Spreading Peace Beyond the Center

I had the great fortune to go to a peace protest this past Saturday in Washington DC. Being an advocate for peace and a peace maker doesn’t just extend to my community; I feel it is my duty to promote peace and non-violence whenever possible. There were two things I observed that I think are relevant to my mediation practice.

1) There were protesters protesting our protest. They were really angry and somewhat violent. Some of them pushed us and spit on us. We did not respond at all, we just kept walking. Peace is a choice. We can make the choice to lay down the fight or not engage in the fight. We see this every day in our practices. Some people are not ready to give up the fight. This is fully in their power to do so, they have to be empowered and educated to the point where they realize they don’t have to fight anymore. We were empowered to let the insults and intimidation roll off of us. It is our job as mediators to help people get to the point where they also can be thus empowered.

2) There was a small mini-rally before the march began. As I was listening to the speeches, some of which referenced the protest protesters, the mediator wheels in my head started to grind. I realized the speakers were just re-iterating positions, and our two separate protests were just two positions clashing, not unlike every mediation I’ve been in. I enjoy exercising my freedoms of speech, but I found the rhetoric and propaganda in the protest to be lacking. What would be more helpful in creating a solution to the problem would be an open dialogue that looks at the interests on both sides of the divide.

Really, yelling our positions at each other doesn't create positive change. We need to tell each other why these things are important to us. I think if we looked at interests instead of positions, we would find that our interests aren’t that far apart, it is our positions that divide us. How many times in mediation have we spent hours going around and around only to find that clients really weren’t as far apart as they thought they were? We could have saved our clients a lot of time if we hadn’t chased their positions around and instead asked why is this important to you? I think this is the type of dialogue that needs to occur surrounding the war. We need to figure out why our positions are so important to us, if we can talk about that, maybe we won’t spend so much time chasing positions around while politicians posture and waste time not creating important legislation.

Mandy R. Stallings
Mediation Coordinator