What can I Do for Peace?

by Chee Yee Ling

“This year the Doomsday Clock – devised by the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – was advanced by two minutes, for the first time in five years. It now stands at 11:55pm, just five minutes away from the ‘midnight’ of human annihilation… This ‘clock’ was established in 1947 at a time when nuclear weapons were understood to be the greatest threat to human survival.”¹

We are that close to a nuclear holocaust!! How can we turn back the clock? Surely, the best way forward is not to wait and watch or to offer solutions after the damage has been done.

As humanity’s survival continues to be threatened by nuclear weapons, reading SGI President Ikeda’s Peace Proposal for 2007 helps me understand the importance of continual effort by every individual to continue to talk about peace. It is vital for us to do all we can now, to influence political decisions. It is well known that womenfolk tend to enjoy talking more than men! Given our unique ability to voice our thoughts with PASSION, we can make our protest against war heard. We should initiate dialogue to help promote mutual respect and restore the human connections, which are so necessary for peaceful negotiations.

In one of his poems, Mr Ikeda wrote:

Dialogue - It is the light that eliminates the dark shadows of violence
Dialogue - It is the sword of peace that cuts the synergetic ties that bind distrust to hatred to war
Dialogue - It is the wings that bring people together and carry us over the walls of confrontation and social disintegration.
To revive and return to the art of dialogue, and to multiply the number of participants in dialogue, is our first task as people of the 21st century.

As long as we focus on conducting dialogue - be it inter-faith or inter-culture - we can help people refocus their thoughts on our similarities rather than our differences. We have to be the ones to initiate this movement. We cannot underestimate the significance of such dialogue in the preservation of peace. In any event, it is our willingness to open our hearts and to conduct dialogue that is the start of everything.

A good example is the Women’s Liberation Movement. Fuelled by a determination to defeat male supremacy and to give women equality, a few women gathered together and started what was referred to as consciousness-raising meetings back in the sixties. Although these meetings were criticised as coffee klatches, hen parties or bitch sessions; this did not stop them talking. In fact, the consciousness-raising meetings became one of the prime educational organising programmes of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Feminist groups and individual women who at first didn’t think they needed it were all eventually influenced and doing it as well. And as proven through history, the tremendous energy in such consciousness-raising chatting has in fact brought about a revolution in the way the women are treated today.

Similarly, if we are serious about turning back the “Doomsday Clock,” we have to all start talking about peace and raise consciousness on the importance of this issue. We can conduct dialogue and create value right where we are. And we do not have to look very far to start. Why not start with the person in front of you right now?

A firm believer in dialogue, Yee Ling has continued to build bridges of friendship with the people she meets. She currently resides in Sydney, Australia with her family. She is a lecturer at Taylors College in Sydney.

[ Courtesy September 2007 Cosmic]

(1) Daisaku Ikeda, from the article in The Japan Times, 12.4.2007