GLOBAL CONSTITUTION FORUMS—OVERVIEW

GLOBAL CONSTITUTION FORUMS (GCF) believes that it falls to us, We the People, to attempt to build a new world, through a transformed United States. We believe in facilitating change in two ways. First, we will host periodic single-topic symposia and occasional multi-day sessions, bringing together some of the best minds, for candid dialogue on peace and justice concerns. By elevating the dialogue, and including a spectrum of viewpoints from diverse disciplines, we hope to increase understanding, to
encourage change in the real world.

Second, GCF will seed change through a network of institutes, including:

1. Education - See Bill Wickersham: “When people tell me there is nothing they can do to prevent nuclear war, my usual reply is, ‘Yes, there is something you can do. You can educate yourself and others. Education is an essential ingredient for the solution of any social problem.’ In order for us to free ourselves of the nuclear warfare trap, we obviously have to have social and political change. Social and political change requires attitudinal change. Attitudinal change requires education.”
2. Dialogue - See University of Wisconsin Regents: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that [we] should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
3. People -See Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than are governments. Indeed, I think people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”); Margaret Mead (“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”); and Noam Chomsky (“you keep plugging away—that’s the way social change takes place; that’s the way every social change in history has taken place, by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.”).
4. Another World / Another U.S. - 2008 slogan for WILPF. See also Thomas Paine (“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”); Pablo Neruda (“I still have absolute faith in human destiny, a clearer and clearer conviction that we are approaching a great common tenderness. I write knowing that the danger of the bomb hangs over all our heads, a nuclear catastrophe that would leave no one, nothing on this earth. Well, that does not alter my hope. At this critical moment, in this flicker of anguish, we know that the true light will enter those eyes that are vigilant. We shall understand one another. We shall advance together. And this hope cannot be crushed.”); Bertrand Russell (“I put first among the gains to be expected [from abolition of nuclear weapons] the removal of that terrible load of fear which weighs at present upon all those who are aware of the dangers with which mankind is threatened. I believe that a great upsurge of joy would occur throughout the civilized world, and that a great store of energies now turned to hate and destruction and futile rivalry would be diverted into creative channels, bringing happiness and prosperity to parts of the world which throughout long ages, have been oppressed by poverty and excessive toil. I believe that the emotions of kindliness, generosity and sympathy, which are now kept within iron fetters by the fear of what enemies may do, would acquire a new life and a new force and a new empire over human behavior. It needs only that men should permit themselves a life of freedom and hope from which they are now excluded by the domination of unnecessary fear.”); and Euripedes (“There be many things of mystery; and many things God makes to be; Past hope or fear; And the end men looked for cometh not; But a path is there, where no man thought.”).