Peace - Entertainment - Alternative Entertainment

It is clear that nobody out there knows how to make peace - they have no idea really of what peace could be. When small countries start committing economic suicide and mass murder, and roll their tanks, all the West can think of after the failure of table-talk in satin chairs is to roll their bombers. The message of Easter on Good Friday and on Resurrection Sunday from a great self-described Christian country was 'In bombs we Trust'.

On our television and film, you can see that the whole public world has no idea about how to make peace either.

All evil begins in the human mind - so it has been observed. What is done, is first thought. What has not yet been thought, is not done. Watching television and film, you can see how much evil is being thought. Sometimes on Saturday nights there is nothing on but crime. What else is in the minds of the viewers?

Where are the great brains and artists who can imagine what peace might be and could show their vision to the people? In TV, in film, in theatre, in books, in poetry, in painting, in comic strips, in building developments? There are some indeed, and they could be found in their obscurity.

The great creative artists of our time are employed in advertising and public relations. They have to eat. They would need inspiration as well as feeding to be able to turn their gifts to Peace. Peace as a message turned on by PR alone would be boring, and responses would rightly be cynical.

Peace television as great art would not be boring. 'Entertaining' drama today too largely shows human effort directed at committing crimes and catching crimes, and humans misunderstanding each other provides 'conflict' for the nub of entertainment. Surpassing this, the 'conflict' and 'drama' could be in the age-old struggle that everyone of good will faces in trying to find their vision and to share it, and in the courage needed to persist in a dream of peace, and to construct it continually in whatever place they are.

Imagination is the ability to consider what might be possible, in the real world, not merely in fantasy. The great imagination needed by the producers and actors would show what ordinary people might hope for, but cannot dream of - the world that could be, instead of the world that need not be.

We could bombard the countries riddled with violence and hate with international shows of what those countries might be like through other means. Of how the cultures of their past which at present fuel the ongoing vendettas could be made instead living guides to their incarnation in peace and prosperity. The true genius of the different peoples of Ireland and Ruanda, of the Middle East and of Yugoslavia, of the South-East Asian archipelago - all that is in their cultures, religions and traditions which could be treasure for the world, and not each and every one a Pandora's box.

In doing this, the artists and vision-makers of the world would be imagining how it could be that exploiters might lose their pleasure in exploiting, the torturers lose their pleasure in destroying bodies and minds, the greedy find deserved honor to be of greater value than amassing yet more incitement to more greed, the inventors get jobs inventing something else than weapons of death.

They would discover how to engage the minds of the people with the joys and struggles of peace, rather than diversions from the real business of peace. For

'the gods are just, and by our pleasant vices, make instruments to plague us'.

Instead of preventing boredom by the easy methods of noise, impact and pushing the boundaries of unpleasantness still further than once dreamt of in medieval nightmares of hell, our artists and producers and their financial backers could prevent the boredom of the people by showing them the possibilities of greatness and peace, and of the courage to seeking these. This requires great writers, great producers, great actors, because it is an easy option to portray evil - it is a difficult challenge to portray good. Namby pamby is neutral, not good. A vacuum when there is no strife is not Peace, as even peace-processors today seem to think.

Peace is living in joy.

What difference would it make to the riddles of the war-torn lands of today? How would they know what was out there beyond their borders? Could we bomb them with video-cassettes or fill their airwaves with broadcast visions of what might be and how it might be achieved?

Well, yes, we could do that. We could also infect the world with visions of Peace. Have you noticed how quickly ideas, attitudes, even intonations of speech today spread across the globe - often not even with the Web and the CD and the world of entertainment, but also strongly assisted by these, and especially among the young. On a track between car-less thatched Javanese villages in the 1960s, I heard music among the trees - it was 'Hey Jude!' on a transistor radio. Ideas and feelings and attitudes are bugs and viruses - they can travel without no apparent deliberate transmitters. Yet they can leap everywhere.

False prophets have cried a false peace, 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace', since before the time of Jeremiah. There can be no peace without bread.

The scores of wars erupting like sores on the body of a sick world
are the result of the needs of peoples becoming more impoverished,
and the greed of peoples becoming richer
through arming them.

We have to infect our own land with Peace.

This is one great clincher to demonstrate Peace to the lands where there is no Peace. It is necesssary to build examples in our own lands of what Peace could be, and for ourselves become richer in all ways through spreading Peace not Greed in our international eco-politics and Peace not Crime in our international entertainment. The West could stop being the messenger of arms and exploitation and the consumption-explosion.

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