Negative peace is merely the absence of war, or in a more extreme sense, the absence of violence and of war used as a political threat. Negative peace could be achieved ending civilization, by decimating the earth's resources until we are too busy trying to get the basic necessities of food, shelter, and reasonable health to think about waging war. Positive peace, in contrast, calls for a world in which war is unnecessary precisely because basic necessities are met. Positive peace is the availability of food, shelter, clean water, health care, education, a sense of safety, and optimism for the future.
War is a top-down, large-scale effort to create positive peace. The ideal of war is to change governments, which will change political structures, which will help individuals build sustainable happy lives. Grassroots peace activism tries to change the same things from the opposite direction, from the bottom-up. Grassroots activism asks each person to change their own life and possibly that of their neighbor in the direction of a sustainable, happy lifestyle. The ideal of this model is that individuals will lead to sustainable, happy communities, which will lead to sustainable happy countries, which will elect sustainable governments. War is global; peace is local.
The changing shape of peace movements echoes the changes in war. War has become less about heroic generals and more about the corporations behind the scenes. Modern peace movements have no equivalent to past leaders like Gandhi or King, but are based in ideas like "the personal is political" and "think globally, act locally". Effective modern peace movements have used grassroots organization as a method of not just creating the change they wish to see, but being it. The idea of developing peace from one peaceful person to two to four to eight to two thousand forty-eight is based on the idea of growing from the bottom up, of first creating a strong base for any action to rest on.
Peace movements gather people from many different locations and backgrounds. While this diversity can create strength, it also helps explain the biggest problem with this kind of activism: it doesn't create lasting change. Everyone gets together for one day to wave signs and then goes back to their everyday lives. A thousand people marching in the streets are impressive, but they can be (and frequently are) misrepresented, forgotten, and even ignored. If people stayed at home and worked in their own communities to create an infrastructure of peace, instead of a thousand individuals there could be a thousand towns refusing to participate in making war. If people in a thousand communities stayed home and refused to give their tax dollars or discretionary money to the war machine, they would be impossible to ignore. They would be impossible to forget. It would be huge, and something that huge would only be possible with a community of support.
A revolution cannot truly succeed unless it has already happened. A power structure cannot be overthrown until its base has been dissolved. No leader can exist for long without some level of support from the people. If a new structure is put in to place, any leader of the old structure will have nothing to lead. We the people bear responsibility for our leaders' decisions. Especially in the USA, where our leaders are at least theoretically elected democratically, we must hold ourselves accountable for the actions of our leaders. But in every country, in every group, a leader by definition is someone who represents others and acts in their name. This means we have to be very careful about the leaders we accept, not just because of the effects they might have on our lives, but because of the effects they'll have on others in our name. Unfortunately, we seem to have a habit of choosing leaders who view war and even nuclear war as a sane option. Thomas Merton suggests that our definition of sanity is the main problem.
In his essay "A Devout Meditation on the Memory of Adolf Eichmann" Merton says, "A man can be 'sane' in the limited sense that he is not impeded by his disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly manner, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself." If such a sane man is in a social situation which dictates that political credibility is valued higher than human life, he can easily, sanely, order murder and genocide for the greater good. Peace activism is still the realm of the slightly crazy people. Merton's essay considers the reputed sanity of Adolf Eichmann, who committed crimes against humanity yet slept well at night. Merton's conclusion is that sanity is not as valuable a goal as we've boosted it up to be. If it is possible for a human being to be fully in control of themselves, without anxiety, able to logically think through the consequences of their acts yet still be able to comfortably commit acts which harm hundreds of millions, to create a world of healthy human beings we need a goal other than the sanity of our leaders.
Especially in this social climate, which values insane "realism" so highly, we can't depend on our leaders to foment revolution. This is a cultural change which needs to grow from the bottom-up, and that means every individual bears the same responsibility whether they're President or business-owner or an activist on the corner with a cardboard sign. The new peace movement is our movement. This peace movement is about the community of support. People willing to hold signs are important, and people willing to organize are important, but the people who stay home are important too. People who don't go to marches but work to provide themselves and others with happy, sustainable lives are the biggest peace movement, and in the end, perhaps the most successful one. If peace grows from the bottom-up, peace in everyday life is what everything else will be based on. The future of positive peace is in every individual life.