be studying the topic of Peacemaking with the hopes of creating and passing a Statement of Conscience in 2010. It is the intention of this process that the UUA will be able to make a comprehensive statement on the role of the Church in Peacemaking and the role of Peacemaking in the Church. And while many questions arise in this process, it seems to me that the most important and first question is: Why study peace at all?

There is of course, the immediate answer: Peace is preferable over war or violence. The ability to resolve or transform conflict without the use of violence—whether it is physical, economic, or psychological—is a goal that many strive to achieve. However, there is more to it than that, I believe. There must be much more to studying peace than simply being “more desirable”.

The President of my college once said: “The university system is bad business. Every year, we take a quarter of our institution; the ones with the most knowledge of how things work here and we send them away, only to replace them with people who have absolutely no institutional knowledge.” In many ways, that is how the world works. Everyday the most educated, experienced, and knowledgeable people in our world leave; only to be replaced by blank slates. The people with the most institutional knowledge of life leave us—never to return. And it is up to those who are currently in the process of gaining that knowledge to teach those who have none. We must teach the newcomers about things like cucumbers and the Pythagorean Theorem and the horrors of genocide. It is up to us to shape the young—and maybe not so young—minds of what it means to be human in this world.

And to think about all that brain drain. Within thirty years, a whole generation’s worth of knowledge can be forgotten. Within one generation, society’s expectations and desires can be completely reformed. To study peace is not merely to improve our own current situations. To study peace is laying the ground work for a new world future. Teaching a child to use their words instead of their fists on the playground not only changes conflicts today or next week, it also changes conflicts twenty years from now.

To study peace is more than just anti-war rallies and conflict resolution trainings; it is modeling the world we want to have. Peacemaking is not merely a means to an end; it is the constant cycle of work. It is like an infinite row of dominoes, each touching another. Each act of peace work is not taking away from the mountain of violence, it is adding to the stack of peace. This is why we must study peace.

For the next three years, individuals, communities, districts, and the denomination in its whole will be questioning what peace is and what we can do to promote it. This will not be any easy process. We have given ourselves a Herculean task. Conflicts are bound to arise. Indeed, some have already. But it is a task that we must take on in order to achieve greatness. And when General Assembly comes in 2010, it is the hope of many—including myself—that we will be able to stand as one, diverse voice and speak to the importance of peace in all its complicated forms. So, in a spirit of love and openness, let us work together by listening and stretching. Let us, to quote the Mahatma Gandhi, “be the peace [we] want to see.”

ICE: Out to Get You

Great. Big Brother is definitely watching you, especially if you’re an immigrant.

I had heard that undocumented immigrants were now sometimes arrested when they came to police attention for other reasons, but I didn’t realize that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was utilizing a giant criminal database to make this happen systematically! (See Database is Tool in Deporting Fugitives, today's Washington Post) What kind of country do I live in when burglary victims are afraid to go to the police because they fear deportation? What kind of country do I live in when a person gets pulled over for speeding and ends up deported, away from his wife and small children? What kind of country do I live in when single mother goes in to her police station for a street vendor permit, and ends up arrested and detained for three months, while her daughter arrives home from school, wondering what happened to her mother? What kind of country do I live in when Immigration conducts raids designed to punish communities which welcome immigrants? (See: "Immigrants raided days after ID card OK," New York Daily Star)

It’s a country in which “Immigration and Naturalization Services” changes its name to “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” because, clearly, we’re no longer interested in naturalizing people, just deporting them. It's a country in which I wonder how welcome my great-grandparents would be if they were immigrating today instead of 90 years ago, and it's a country in which I am increasingly, desperately disappointed.

Introducing Alex

I would like to take a quick moment to introduce myself.

My name is Alex Winnett and I am the new Program Associate for Peacemaking in the office.

I am a life long Unitarian Universalist from Orange County, California. My family and I were very active with our home congregation, Orange Coast UU Church in Costa Mesa.

I recently graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana with a degree in Peace and Global Studies with an emphasis in Interfaith Dialogue.

While in the office, I will be working with congregations all over the country as a resource for peacemaking opportunities.


Here are some fast facts:

I was a boy scout but left due to "political reasons".

While at Earlham, I was co-convener or an interpretative dance troupe that used humor to investigate the role of gender and sexuality in society.

I am a trained active listener specializing in helping survivors of sexual violence and assault.

I studied in Northern Ireland for a semester working with an NGO and the largest non-sectarian party in the Nation.

My senior thesis was on the role of myth and legend in peacemaking.

My favorite color is green.

And my favorite food is "burritos the size of my head".

I look forward to working with the office and all of you.

A Thaw in the Ice or Hot Air?

Despite campaign promises to reduce carbon emissions, in 2001 the Bush administration reversed U.S. policy under Clinton/Gore and pulled us out of the Kyoto accords, claiming that the requirements to reduce greenhouse emissions would be too costly. The Kyoto Protocol was a substantive amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was the first international agreement to fight global warming/climate change. It has been signed by 162 nations to date, but without participation from the biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions. Our absence was glaring. For over six years, the Bush administration has resisted all calls to respond to the growing global warming/climate change crisis, even disputing the overwhelming science by saying that more studies needed to be done before we could conclude that human activity is responsible for the climate change we see.

Yet yesterday the headlines of all the major news organizations blared: "Bush Calls For Global Emissions Goals." And Bush is quoted as saying "The United States takes this issue seriously." For a brief moment I thought that perhaps our president had had a sincere change of heart. Then I read what he was actually proposing. Ignoring the existence of the Kyoto Agreement, President Bush is calling on the world's 15 greatest polluters to meet in order to discuss agreeing to their own standards. Ignoring the existence of an agreement signed by 162 nations, Bush wants us to start the discussion from scratch, in order to come up with our own standards, while still insisting that mandatory emissions reductions are too costly.

Given that the G8 summit is next week in Germany where global warming/climate change will once again be the top priority, one can't help but think that Thursday's announcement was designed to deflate the expected show-down between the U.S. and the rest of the world, while not providing anything of substance. The good news is that the Bush administration is now on record admitting that green house emissions are a serious problem and the U.S. must take a lead in addressing this problem. The bad news is that we aren't doing so and time is running out.