Celebrate the Peace Symbol\'s Golden Anniversary How Far Have We Come?

If there is to be Peace in the world, there must be peace in nations. If there is to be Peace in Nations, there must be Peace in cities. If there is to be Peace in cities, there must be Peace between neighbors. If there is to be Peace between neighbors, there must be Peace in the home. If there is to be Peace in the home, there must be Peace in the heart.
 
                                                              - Lao Tzu

Back in the late fifties I was a peripatetic jack-in-the-box school-kid ready to take on all comers. I was quite active and would keep going and going and going like a toy bunny hyped-up by an Energizer 9-Volt.

But this was the time before the ADHD hysteria, when people recognized that boys will be boys. StillŠ I was a bit beyond that. I was just a little too uptight to be a "normal" boy. I never quite put it together back then but know now - after years of internal work and one huge psychic enema - it was all that propaganda that got my short hairs standing.

I remember those crazy bomb drills, Bert the Turtle and all that "duck and cover" nonsense that gave me a not so-healthy appreciation of nuclear holocaust and a lifelong fear of a doomed and foreshortened future.

It was the era of the fallout shelter. Supposedly those godless Commie bastards were just itching to bomb my little hometown and destroy everything rare, precious and beautiful about our way of life.

A neighbor down the block showed me his shelter with a fully stocked two-month supply of canned goods, beef jerky and water and he warned me that he wouldn't be able to save my familyŠwe'd be on our own.

At the time I really believed most everyone had a fall-out shelter, except for me. The truth was less impressive than I imagined, as only about 100,000 bomb shelters were constructed in the height of the cold war during the fifties and sixties. Still, the message washed over our consciousness and fille d us up with an almost free-floating fear.

The message was planted deeply and to this day I feel an underlying sense of foreboding - something is going to happen in my lifetime and it's not going to be good.

I was astounded by Henry David Thoreau's venerated work "Civil Disobedience" and began to understand his link to the rise of the American Peace Movement following World War I and his undeniable influence on Gandhi, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King. There was so much to learn about our complex geopolitical alliances as we teetered on the brink of self-destruction. The educated and the elite were making the decisions without regard to the voices of peace and reason.

How could we come to terms with our worst impulse toward self-annihilation as we dearly clutched our instinct to survive?
Enter Gerald Holtom. He was a quiet un-assuming geekish sort of anti-hero who filled this existential void. Never heard of him? Me neither, I am embarrassed to say. And yet, as the creator of the now famous and much maligned "Peace Symbol", Holtom has been an inspiration to untold millions.

He was commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to design a symbol for use at an Easter March to Canterbury Cathedral in protest to the research and development of atomic weapons. 

In the winter of 1957/58 Holtom, a west-end London artist and WWII conscientious objector, had come upon his final design for a symbol of peace and though he agonized over his creation, he was 66.6 percent sure that it was "the one".

He explained his creative muse to Peace News editor Hugh Brock, "I was in despair - deep despair. I drew myself; the representation of an individual in despair, with arms outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing with a line and put a circle around it."

The two lines down were the British semaphore signal for N (nuclear) and the one line up for D (disarmament) - and eureka, the Peace Symbol was born! Holtom later showed his sketches to a small group of Londoners that helped create the CND and it quickly gained acceptance as the symbol for Britain's anti-nuclear movement.

The Peace symbol was prominently displayed in the very first anti-nuclear march from London to Aldermaston on Easter weekend 1958, where nuclear weapons were and are still being manufactured.

Peggy Duff, a well-known peace activist, organized the march. Holtom was also involved in the preparations and made all the visual effects, banners and placards that would leave a compelling image in the public mind.

He produced five hundred cardboard lollipops on sticks. Half were black on white and half were white on green. Just as the church's liturgical colors change over Easter, so the colors of the lollipops would change - from winter to spring, from death to life.

The first peace badges were made of fired white clay with the Peace Symbol painted black. They were disseminated with a note explaining that in the event of a nuclear war the peace badge would be one of the few human artifacts to survive.

The protestors, 10,000 strong, left Trafalgar Square in London to traverse the country on a torturous four-day journey. By the time they reached the Atomic Weapons Establishment near Aldermaston their ranks had dwindled to about 2,000.

American pacifist Bayard Rustin, a confidant of Martin Luther King, joined the march and later brought the symbol back to the states to be used in the nascent and growing civil rights movement. But it was Philip Altbech, a University of Chicago freshman and member of the Student Peace Union, who became a major player in advancing the popularity of Holtom's creation.

Altbech recalls: "I was in the UK to speak for the national Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was impressed by their symbol - the Peace SymbolŠI put a few of the buttons and little flags in my pocket and brought them back to SPU headquarters in Chicago."

After initial resistance the SPU printed 20,000 of the peace buttons, distributed them to their chapters and sold them at meetings. The Peace symbol was on its way to mass popularity.

Holtom deliberately never copyrighted his creation, hoping that it would acquire universal significance as a symbol of peace and non-violent protest. In a very deep sense the Peace Symbol has now become a cultural archetype.

We have survivedŠso far. But how far have we come? Our society is unhealthy and we seem to at a crossroads created by the dialectic of our nation's global ascendance and gradual decline.

Now we are living under the yolk of the patriot act and are immersed in a never-ending war. More than ever, we need to listen to our saints and prophets - Jesus, Gandhi, and Reverend Martin Luther King. It is curious that they all preached peace and equality yet they all died violently.

Why are we so afraid of peace?

Recently I spoke with Joni McCoy from the Home for Peace & Justice.  She has observed the devastating effects of war and violence on her peace trips to Palestine and Iraq with the Michigan Peace teams. In the late seventies and early eighties, she participated in monthly vigils and non-violent actions (walking across the street) at Wurtsmith Air force base in Oscoda and was arrested for trespassing. In other words, she walks with integrity. At 68 years of age, Joni hasn't lost a step and is committed now more than ever to advance the cause of peace.

"To give you an example of who The Michigan Peace Teams are, do you remember the Christian Peacemakers teams? They were in Iraq a few months ago and a Canadian, a Brit and American were abducted and the American was killed. It's that type of thing.  The Michigan Peace team - we've been going to Palestine and Israel. It was on one of those trips in 2003 that a Catholic Priest and I went over to Iraq to see if we could field a team over there.  And of course, it didn't happen."

"Peace Teams act as buffers. We go over there and act as buffer between the Israelis and Palestinians. We get people across the borders, ride in ambulances, stay in houses that are going to come down, and just whatever we can do to prevent the violence."

I'm several generations into my life and plenty has happened, only now it seems that the need for peace work is greater than ever.

The never-ending war is a global phenomenon that despoils our nest and threatens our existence. It seems that globalization has become the measure of our hope and our despair. Perhaps our core task is to perceive our own darkness so that healing can proceed and we can feel again - love and serenity; healing and spiritual longing.

Where does that leave us? Back to where we started.

Celebrate the Peace Symbol!

There are 36 statewide affiliates of United for Peace & Justice. In Saginaw you can contact the Tri-City Action for Peace or Home for Peace & Justice by calling Joni McCoy @ (989) 792-9766 or emailing her @ homeforpax@aol.com.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. Please remember those words from Mother Teresa as we embark upon a new year.

Peace & Love
Bo White