Conscious Choice: Oasis of Endless War: the Peace Museum

March 2003

Oasis of Endless War: the Peace Museum

by Jonn Salovaara

Small and in its own way, beautiful, the Peace Museum is located these days in the gold-domed central building of Garfield Park. It affords magical views of the Chicago skyline beyond the tall trees of the surrounding green space. The Museum, which shares the no-longer-so-opulent building with some park district activities, seems — in many ways — the inverse of the vast Museum of Science and Industry (msi), the well-endowed temple of the military-industrial complex in Jackson Park. If msi glorifies the mind and might of humankind, the Peace Museum pays tribute to its heart.

The current exhibit, Artifacts of Vigilance, carefully selects a roomful of artworks from the ten thousand items in the museum’s permanent collection and displays these banners, lapel buttons, song manuscripts, photographs, and other objects related to the work of creating peace. An artifact that hit me especially hard was the letter from Joan Baez, the Vietnam-protesting folksinger of the‘60s, to then-president Lyndon Johnson. She begins by saying, "I feel compassionate and full of love toward you and all the people of the world."

I grew up with very different feelings about Lyndon Johnson, and Baez’s opening is a strong reminder of the spiritual centering that is necessary in the work for peace. John Lennon’s guitar, donated by Yoko Ono, and the penned-over spiral notebook manuscripts of songs by U-2 and Tom Paxton remind us of other musicians supporting peace.

The artifacts speak to us from more than the Vietnam era. They come from the whole span of the past century and extend by way of an Internet terminal into the present. Social worker Jane Addams helps hold a peace banner in one photograph. A group of suffering prisoners beseeches us from a powerful etching created by Kathe Kollwitz prior to World War I. Demented-looking Nazis, sketched by George Grocz, remind us of the de-humanizing depths of war mongering.

Many items are from social-justice movements, illustrating the adage, "If you want peace, work for justice." The show helps to illuminate the peace-ramifications of the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the struggle of refugees, the effort to memorialize the Holocaust, and the anti-nuclear bomb effort.

Equal Opportunity: The Pursuit of Peace

The intended message, says LuAnne Lewandowski, who curated the show with Marianne Philbin, is that everyone can be involved in the pursuit of peace. A prime example of a private citizen who found something to do is Justin Merrit. A woman living in Iowa, she decided to make a banner, and to ask everyone she knew to make a banner, depicting what they would miss in the event of a nuclear war. Eventually there were enough banners to string together and tie around the Pentagon. Merrit’s original banner brightens this exhibit: she sewed, amidst a full spectrum of colored thread, the names of all the people she would miss.

Originally curated in 1992, the exhibit has been expanded for the current showing. It now includes a large black and white photograph of a classroom in Baghdad where a little girl is about to speak to an American visitor. She’s quoted as saying, "When you return to the United States please tell the children to ask their parents not to bomb us." The wall-paragraph informs us further that the girl then sat down at her desk and wept. This was after four days of bombing during the Clinton administration in 1998. This particular artifact is from Kathy Kelly’s Voices of the Wilderness project; Kelly has spent the last 12 years working to show Americans the very human faces of the Iraqi people.

I was not expecting to be so moved by the Peace Museum. I wasn’t expecting to walk around this room fighting down a lump in my throat. Do you sometimes feel that the world, if not insane, at least needs a lot of therapy? Does the incessant war mongering of our current government and "corporatized" media leave you feeling like you got off at the wrong planet?

Here is a place where you can go. Here you can spend time with others, past, present, and future, who not only want peace but also understand that it must be worked for. The gold dome is more than an oasis for the media- and government-weary. Through its association with the park district, the Peace Museum develops a variety of programs that challenge schoolchildren to think about peace, and also to create it. It offers resource materials - books, videos, and Web sites — to anyone who wishes to both visualize world peace and take steps toward it.

Postscript

The Peace Museum is seeking support for its programs from corporations that want to sponsor peace. Maybe some day the financing gap between the MSI and the Peace Museum will close at least a little. How about an establishment as vast as the Museum of Science and Industry, all devoted to peace?

Jonn Salovaara is a freelance writer and landscape gardener. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College in Chicago.

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