Sunday, November 26, 2006
Peace piece
I've been meaning to get to this one for awhile. Last week Marianne Williamson, known to me through some of my yoga friends for her new-agey self-help books, published an op-ed in the Boston Globe next week advocating a Department of Peace, a new Cabinet-level department in the US government. This may seem pie in the sky, but the more I read over it and thought about it the more sense it makes. For less than a tenth of the defense department's budget, imagine what could happen. Call your rep- let's start the ball rolling on this one.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It seems entirely unnecessary. Most of what Williamson proposes here already falls under the auspices of other departments. The Department of Education can implement conflict management programmes, and fund after-school programmes to keep kids out of gangs and out of trouble. Other financial departments have the capacity to manage social and class disparity.
Instead of putting money into the creation of a new department, it should be put back into programmes and resources.
Wasn't it Hobbes who posited that governments existed to protect men from themselves in the state of nature? It never crossed his mind that the state of nature would persist in spite (or arguably because) of governmental practice.
Post a Comment