Nonviolence Paper

Global Issues

Nonviolence Paper

Even though it has been a while since the nonviolence speaker, Rick Polhamus, visited Wilmington College, I can still recollect the topics that he spoke on, and most memorable, his unicorn. He mentioned his many, many, past jobs and how he came across his current position as a peacemaker. I can recall thinking it odd that he had such a wide range of experience in his field of employment. Like raising horses to dealing with victims of brain injury. I guess what I am trying to say is that Mr. Polhamus was a very interesting person who seems very intelligent. Polhamus told us of his travels to Israel and Iraq and some of the stories of the people that live there. After hearing the stories and looking at some of the pictures, tears almost came to my eyes for some of those families that had tragic events that had shattered their lives. He also shared with us some of his experience with Native Americans and his time spent with a totally different culture.

During his speaking of his life journeys, Polhamus described difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking. Peacekeeping is seen more as a negative type of peace, like soldiers in the war zone. So on the other hand we have a more positive form of finding peace with peacemaking, and how he himself is a peacemaker. In a situation where there is no peace, his job is to step in and help to make some peace. He expressed his feelings on how some people believe that they can fix violence by bringing more violence and how it can turn out in tragedy. Then he explained how peacemakers work. Anywhere from six to twelve peacemakers will go to the situation and step in between the violence and be mediators, which can at times be very dangerous. He often finds that one side of the conflict has a more violent force than the other, like physical difference. With this a lot of times will come a relation with the press, and we know how the media can persuade one about a place or person, and easily created a bias in the minds of people which can also affect opinions on peacemaking.

World War II was a difficult time when it comes to peacemaking and peacekeeping. Japan was basically trying to take over the world, and brought the United States into it with the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. So after such a hard blow, the United States had to put a stop to Japan’s forces. As a high standing nation, we were working on a nuclear weapons mainly because of the fear that Germany might be doing the same, and we did not want to give them power, so we tried to make sure that our technology was just advanced as theirs. Even people that had worked on the Manhattan project like Einstein believed that we should never release the weapons that we were working