Americans resistant to peace

Thanks to communism, Fairmont, Minn., has just become a little bit more famous. As recently as… Thanks to communism, Fairmont, Minn., has just become a little bit more famous. As recently as last week, this small farm town was barely known outside the hog-farming community, but then National Public Radio came along and brought Fairmont to the limelight with a profile of some of the town’s recent political actions.

I was drawn to the story because the opening dialogue was between NPR’s reporter and Fairmont’s Peace Club, a non-partisan peace exploratory committee of sorts. Plus, as I said earlier, Fairmont is a pig-farming town, and after an unfortunate sausage-wrapping experience in the eighth grade, I have always felt a kind of sympathetic kinship with pig-farming towns.

Anyway, it turns out that during one of their discussions, the Peace Club stumbled onto some national legislation that has been around for about 200 years. The bill calls for the foundation of a “Department of Peace,” an idea first thought of by Benjamin Rush, one of the founding fathers. The DOP would work to provide an alternative way of approaching conflicts than that of the Department of Defense and reduce national and international violence of all types.

The Fairmont Peace Club thought that the DOP was a pretty good idea. So did the city council of Fairmont, at least for a few days. The council agreed to support the DOP by joining a number of other cities nationwide in endorsing the legislation. The vote was unanimous. But as soon as the news of the council’s support reached the breakfast table of some of Fairmont’s residents the next morning, pressure began to mount for the council to turn over the endorsement, and, after a fantastic local showing of opposition to the DOP and a close council re-vote, support for the DOP was withdrawn.

I listened, intrigued, as opponents to the DOP talked about the reasons they would not support the endorsement. A few of them said the “fluffy” insistence on peace was communist. One person mentioned a lack of funding for the start of a new department. And there were many claims that the eventual influence of the United Nations, which was alluded to in the legislation, would compromise the United States’ self-governance.

The Peace Club is not full of communists. But even if it were, I find it hard to see a communist uprising as a threat to the United States any time soon; it’s not in the cards. So I just couldn’t believe the opponents of the DOP really imagined the legislation leading to a Marxist occupation of the United States..

Maybe it’s the money thing. The United States is not exactly rolling in excess dough at the moment. The proposed DOP budget asks for approximately $8 billion. Now to me, that seems like quite a chunk of money, and I know it definitely seems like a lot to that kid who is living off of peanut butter spread on dried ramen. But think of this: The Department of Defense has a budget of $500 billion. If the Pentagon were a country, it would be one of the richest countries in the world. And they’re asking for more, a lot more, to support our war in countries that can’t even imagine that much money. They could spare a few billion.

And look at what the DOP is going to save us in the future. It’s a good insurance policy. The more we invest, the more violence it prevents. The less violence, the less money we have to spend on conflict resolution, so appealing to a lack of funding might work temporarily, but in the long run it is a paltry excuse for stopping the DOP.

As for U.N. involvement, it’s true that they would have some policy influence on the DOP, but there is nothing in the bill that would grant them authority to override U.S. policy. Those in charge of the DOP would be elected by American voters, and it would be Americans making the decisions.

So if it’s not communism, funding or the United Nations, what is it that people find so unsettling about the DOP?

From what I heard on NPR, it seems that the real problem for the people in Fairmont is a fear of a loss of identity. Communists are pegged as anti-individualists, and too much input from the United Nations could be seen by some as an obstruction of U.S. sovereignty. But these fears represent such a small part of the DOP, that I can’t imagine they’re anything more than a manifestation of some larger anxiety that the DOP will somehow diminish American identity. We live in a nation that is so new and came into its power so quickly, that its greatest fear is that it was just beginner’s luck. We cling to our patriotism, strive to assert our fledgling selves in the global community and lash out at anyone who imperils our independence, even remotely, including the DOP, all to preserve our Americanism.

But what happens when American identity is defined by the resistance to peace? I don’t have an answer, but a DOP can help us start thinking about the question.

Could a DOP work? E-mail Cassidy at cbg11@pitt.edu.