America’s Professor of Peace : Idealism: Attempts to fight violence with violence have failed, says a columnist and teacher. His suggestion? Teach kids to solve little arguments before they become big fights.

It was a grand day for the peaceniks when “Mad Dog” Colman McCarthy hit town.

First, a Sunday morning stop at radio station KPFK in the Valley, where McCarthy (dubbed a “mad-dog liberal” by the National Review) told listeners that “Clinton, (Dick) Cheney and the chairman of Northrop” are the real “warlords” of the world, not the little “oddball rulers” who use weapons that the United States “so graciously” provides for them.

Then, a trip downtown to Immaculate Heart College Center, where McCarthy (also known as “the liberal conscience” of the Washington Post, for which he writes two columns a week) talked to a group that included everything from scientists, psychologists and teachers to firefighters and carpenters--all eager to hear his views about teaching peace to children.

“Someone is finally doing something about this violent society we live in,” Lori Klaidman said after hearing McCarthy talk. Klaidman, 32, a brain research scientist at USC, said she might try to follow McCarthy’s path and start a peace course at her local elementary school.

The next morning, McCarthy led two assemblies at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, where some of the city’s best and brightest students received his pacifist word.

“I’d heard things like this before, but only in relation to religion,” said Tia Roosendahl, 17, a senior. “We were taught to love one another, to have peace in relationships and to follow Jesus at the Christian elementary school I attended. But I never thought it applied to everyday life. I’m impressed that (McCarthy) has thought it all out and written it down.”

Laura Layton Pendorf, a Polytechnic Spanish teacher, also heard McCarthy and was one of “quite a few teachers here who asked to start a peace studies course at the school. That would be a lot more interesting than the pluperfect subjunctive,” she chuckled.

Next, McCarthy made his way (at his usual freeway speed of 45 m.p.h.) to Claremont McKenna College, where about 120 students and faculty heard his theories.

“People were moved by him; some got fired up about starting to teach his courses in nonviolent resolution of conflict,” said Bonnie Snortum, director of the school’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. “Many students had never been exposed to ideas like his before.”

*

At first it sounds absurd: a man who teaches peace.

Computer skills, yes; parenting, maybe; dead languages like Latin, marginal. But peace? How would you teach it--and why?

Colman McCarthy finds it odd that anyone would ask. It’s obvious to him that seeking peace through violence hasn’t worked. In his 54 years, he has seen too many conflicts erupt around the world--always followed by an increase in armaments and threats to use them. He has watched the number of prisons soar, never enough for the prisoners destined to live in them. He has seen families erode, youth gangs explode, drugs and violence invade our cities and countryside.

He is a peaceful man, not a stupid one. If fighting violence with violence worked, he says, the results would by now be obvious to everyone, and even he could not dispute them.

He’s packed with statistics to support his point:

“Nearly 80 million have been killed in wars in the last 100 years; about 40,000 are killed per month right now in wars everywhere; more than 10,000 Americans are killed in handgun homicides every year. Carjackings, rapes, follow-home robberies. We are afraid to walk the streets for fear of being hurt.”

Add to that, he says, the very personal atrocities that occur within the home--spousal abuse, child abuse, all sorts of family quarrels that end in harm.

“Aren’t we tired of it all?” he asks.

And isn’t peace--defined by Webster’s as an absence of war, freedom from public disorder, and an undisturbed state of mind--the thing we all want most in our lives?

If so, he has some answers.

Let’s teach children, starting in the first grade, the theory and meaning of peace, and how to achieve it by resolving conflicts nonviolently.

Give them the tools to solve small arguments before they become big fights, McCarthy says. Let them grow up using this knowledge, so that they will become peace-loving, peace-making adults.

We are a nation of peace illiterates, he says.

“We wouldn’t ever put kids through 12 years of elementary and high school with no reading or math. They get math every day; how many will use it? How often do you have lively discussions of algebra in your home?”

But children learn nothing in 12 years about how to solve conflicts or make peace with family and friends, he says. Every child experiences these conflicts, which can be hugely healthy, he adds. “Conflict is simply a signal that we’ve got to change the way we operate, or something worse may erupt in the relationship. We can achieve that change by violent or nonviolent means.”

McCarthy says if enough children are taught to solve problems without hurting others, the world will eventually become a peaceful place.

Children need inspiration as well as technique, he adds. “They know all about the generals, like U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee,” he says, “but ask them about great (humanitarians) like (Albert) Schweitzer or (Jane) Addams, and they draw a blank. . . . There are hundreds of peace-oriented authors out there to read, but the kids never hear about them at school.”

*

Even those who label him a leftover-leftist-flower-child acknowledge his sincerity.

“McCarthy represents the pacifist Catholic tradition. He’s one of a kind and authentic. We can’t find anybody like him to replace him,” says Patrick Buchanan, the conservative columnist and co-host of TV’s “Crossfire.”

“He’s a likable guy,” Buchanan adds, “but I think his views are heretical. Even the Pope now says people have an obligation to use force if necessary to stop what’s happening in Bosnia. The idea of personal pacifism is fine, but you can’t even do that when you have a moral obligation to protect your family. I think he missed his third-grade class on original sin, (where they taught) that some people really are violent, dangerous or wicked--and you have an obligation to defend yourself with force, if necessary.”

Buchanan says McCarthy, a frequent guest on his TV show, practices “a doctrine of freeloading. The U.S. is protected by people who risk their lives so that Colman can stand in a classroom and say they are doing unjust and immoral things. It’s because (the military) and the police are willing to defend us on a daily basis that Colman is free to stand up and preach the beauties of pacifism.”

McCarthy chuckles at such detractors; intellectual battles don’t trouble him at all. Judging from mail and phone calls he receives after every public appearance, he says, more Americans are willing to try a loving, nonviolent approach. Of course, they’re not yet pounding down the doors to join his crusade.

So McCarthy treads his Gandhian path alone.

The quick trip to Los Angeles last week was part of his usual pattern, sowing insights like apple seeds.

At home outside Washington, he describes life as solitary, except for his wife of 27 years and three sons.

He’s up before dawn five days a week to teach a 7:15 a.m. peace studies class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

Then he bikes to the office, where he writes the peace-pushing columns that are syndicated in about 50 papers (including The Times).

Then to the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit educational institution he started seven years ago to teach children nonviolent methods of resolving conflicts, while disseminating the literature and theory of peace.

(He has raised about $600,000 for his center in the past five years, $300,000 in a grant from Bill Moyers. Part of that money is used to teach teachers how to teach peace, a subject he hopes will eventually be taught in all the nation’s elementary and secondary schools.)

Then to Georgetown University School of Law, or the University of Maryland, where he teaches would-be lawyers a 14-week course he created, called “Law, Conscience and Non-Violence.”

*

McCarthy can’t pinpoint the origins of his pacifism. His parents were devout Catholics; his father a lawyer “who didn’t really care about making money” and used to offer free legal services to all the poor people in their Long Island neighborhood.

He recalls being disturbed that the college he attended (Spring Hill in Mobile, Ala.) had an ROTC program. “It struck me then, and still does now, that the military really has no place on campus. A college ought to be a place where we learn to solve disputes through the force of ideas, the force of truth and justice--rather than through violence and killing. I was radicalized by that.”

He was not the ideal student, he says. “I was a pretty wild kid in school, so afterward I decided I needed discipline. I wanted to read all the books I should have read in school and didn’t.” He entered a Trappist monastery--”a very strict, austere order”--for what he thought would be a few weeks. He stayed five years, he says, making friends with the cows who were in his charge, and the only ones to whom he was allowed to talk.

Looking back, those were the most important years of his life, he says. “It’s therapeutic to have a period in your life of contemplation, of strenuous physical exercise and of opening your soul to spiritual concerns. It has been a wonderful resource for me and helped me to love my family tremendously.”

It also helped him to love the cows and other living things. “I came to realize just how sweet and gentle those animals really are, to understand why the Hindus consider them sacred,” he said. “As soon as their milk would taper off, they’d be shipped somewhere” to a fate he didn’t want to even imagine.

McCarthy’s audiences are startled sometimes when he suddenly shifts gears from peace mongering to the evils of eating meat.

It’s part of this whole nonviolence thing, he says. “I tell my students not to eat anything that had a mother.”

Seven Ways to Resolve Conflicts Without Violence

1. Define what the conflict is about. Studies on spousal disputes show that about 75% of the time, the partners are fighting about different issues. It was something the wife said or did this morning that has the husband enraged, and something the husband did six weeks ago that has the wife losing it.

2. It’s not you vs. me. It’s you and me vs. the problem. The problem is the problem. It’s stupid to try to defeat the other side, because the first thing the other side thinks after losing is, I need a rematch: I’ll come back with more firepower. We have a world of rematches of rematches of rematches. Don’t bring your adversaries to their knees, bring them to the table.

3. Before a conflict heats up, list your shared concerns against your one shared separation. Deal with the conflict from where the relationship is strongest, not weakest.

4. Never ask people who have been in a fight what happened. They’ll only give you their version of what occurred. Instead ask, “What did you do.” Then you have facts, not opinions. Facts help clarify perceptions, which is basic to conflict resolution.

5. Develop a sense of forgiveness. Reconciliation is impossible without it. Many people are willing to bury the hatchet, but they insist on remembering exactly where they buried it--in case they need it for the next war.

6. Learn to listen actively. Turn it around, from “when I talk, people listen,” to “when I listen, people talk.”

7. Purify your heart. You can’t get violence out of other people without first getting it out of your own soul. We can’t eliminate the weapons of the world without first getting them out of our own hearts.