Nobody Said Peace Work Was Easy

Beth Shelburne and John Lovie keep showing up to do it

Images from Beth Shelburne's Moth to Flame and John Lovie's Mostly Water

Welcome to another Friday edition of PeaceLinks, my archive of web links about peace, cooperation, and plain decency.

Showing up with love in this world can be bruising and exhausting. Even though I’ve used the word “uplift” to describe some of what I look for in a Peace Link, I don’t mean to be saccharine about it. Efforts at justice, common sense, and cooperation fail and frustrate many times before strangers recognize their common purpose and throw each other lifelines.

Today’s links come from two Substackers who shine light on a particular space of brokenness - a specific region and specific problem - and then approach it with research, tenacity, and love.

It is hard to wait for injustice to change. Lives are lost while systems lag.

Beth Shelburne

of

Moth to flame

and

John Lovie

of

Mostly Water

don’t let that overwhelm them. They are showing up for the dignity and preservation of life, no matter how long it takes. And by writing about it, they transform the struggle into something beautiful that you and I can share. From sharing, if we feel moved to it, some of us will find ways to add support.

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Beth Shelburne was a successful TV news anchor when her life changed five years ago. She reassigned herself to the beat of covering the Alabama prison system as an investigative reporter. The post about what prompted this change makes a good introduction to her work. From there, just keep reading to meet the men, women, and children whose lives have redirected her purpose. The less I say, the better. Her story has a liberty-bell ring of truth to it:

How prison reporting changed my heart

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John Lovie draws attention to another area where people are not at peace. As an environmental writer from the northwestern U.S. (an island in my home region of the Puget Sound), he works with his neighbors to mitigate the consequences of careless development and rising seas.

Instead of ranting against another political tribe, he encourages us not to be divided and conquered by a small number of people whose narrow interests defy common sense. “In highly individualistic societies,” he writes,

including most Western countries, but especially the United States, politicians, corporations, and others have weaponized our lizard brains against us. They have done this by taking advantage of our fixation on personal freedom and property rights to portray solutions to societal problems as threats to liberty so that our lizard brain reacts. This is how we surrender wetland protections to personal property rights; sacrifice schoolchildren to gun rights; “other” people and take away their rights, forgetting that those are our rights too. [italics added]

Whatever our politics, could we learn to notice when someone — anyone — portrays a solution to a societal problem as a threat to liberty, and recognize this as the manipulative formula that it is? John Lovie is trying to expand the space of our common ground on environmental subjects, as if our lives might depend on it:

Denial and the lizard brain

Beth and John remind me to self-check:

What can I do today to spread love in the world? What energies can I redirect from work that makes me smaller? What need in my community do I have the power to show up for?

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P.S.

Have you been enchanted by a story about someone getting free of the prison system? Or about water? Have you been enchanted by a book? Consider telling your story in a few hundred words and posting it to the friendly contest going on until July 13 at my other Substack, Enchanted in America, here.

Enchanted by the Book Contest