Last on Earth
Occupation: Journalist and Peace Activist
Profile: Director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colman_McCarthy
Number of Quotes: 17
Everyone in Texas is illiterate.
Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.
I don't celebrate the 4th of July because there never should have been a war with Britain.
I dress like a Republican so I can talk like an Anarchist.
I'd prefer that my students don't ask questions. Instead, be braver and bolder: question the answers. What answers? Those from anyone who says the answer is violence. Of all the lies, that's the grossest.
It's better to build a peaceful child than re-build a violent adult.
It's too easy only to blame the militarists, racists, sexists and other pushers of violence for the mess we're in. What is harder is self-examination, moving beyond caring by looking inward to ask the personal question: What more should I be doing everyday to bring about a peace and justice based world, whether across the ocean or across the living room?
Let us commence, if we may.
Over the years, I've had suggestions from other teachers to offer what they callbalancein my courses, that I should give studentsthe other side.I'm never sure exactly what that means. After assigning students to read Gandhi I should have them also read Carl von Clausewitz? After Martin Luther King's essay against the Vietnam War, Colin Powell's memoir favoring the Persian Gulf War? After Justice William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall's views opposing the death penalty, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein's favoring it? After a woman's account of her using a nonviolent defense against a rapist, the thwarted rapist's side?
Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we'd all be good at it.
The most important act of peacemaking? Your next one. Few of us will ever be called on to do great things, but all of us can do small things in a great way.
To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I've had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
Too many schools process students as if they are slabs of cheese going to Velveeta High on the way to Cheddar U and Mozzarella Grad School.
Unless we teach our children peace, someone will teach them violence.
Wars aren't stopped by fighting wars, any more than you can fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. You fight violence with nonviolence.
What makes us happy is service to others. If schools don't expose students to the joys of community service, we graduate people who are idea rich but experience poor. In these addled times of leave no child untested, we think it's enough to pound ideas into the kids' heads. You can make all A's in school and go out and flunk life.
You can earn all A's in school and then go out and fail at life.
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