The audacity of sanity

Earlier this month, syndicated columnist Robert Koehler wrote about Civilian Diplomacy. His column did a great job of explaining the historic founding of FOR in 1915 as well as the power of FOR’s peace delegations to Iran. Koehler said a lot of smart things — such as "If we know enough we’ll never go to war again" — but my favorte parts were the words of delegate Hank Brusselback:

"If the government isn’t willing to talk to people, then the people need to be willing to (talk to each other)," Brusselback said. "It comes from a belief in the nature of security — it’s not about weapons, fear and posturing on the world stage. It’s about communication, talking to people, everyone having their basic needs met. If you understood security that way, you’d see that security is about dialogue." […]

"Our determination was to do something different than go out in the streets, which we did for Iraq," Brusselback told me. "We wanted to give a message to Iranians — to let them know there are lots of us here who believe in peace." […]

"We wore pins, written in Farsi: ‘We are part of a peace delegation,’" Brusselback said. "And (people) just had this big, warm smile. They wanted to give us hugs and shake our hands. ‘We love Americans!’ They told us that day after day."

- Civilian Diplomacy, 8/14/08

Thanks, for the shout-out Mr. Koehler. This was a great article.