The Pentagon estimates the war in Iran has cost $25 billion and officials have offered no indication when the war may end. The news is full of bombastic language and posturing by various leaders. For many years, KUNM has made room on its airwaves for voices promoting nonviolent conflict resolution in the show “Peace Talks Radio.” KUNM asked show co-founder Paul Ingles why finding alternatives to war is so difficult.
PAUL INGLES: Peacemaking is hard. It takes a long time. It takes courage of a different kind, more courage than threatening and using violence, and it takes a deep curiosity about your adversary, so deep that you want to take advantage of opportunities to talk, to find out exactly what the needs of each party are, and see if you can craft agreements that get some needs of both sides met so as to give negotiators from both sides a chance to go back to their people and generally save face. And the most compelling stories from our series that have focused in on those famous peacemakers as described as having all those qualities. They have patience, curiosity, investing in the quality of the communication, to establish trust and respect that you actually do care, to learn what the needs of your adversary are, and that's usually established by displaying your capacity to really listen, listen, listen.
KUNM: Yeah, those kind of skills just seem rare.
INGLES: Eleanor Roosevelt, who, after FDR’s death and after the end of World War II, she headed the UN committee to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So we talked with Roosevelt scholar Alita Black, who told us in 2014 that Ms. Roosevelt succeeded as a negotiator because she was profoundly familiar with the religions of the world. She was interested in how all people found faith. Also she was patient. She could sit all day listening, and she also transparently wrote about these negotiations to install the Declaration of Human Rights at that time in a daily newspaper column that was carried in newspapers across the country. So she was really investing civic-minded people in the US in understanding the importance of global human rights while they were negotiating this. And she also famously reached across the aisle to one of FDR fiercest critics, Republican John Foster Dulles, to get him to support the proposed document.
KIUNM: So many people who are otherwise engaged and listen or read the news have been tuning it out, trying to protect their mental health. It's understandable, but why is it also problematic? And how do we address that?
INGLES: You're talking to someone who, after the election of 2024, hasn't watched a major network or cable broadcast news program since. Having been a reporter for part of my career like you, I felt a duty to watch one every day, and that doesn't mean I've turned my back on it. I mean, I follow headlines in my email from periodicals I trust, and NPR is one of them, because you and I have both reported for years for NPR, and we know the diligence that their editors impress on their reporters not to play to any bias and actively explore what might be our inherent blind spots right when approaching a story.
So I tune into like, hourly news summaries on NPR and drop in on the radio news shows, but probably a little bit less often. On social media, I delete and sometimes report inflammatory posts in my social feed, even if they're popped in by friends. I delete sponsored posts that I don't think help civil discourse. I don't open reels or videos that friends send me that simply seem to be wannabe partisan influencers spouting on politics. I do watch late night comics because I honestly see them as the editorialists, the Eric Sevareids and maybe the Lenny Bruces of the 21st Century, and the only ones who really speak truth to power and are willing to critique either side.
I know what kind of leaders I'm going to vote for. If my candidate takes office, I'm going to keep watch to see that they vote the way I might if I held the seat myself, and if it appears not, I'll let them know how I feel. If the candidate I didn't choose takes office, I'm certainly going to let them know how I feel, and I am going to stand in peaceful protest. I'll turn my camera on if things get dicey, but I'm probably not going to be the one that shouts provoking epithets and throwing water bottles at heavily armed agents. I'm just not. For a good reason, I think, because that's not what the Freedom Riders did in the 60s, and that's not what Gandhi's followers did in India. That's my personal take on it. Again. I'm not trying to tell people how to be, but I feel that urge to step back somehow a little bit and set some boundaries on how much messaging and bad news that I can take.
KUNM: Well, Paul, thank you for all your work over the years.
INGLES: Back at you, and it's a privilege to be on these microphones.
