A First Book Talk—With Thanks to the Next Big Idea Club

Peacebuilding Starts at Home is at the publishers, wending its way toward a release in time for the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s PeaceCon in early September. That means that I have more time for writing blog posts and a new need for writing them, since they will be one part of our marketing campaign.

So, expect a couple of changes to the blog, especially if you read it on Substack rather than Linkedin or my own website. However you read it, the plan is to publish an issue a week, normally on Tuesday mornings. I won’t always focus on the book, but I will raise and even update the issues covered in it.

I am also planning to add a paid tier or two to the Substack version. We are still making plans, but one thing is definite. The (almost always) weekly posts will remain free. The basic paid tier will include an electronic copy of the book when it is published and other benefits. What Substack calls the Founder level will include the book and consulting time with me and/or other members of the AfP team to help you set up your own project.

In any event, as will be the case with book royalties, all of the income will go the AfP’s Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative.

Last Friday, I did my first public talk about Peacebuilding Starts at Home. It doesn’t matter that the book itself won’t be out until September. Maybe the same logic that says maximizing pre-orders at Amazon is a good idea suggests that pre-talks will help, too?????

It was also the first time I had ever spoken to a bricks and mortar Rotary club, in this case the one in Bailey’s Crossroads VA which is one DC suburb away from my home in Falls Church.

The Next Big Idea Provides a Template

Needless to say, I was a bit nervous. Luckily, my friends at the Next Big Idea Club offered me a crib sheet—oops, I mean a template.

As I said a month or so ago, Gretchen and I are charter members of this organization that publicizes, promotes, and builds community around the best new creative nonfiction books

For the last few years, it has asked the authors it works with to boil their work down into fifteen minute talks that it calls book bites that revolve around their five key

points.

At first, I didn’t much like the idea. How could you turn a whole book into a fifteen minute presentation or five points?

But then I realized that most book talks are only about fifteen or twenty minutes long. In that amount of time, you can’t make much more than five points. And, as I saw in some of the NBIC podcasts I listened to, sometimes the author and interviewer didn’t make it past the third point even though they had a full hour for a discussion.

So, I actually had the book bite meme in mind while I was writing Peacebuilding Starts at Home. They changed a bit—but surprisingly little—as I put the book through more drafts than I care to admit. So, I could calm my nerves a bit and remove the need for notes when I took the microphone in the Board Room at Goodwin House which, eerily, is the home my mother in law lived in until she died in the late 1990s.

And the five big ideas are a template I can use to structure any talk I give on the book and then adapt it to any audience, including when I talk about at it with other parents and grandparents at my grandkids’ soccer games. And, given the way the Rotarians reacted, I stumbled on to a model that just might work.

Five Key Points

So, I tried to get the 30 or so people who came to breakfast in the Board Room at Goodwin House to think about the following five key points which I adapted to the implications of my book that presumably made the most sense for Rotarians. Their enthusiastic response suggests that I should be able to do the same for any audience I’m likely to encounter.

Peacebuilding Starts at Home is an invitation masquerading as a book. That’s literally the first line. Indeed, the whole book offers its readers ways of finding on-ramps for doing just that in they deal with the wicked problems of life in this century’s version of the roaring twenties. I’m not inviting readers to a dinner party at my house or to join me on a trip to some exotic vacation spot. Rather, I want them to join the organizations I cover in the book on a journey toward a social and political paradigm shift that marks the next stage in humanity’s social evolution. That involves thinking of peace as a verb, which was my original title (long story). Peace is not simply a noun, a goal we shoot for. It also has to be a verb and an active one at that. It is something we do, something we build together. Peace as a verb may drive what Anne Curzan calls your inner grammarian crazy, but it is what my invitation is all about. As I also told my audience, I also learned about her book from the Next Big Idea Club.

Reality tells me (and you) what to do. I first encountered this phrase at the Beyond War national leadership seminar almost forty years ago. That weekend, we worked though the realities of life then which “told us” that we needed a new social and economic paradigm. What was true then is only truer (apologies to my inner grammarian) today. In the case of my Rotarians, reality is telling us to go beyond “just” doing the kind of service projects the organization is justly famous for. Given the events of the last forty years, the time has truly come to be far more intentional about understanding what reality is like and what it suggests that we should be doing. That involves forging a paradigm shift through which most of us solve most of our problems without the use of force or violence most of the time. It will involve building it using a strategy that starts with the social mainstream and builds from there which is a far cry from the strategies I practiced in the 1960s or then studied in the first twenty years of my academic career.

Let it begin with me, I stole this line from Tom Paxton’s song, “Peace Will Come,” which was part of my political and musical education in my long-ago youth.

Now, I use it and Reinhold Neibuhr’s Serenity Prayer to help the people I work with see the need for what I call going to scale inward. Developing peace as close to home as possible won’t be enough (I am a political scientist, after all), but it is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for pulling off the paradigm shift I’ve been ranting about since I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in my first research methods class as a college sophomore. Most of my readers won’t have the time or resources to become anything like a full-time activist like I am. However, if they become more self-aware and figure out how to solve most of their problems without the use of force or violence most of the time, they can begin producing my final two Next Big Idea Club points.

The Peacebuilding pivot. I’ve been a peace activist and social change scholar since the late 1960s. Of late, however, I’ve realized that we peacebuilders have to pivot and use what I call an inside-out model. Rather than starting at the ideological extremes, it makes more sense to start with networks like Rotary and others that attract people who, in their terms, put “service over self.” More importantly, we live at a time when dissatisfaction with the status quo is society wide. Public opinion poll after public opinion poll suggest that trust in our leaders in all walks of life is at an all time low and that we need to do more than tinker with the status quo. Among other things, that means that the more than two hundred member organizations of the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) where I work have to do more than just stress peace as we have traditionally defined it but as a toolkit for addressing all of the problems we face. Luckily, as the book documents, that is beginning to happen. Meanwhile, luckily, too, many organizations that don’t think of themselves as peacebuilders are pivoting toward us because they realize that they need our skill set so that most of us can solve most of our problems without the use of force or violence most of the time. If I’m right, peacebuilding as we define it can become something of a Victorinox Swiss Champ Swiss Army Knife (more apologies to your inner grammarian) whose thirty-three utensils can be used in a wide variety of settings.

Spreading ideas worth spreading was, of course, borrowed from the TED media empire. We don’t need to spread every cool idea out there which that organization does. However, we do need to turn my first four ideas into a movement that shifts not only cultural norms but public policy. One of the reasons that Gretchen and I are high on Rotary and have decided to commit a lot of time to it is that it has 800,000 members in the United States alone. What if we could help even ten percent of them add peacebuilding to their existing service work? What if we could reach a similar number of Americans who see the need for change but don’t know how to get there from the ranks of people like my sister or my therapist or the adults who show up at their kids’ soccer games or who live in the condo complex that we are about to move into or even belong to the Next Big Idea Club?

The is a Sixth Big Point

The Next Big Idea Club may have missed one thing. At least for a book like mine, a talk should end with a bang and a call to action. So, I ended mine with the words that also serve as the epigraph for the first chapter. They were uttered by my former graduate school professor, Robert Putnam, at the end of a discussion of a documentary based on his work, Join or Die, that was held at Georgetown a year and a half ago.

At the end, Putnam looked out over the students in the room and said:

The future of our country is in your hands.

So, how are you going to take the future of our country in your hands.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.