I have never been good at keeping new year’s resolutions.

But now at 78, I don’t have a choice

I have to break a life-long habit of breaking them because I’ve made two overlapping commitments that will shape whatever professional and political time I have left.

Which I will only be able to do so if you take me up on the invitations that follow.

That’s a nice way of saying that I’m asking you to hold me accountable to my pair of resolutions.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Book That I Have to Promote

Although I don’t like anything that smacks of self-promotion, my first resolution is to start promoting my new book, Peacebuilding Starts at Home: How You Can Make It Happen.

The Book

When I finished editing The Rondine Method, I assumed that I was done writing books. I did keep writing blog posts which led to vague ideas about a new book on American peacebuilding.

But those ideas were vague—at best. My writing fragmentary—at best.

Then, Patricia Shafer and I thought about writing a book together. While that book didn’t materialize, I will forever be grateful that she lit the spark that led to Peacebuilding Starts at Home two years later.

 

I wrote the book—and more importantly, you should read it—for two reasons.

First (and you don’t need me to tell you this), our country is in trouble.

No matter where you look.

No matter which issue(s) you care about.

No matter who you vote for.

Second and more importantly, too often, I found myself agreeing with most Americans.

I had trouble seeing how we could pull ourselves out of this mess.

I felt “politically clinically depressed” because my colleagues and I hadn’t come up with a strategy that might work.

Yes, they were doing terrific work on specific issues in specific places using specific tools.

But there wasn’t much holding it all together in a way that could produce the kind of paradigm shift I’ve been ranting about since I was in college—and that was a long time ago.

The more research I did, the less powerless I felt to the point that I ended up writing a book whose hopeful tone about a more promising future actually surprised me at times—especially when I when directly from my keyboard to watch the nightly news!

So, if you want to start feeling powerful and part of the solution as we used to put it in the 1960s, Peacebuilding Starts at Home charts one way out of our bind(s) by inviting its readers to take eight steps along what I call the peacebuilding starts at home loop by:

• Taking stock of where you are

• Seeing the big picture

• Honing in on your own beliefs and behaviors

• Finding an on ramp into traditional peacebuilding

• And/or pivoting toward working on other issues that are dividing our country

• Helping spread everything you saw in the first six chapters so that we can produce a dramatic shift in the way that most Americans deal with most of their problems most of the time

• ·Prooducing dramatic policy shifts

• ·Finally, opening the door to the next stage in our social evolution

For once in my life, I was pleased with what I wrote.

I think I make a convincing case for a new kind of peacebuilding based on what I learned from the roughly forty organizations I profiled in illustrating each of those eight points.

More importantly, I think I did a good job of making the case that we can succeed only if people like you—which literally includes you—do your part.

To that end, I drew on my experience as a textbook writer to include fun-to-do “homework” assignments which will help you wend your way along the loop and find your on ramp.

(And I’ll reply to your homework without grading it—see below).

My Challenge and My Request

Writing the book was the easy part.

Like any author, I must promote it because no one else will.

Long gone are the days when authors write books and publishers somehow magically sold them in independent bookstores around the country. Almost two-thirds of all books are bought online; half are sold on Amazon alone.

Authors typically must hire a publicist to help them build a market for their book which I did. Even then, the author must do most of the “leg work” despite the fact that few of us have any marketing skills.

I am in the process of developing mine with Ripple Impact and my publisher, J.P. Zenger books, both of which are run by people I have known and worked with for years.

Their plan(s) will focus on reaching out to people I do not already have a personal connection with both for selling the book and the larger peacebuilding starts at home community which I will turn to next.

But since you already are reading my newsletter, treat this as a not-so-subtle hint to buy the book. Here is the publisher’s blurb.

You can buy it wherever you get your books, but as you just learned, that probably means Amazon.

And, as you no doubt know, reviews on Amazon are always helpful. And as you may not know, once a book gets a certain number of reviews, it gets bumped up by the company’s algorithm.

A Community I Have To Help Build

That leads directly into the second resolution.

Despite its subtitle, the book alone won’t make peacebuilding starts at home happen.

Even if the book succeeds beyond my wildest expectations, not enough people read nonfiction books to base any social change movement on one.

 

The same holds for its web site which we will be able to use to update the book’s content. For better or worse, it will never get enough traffic so that it could become a venue that will get millions of people to make peacebuilding starts at home a part of their everyday lives.

The Community

In other words, we have to build a community of peacebuilders (sort of) the old fashioned way.

Before I was an author, I was a political organizer in the peace and other movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In graduate school, I was able to study with some of the leading experts on social change and spent much of my academic career doing research on how political paradigm shifts occur.

Now, the time has come to put what I’ve learned over the last sixty years into practice.

Of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing that on my own.

The problems we face are too big.

My skills are too limited.

Besides, I’m way too old.

What my colleagues at the Alliance for Peacebuilding and I can do is provide the organizational scaffolding around which we can build a broad coalition of organizations and individuals who can together create such a community, network, and movement.

We’ve actually been doing that quietly for the last couple of years.

In fact, my book is based on what our member organizations and others I met while research it are already doing.

Now, our challenge is to take what I discovered as a starting point, expand what we mean by the peacebuilding starts at home community, and take it to scale.

Some of it will be “insider baseball.”

We will be creating a loose network that expands what we mean by peacebuilding to include finding solutions to all of the complex, intertwined problems facing our country—not just political polarization and related threats.

We will be building bridges that cross issue-based and ideological lines.

We will incubate new projects.

We will continue trying to shape the national political discussion.

We will be taking these ideas to the American public.

My Challenge, My Request, and, Yes, Your Homework

That last point brings me back to my invitation to you.

We will have to help millions of Americans endorse and live by the values discussed in my book.

We also know that relatively few people read non-fiction books these days.

So, we will develop a series of videos and other tools that I will be telling you about in the weeks to come. We will also do podcasts and some traditional media work.

Among other things, those initiatives will ask you—and people like you—to adopt a new mind set or personal paradigm, apply it in your everyday life, and find your place on what I call the Peacebuilding Starts at Home Loop in the book.

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We would, of course, love it if you did decide to join one of the organizations in our network. Or started one of your own—after all, I did just mention incubating new projects.

But, we neither expect nor need that to happen.

Even if you don’t become a peacebuilding activist, you will come to think of yourself as part of the Peacebuilding Starts at Home community much as I thought of myself as part of the new left in the 1960s or the environmental movement today. In the process, you can be part of the network of local opinion leaders that we will begin building during the course of the first six months of the new year that could end up reaching tens of millions of Americans by the end of the decade.

That’s where the homework and your role come into play. If you do the short assignments in the book or the even shorter versions that I will include in the videos which I will publish here in the next couple of weeks, I will read (but not grade) them, get back to you, and we can begin figuring out how Peacebuilding Starts at Home can become a part of your life.

Toward the New You

I will spell all of this out in a flurry of posts over the course of the next few weeks.

But let me end this one with one last teaser.

If you take what the people I feature in the book and my other colleagues say seriously, you will change—and change dramatically.

You will get along better with the people around you and handle the conflict in your everyday life better.

Your relationships at home, at work, and in your community will gradually get better and deeper.

You will see how the impact of the “new you” ripples out beyond your literal home until it touches more and more of your home country.

know that’s true, because I’ve seen it happen to me.

I was reminded of how much I’ve changed by becoming a peacebuilder recently while I was recording a podcast with my friend Devin Thorpe of Superpowers for good. In fact, I was thinking to much about how much I had changed, I actually lost my train of thought a couple of times while we spoke!

https://www.superpowers4good.com/p/peacebuilding-begins-at-home-why

Still, if this is your first introduction to Peacebuilding Starts at Home, it just my whet your appetite for the flurry of material to come.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.