Jan./Feb. 1984 RAIN Page 5 BRIDGING HEMISPHERES: Peace Through Communications AN INTERVIEW WITH JOEL SCHATZ In the February I March 1983 issue of RAIN, we printed letters from Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield and A. Khudiakov, press-attache for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' Mission to the United Nations, supporting Joel and Diane Schatz's peace visualization project. The project's objective, as we have mentioned before in RAIN, was to create a poster depicting "what the world would look like ifpeace broke out." (See detail from poster on our cover.) Joel and Diane organized a series of workshops to determine how people from many walks of life envision peace, and in August they visited individuals and groups in the Soviet Union to find out how people there imagine a peaceful world. They returned shocked and ecstatic. Their preconceptions of what people's feelings might be were shattered, and the Soviets' desire to improve direct communication with Americans overwhelmed their hopes and expectations. Enter telecommunications. For what emerged from their trip was a will and a way-a communications medium, besides their first peace poster, for both imagining peace and creating it. RAIN intern Than James and I took a drippy Oregon afternoon to discuss with Joel what he and Diane discovered.'—KN RAIN: What did you learn from your inquiry into what the world would look like to the Russians if peace broke out? Schatz: We went there to negotiate arrangements to conduct formal peace visualization workshops which we could document on videotape. In the process, we also sampled a lot of opinions from Russians on their version of peace, and it was virtually identical to the kinds of information we've been extracting from people in North America. People there would like fresher food, improved medical care, better schools, certain kinds of consumer goods to make life a little easier, less alcoholism. It was obvious there are certain universal kinds of human needs that drive the Russian people just as we're experiencing them in this country. There's no difference, really. They go about it in a different way from a government standpoint, but the fundamental yearnings and dreams seem to be the same. RAIN: You were also involved in trying to establish telecommunication links between Russian and American groups. What was their response? Schatz: There was a uniform, exuberant response. Literally everyone we approached with the possibility of extending computer conference networks from the U.S.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz