Page 6 RAIN January 1982 Our next project is to try to visualize peace. We're asking ourselves the question that hurts our brains: "If peace broke out, what would it look like?" It sounds terrific. We've thought about it now for two or three months and collected some notes. We're going to start consulting and writing letters and talking with thousands of people—whoever has an idea. We're not talking about these ideas in the abstract—the ultimate political folly of the United Nations and most government foreign policies is that the conversation is so abstract that no one really knows what they are talking about. If peace were really pursued (given the extraordinary decadence of this culture and the extraordinary poverty of Third World nations whose materials we use to power our extraordinary decadence) what would life be like for us here next week? How would our clothing be different? How would our travel plans be different? What would we be doing differently in school? What kinds of jobs would we have? What would be the nature of business? What would be the nature of government? What would life be like for 153 countries plus the United States? What would it be like given the fact that the U.N. now records 5,000 religions on this planet? How do you strike some common sense resource balance and then picture it? What would it look like? How would we proceed? I'm convinced we can't move in that direction until we see where we're moving. Madison Avenue has known this forever; lay the image out and people will go for it. What we're doing now is building a systematic set of questions for widespread distribution to gather specific answers for the composition of wholistic peace imagery. Want to help Joel and Diane envision peace? Send your ideas to us at RAIN! pretation is that many people feel bad times are coming and it's important for people in the corporate world to do anything possible to become leaders and say what's happening, to put out useful information so that their public relations are intact when people consider buying their goods and services. There are so many changes occurring so fast in the corporate world that it's dizzying. So many people want to get on a track that's popular, that makes sense, that adds stability, even if it means a 180 degree reversal from values or practices that have generated profits in the past. These are not simply events occurring in Oregon, which has been known to be advanced in certain ways (much of that is illusion; some of it is true). This is typical of the business community in general. There's an enormous amount of information moving around. The game that's going on is "how do you make money from what has now become fashionable?" I expect that the utilities, for example, in addition to selling insulation will get into the business of marketing solar packages, hydro packages, wind generators for rural areas and anything else that will turn a profit. It's an extremely interesting time when most people involved in high finance know that the stability of the system is so fragile that if enough people don't support the ideas that are tried and tested and make sense, that they'll blow the entire experiment. This was particularly true of conversations in New York City where most of the orientation and dialogue had to do with increasing prospects for nuclear war. Partly because New York is United Nations headquarters, policy booths have been set up on the streets, closed-circuit TV cameras have been set up in front of foreign missions because of bombings and so forth. It's increasingly tense. The Second Special Session on Disarmament is coming up in the spring of next year and many people are now asking the most basic questions in the most unlikely places you can possibly imagine. What I'm hearing is that it's easy to go talk about whatever things you're interested in working with and talking to the people about what you're doing if you've got something that fits any way at all with the kind of public image and corporate direction that might make sense. Now is the time to do it; you can't be too outrageous. I believe that so strongly—I can't find the words to impress more strongly that I believe that's true. How long that window will remain open is a big question. I have travelled all over the world talking energy policy with all kinds of people and never found such receptivity to these kinds of ideas as I have in the past few months. And the diversity of support is totally astonishing. Ultra-liberal people, very conservative people, very young people, very old people, all wanting to take some What / found in the White House was r extraordinary receptivity. common sense and figure some way to make the money system do it. I love it. It's exciting. Someone asked me recently whether I think it's foolish to continue working towards all of these wonderful goals when our country is manufacturing plutonium and we'll probably all blow up. My instinctive response was "we'll never blow up in a nuclear war—it's not profitable." I hadn't even thought of that before. It just kind of flew out. That is, in a way, my consolidated interpretation of what I've been hearing, what I've been exchanging with people these past few months. □ □ —Joel Schatz
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