Dear America,
This morning, as our leaders meet behind closed doors with admirals and generals, I’m thinking about names. They’ve rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War, and that word echoes like a drumbeat. Names shape culture. Language shapes reality. When the word on the masthead is “war,” its shadow seeps into everything below it – into how we speak, how we drive, how we parent, how we treat strangers, how we imagine the future.
But what if we built a different masthead? What if, alongside our soldiers, we trained diplomats, healers, and visionaries with the same rigor? What if we established a Department of Peace – not a symbolic office in the basement of power, but a cabinet-level agency charged with bridging nations, cultures, and communities before conflict erupts?
We know that governments set tones. An “aggressive” aura at the top legitimizes aggression everywhere else. It condones division over cooperation, domination over listening. It breeds leaders who are rewarded for impulse and spectacle rather than critical thinking and self-awareness. It trains a society to believe that the answer to conflict is more conflict – bigger, faster, louder, deadlier.
When did we give up on creativity? When did we decide that killing enemies was easier than understanding them, that war was easier than imagining win-win solutions? When did we stop seeing ourselves as equal citizens of the world and start assuming we were better – entitled to take what we want no matter the cost to people or planet?
I want to remind you – and myself – that war should be a last resort. It is not a victory but a confession of failure: a failure to bring everyone to the table, a failure to honor our own professed values. And I want to remind you of words spoken two thousand years ago to an occupied people under violent rule: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
This is not weakness. Peace requires more imagination, more courage, more skill than war ever will. It is harder to build a bridge than to blow one up. It is harder to see your enemy as human than to reduce them to a target. It is harder to be creative than to be cruel.
So this is my plea, my love letter to a country I still believe can surprise itself: let us become a nation whose strength is measured by how many bridges we build, not how many we destroy. Let us demand leaders who lift the whole world up instead of treating it like a prize to be taken. Let us create a Department of Peace and give it the budget, the talent, and the urgency we now reserve for war.
Because the world is watching. And because, deep down, we already know: blessed are the peacemakers.
With fierce hope,
The Radical Left