A Word from Peacemaker
Larry Rosen

​​"People ask me why I do this work.  They find it admirable but hopeless. Needed but futile. After all, they fear, the world is on an unalterable path toward cataclysm. I don't believe that's true. Plus, I'd rather go down fighting than capitulate. What’s ironic is that I believe the most effective way to fight is to deliver respect and love.  Two of the most important lessons I’ve learned in working on The Enemies Project speak to our pessimism and optimism. ​ Firstly, it has been wildly difficult to find participants. In my search, I have been called all sorts of names: useful idiot, apologist, troll, white guy colonizer, Nazi sympathizer, Antisemite, Islamophobe. I think, 'Me? You've got to be kidding.'   I’m just a guy trying to bring people together for conversation, expressing no particular viewpoint except that understanding yields cooperation. And yet, these responses to my overtures underscore a pessimism that pervades society. 'We can only win,' they think, 'if we defeat the other side. And you, Larry, are legitimizing their evil.' But how do you win a world where the others keep on fighting, relentlessly?  Unless you kill them all, which you can't, they are coming back for you.   Secondly, and more importantly, I’ve learned that I’m not alone in my hope. Most of us simply want a return to normalcy. From all corners, from the politically passionate to the politically apathetic, from the left and the right and the middle, they tell me publicly and privately: 'I want to live again in a world of respect. I'm tired of so much hate.'   This second force, the one wishing for cooperation, in spite of conflict, hides because it fears punishment from zealots of the first. And yet, when I lit a match in the dark, I saw all these eyes, searching for others like them. My deepest learning is that those craving normalcy are everywhere, far outnumbering people hostile to reconciliation. We, the common people, are exhausted by Enemy Makers and their worlds of contempt. We want to build again. Our important and contentious issues—from nuclear proliferation to climate change to global disease to mass migration to AI to spiritual longing —none of them gets solved when we are at psychological war. All of them get solved when we find each other again.  I do this work because my two young ladies will inherit the world. And so will your kids. And it will be run by Enemy Makers or Peacemakers. I aim to provide our children with the insight and tools to resist the first and become the second. So that as they come of age, they have a vision not just of what to avoid, but what to be. So that their energy is not wasted on hate, which builds nothing, but is invested in people, including those they naturally wish to defeat. Despite my own tribal tendencies, I see friends everywhere, especially in camps I once viewed as enemy.  I wish to light a candle so that those despondent about our future notice all those others searching hopefully in the dark.”