Working Towards Peace in 2006

Reminder: The second meeting of the Madison Women's Autonomous Movement (affectionately called WAM!) will be on Monday, January 30, at 6:30 pm on the UW campus (Memorial Union, see TITU a few days before the meeting for room location). For more about WAM!, see this post.

So, it's the last day of 2005, and I'm sipping caffeinated tea to help me through tonight's celebrations. Like apparently everyone else online (and in "meatspace"), the imminent new year has me in a reflective mood. I've enjoyed reading some very hopeful reviews of 2005 by progressive activists, including one by Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin that you can read here.

As we struggle, we need to celebrate our victories, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers winning a slightly better wage from Taco Bell for tomato pickers is major win. (Looking ahead, you should know that McDonald's has established a front group to frustrate future labor rights campaigns.)

Here's my favorite quote from these activist year-end essays, from Rebecca Solnit:

Hope is not history's Barcalounger, as is often thought: It requires you get back out there and protect that habitat or stop that war. It is not the same as optimism, the belief that everything will probably turn out all right despite your inactivity, the same kind of inactivity that despair begets. Hope involves a sense of possibility, but with it comes responsibility.

Along similar lines, Howard Zinn asks:

And while we work with increased determination to make [U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq] happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war -- not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

Amen, brother.

It might sound pie-in-the-sky, but I firmly believe that one role of the progressive activist community is to dare to dream about positive alternatives, and to talk to others about them. More importantly, to implement these alternatives, on whatever scale is possible. That's one reason why I love Madison so much - the cooperatively-run businesses, not-for-profit housing, fair trade coffee roasters and retailers, community radio and television, etc. Why not take the same approach to peace work?

Happy 2006. May it be the year all wars end.