#International Affairs
Target:
U.S.A.
Region:
GLOBAL

About 10% of the world's population go to bed each night on an empty stomach. About 4 million infants die per year before reaching the age of one. Covid-19 has about 170 million infections and about 3.5 million deaths. Approximately 70 million children do not go to school each day.

Our world's average temperature has been increasing by about 0.2 degree Celsius per decade, resulting in melting glaciers and flooding of shore lines, increasing number of violent hurricanes and raging forest fires, and degradation of air quality.

The world faces injustice daily, in the form of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, or ethnic discrimination. Inequality has reached unprecedented levels, with more than 70% of the global population living in countries where the wealth gap is growing. Our leaders are not accountable for their decisions and are making decisions that benefit the small percentage who are wealthy and powerful while neglecting the great majority of the people. Furthermore, their decisions are often made not based on facts, science, or logic.

These three phenomena of increasing global poverty, environment challenges, and lack of justice and accountability in decision making are moving the world away from peace and moving toward war. A war including nuclear weapons will lead to an unimaginable world hardly livable for our children and grandchildren.

This is why the world needs a new peace initiative that is supported and pushed hard by a large coalition of global citizens and organizations committed to work toward a new peaceful world.

Our world is facing serious problems related to poverty, health, education, climate change, racism, inequalities, wealth disparities, terrorism, armed conflicts, wars. Our current path will continue to increase the seriousness of these problems, and the status quo will lead to more conflicts and wars, including nuclear wars leading to a world with unimaginable consequences for our children and grandchildren.

We must ask ourselves is this the path we want to continue, or do we want to move toward a path for peace that emphasizes a win-win strategy on working collaboratively to attack the global problems that all of us are facing. We already have many organizations working toward this approach, but the proponents of the status quote are many and powerful. We need a coalition of organizations to push for this peace initiative that attacks these fundamental problems of poverty (P), environment (E), justice (J) and accountability (A), or the PEJA Peace Initiative.

Attached below are some references with relevant information, including a poem for peace:

1. Abby Martin’s Documentary Film “Gaza Fights for Freedom”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZSaKYmP2s.

2. “No Cold War with China”: Resolution passed in May 2021 by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) - (a 30,000 member trade union of faculty & staff of the City University of New York): https://www.psc-cuny.org/sites/default/files/Resolution%20No%20Cold%20War%20with%20China.pdf.

3. Professor Kishore Mahbubani’s lecture on 5/13/2021 “Can Asia Guide Biden on China?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUusDCWWrG4.

4. Don M. Tow’s article “Xinjiang: Horror Story or Historic Transformation?” (June 2021): http://www.dontow.com/2021/06/xinjiang-horror-story-or-historic-transformation/.

5. Mei Tow Lam's "A Poem for Peace" (June 1, 2021): http://www.dontow.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Peace-Poem-June-1-2021.docx.

If you agree, please sign this petition. If you are signing it for an organization, please include the organization name and your position in the organization.

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The The Poverty-Environment-Justice & Accountability (PEJA) Peace Initiative petition to U.S.A. was written by Don Tow and is in the category International Affairs at GoPetition.