By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 5, 2026
I don’t mean to complain about the Board of Peace. If you want to ensure endless wars, expand settler colonialism, formally empower oligarchs over nations, destroy the United Nations, and keep genocides rolling along, I’m sure it’s fantastic!
But I recommend, at least in addition, trying the table of peace. This is something I tried in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. First, you’ll need a table. Then you’ll need some supplies. I recommend free stickers, bookmarks, and flyers, some books, some sign up sheets, some display boards, a jar for donations, a banner. Bring all this stuff and a few friendly people to a farmer’s market.
And you’ll need one more thing: a game. Here’s how I did that. I asked people to pretend to be the United States Congress for 10 seconds. (Many of them were disgusted at the thought but I assured them they could shower afterwards.) Then I gave them 12 stones and told them it was the federal discretionary budget for 2027. I asked them to distribute the stones in eight glasses labeled: Environmental Protection; Education; Labor, Small Business Administration, and Commerce; Health and Human Services; Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation; War and war preparations; Energy; and Other. If they asked “Now is this green energy or fossil fuel energy?” or “Is this education as it should be done or the dy$#@! they do now?” then I told them it was their ideal form of energy or education.
A lot of people played the game.
Environmental Protection won. Very close behind that were Education and Health and Human Services. Not far behind those was Energy, which everyone told me was renewable energy. Housing and Labor came next. And one gentleman the entire time I was tabling put one stone into War. He explained, almost apologetically, that it was for the “defensive wars.” I backed away slowly and kept my eyes on him.
When each person had finished distributing the stones, I showed them a pie chart illustrating the budget proposed for 2027 by Trump. The glass that people had left almost empty eats up 77.66% of the pie. The categories people wanted funded most get the tiniest slivers.
Not everybody will play the game. Some people will take a sticker and keep walking without slowing down. Some people will stop and talk. Others will buy a book, sign a pledge, etc. With the ones who will devote 60 seconds or more, your goal is of course to get them engaged. Will they sign up and get involved? Will they take some flyers to distribute? Here, I think, it’s important to understand that success is measured in very small numbers. If you can get a few people doing more than they were before, that’s a win.
Many people, those who don’t slow down and those who stop to chat, will assure you that all is fine because they plan to vote in an election. I live in a district and state and nation with no anti-war candidates running for any offices, but even if that were not the case, the delusion that voting fixes everything and that no one can do anything other than voting would still be by far the single biggest hurdle to effective participation in society.
Many will tell you how deeply they agree regarding war and peace, and how sorry they are that all is hopeless and doomed by “human nature,” or “sociopaths,” or “money” — they’ve got a million of these. Others will thank you for what you’re doing — conveying the meaning that they’re glad you’re doing it so that they don’t have to.
But there’s usually a few percent who will actually get active and educate and agitate and demonstrate. Get them, and you’ll have done your part toward finding that few percent of the whole population that is needed to change the world.
