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Peace Breeds Prosperity; Poverty Hinders Peace

Peace Breeds Prosperity;
Poverty Hinders Peace

Peace and poverty cannot coexist. Peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Establishing and maintaining peace will take far more creativity, dedication, and hard work than war ever did. True peace would be much cheaper and far less traumatic than any war, but, to date, no one has been able to pull it off.

The essays in this collection introduce creative ideas for ending poverty everywhere, in the hope that humans can finally build a truly peaceful society where everyone enjoys at least the basic benefits of prosperity, for the first time in history.

"Learning Problems":

As much as I love both convenience and salads--with the flavors of different veggies in each bite--I'm not a fan of those salads that are stored and sold in plastic bags. When produce vegetate together in plastic, flavors tend to blend. Lettuce doesn't taste like lettuce so much as a mutant: part carrot, a dash of celery, and a bit of whatever else that poor lettuce cohabits with. The pieces lose their distinctive flavors so that lettuce, tomato, and carrot turn into a blended taste you might call "letomrot."

I feel the same way about the "vegetable stew" flavor of mixed vegetables and the homogenized odor of flowers that mingle with bunches of other buds in florists' fridges. And I'm no fan of the lock-step, homogeneous approach that most schools take in educating the masses for our modern society.

I'm certainly not alone. For decades, a host of experts have complained about the American educational system. They note that it doesn't really educate many students, especially those who drop out early from sheer boredom and frustration, or those who are passed along through each grade and graduated--even though they can barely read.

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"Institutions versus Individuals":

It’s time to implement real solutions that won’t cause more problems down the road. That’ll be difficult to do, but not totally impossible. Essays in this book focus on some of the win-win-win steps we could take to end poverty everywhere and relegate war to the history books, and maybe even save the planet in the bargain.

Of course, that would require taking a new approach to the way decisions are made. In many cases, it means taking power away from the people who’ve led us down this road toward eventual destruction and giving it to the people it belongs to in the first place: the people who are most affected by all those decisions.

That’s what democracy is all about, as opposed to a representative republic, which is the form of most governments in existence now, including the U.S. That’s because the republic was the best form of government that had been tried by the late 18th century, when the Founding Fathers (no mothers involved then, of course!) were organizing a new country on the American continent. Instead of trying something that was really new, they patterned their nation after the one they already knew best, with only a few minor changes.


Visit Debbie Jordan's web site at:

www.imaginetheworldatpeace.com