All they are saying, is give peace a chance

/ December 10, 2014
The message was clear at the 44th annual Plowshares Craftsfair & Peace Festival

The message was clear at the 44th annual Plowshares Craftsfair & Peace Festival

I felt at home at the Plowshares Craftsfair & Peace Festival Saturday, soaking up the vibe and taking pictures with my iPhone 6.

I wrote about the 44th edition of the fundraising event from my weekly community blog for Syracuse Public Media site waer.org. There are plenty of my photographs to go along with it there, too.

If you’d like to read my column at waer.org, click the link below.

http://waer.org/post/plowshares-craftsfair-peace-festival-they-make-lifelong-statement

Suffice it to say that the artisans and crafts people gathered at Nottingham High School in Syracuse were all in it together.

They used color as a medium.

They used color as a medium.

The artists were bold.

The artists were clever.

Button it up or a bumper crop.

The artists were clever.

Treats from another land.

Treats from another land.

The artists were sweet.

The mural outside the entrance to Nottingham High School in Syracuse, N.Y.

The mural outside the entrance to Nottingham High School in Syracuse, N.Y.

Yes, it was a diverse experience.

And for a good part of the day, the John Lennon song from which I crimped the headline above was pleasantly rattling through my head.

Do you have a Peace Council in your area, and if so, what events if any have you attended? Do you think arts and crafts fests can educate people about peaceful causes and ways of living? Do you have a favorite peace song, and if so, what is it, who wrote it, and who performs it?

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46 thoughts on “All they are saying, is give peace a chance”

  1. A beautiful message well worth repeating, Mark I love the photos – especially the mural outside Nottingham High School – and, of course, John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance.” Today, Dave volunteered to wrap Christmas gifts for children as part of Florida Today’s community outreach. 😉

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  2. Forgive my poor grammar above – I typed quickly and didn’t proofread. My bad. I meant to say some of his stunts WERE weird. Sigh… can the fact that I am on a muscle relaxant for my jaw and just a bit loopy be considered a reasonable justification for poor grammar? (It’s all I got, pal, so please accept it! )

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  3. John Lennon… great artist. Love ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ Some of his stunts (the bed-in or whatever it was called with Yoko) was weird, but hey, it was the sixties, right? 🙂 I love your posts, Mark. Good stuff, always.

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    • I went to a Christmas concert and I was in the audience (duh) and the great cast was singing John Lennon’s “Happy XMas (War Is Over)” and I stuck my right hand up in the peace sign, and the singers saw me and they smiled and some others around me stuck up the peace sign. I got goose bumps. It was a public demonstration for me, Aud.

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  6. Well, that IS my favorite Peace song. (Although Edwin Starr’s WAR is funny and fun to sing along with.) And thought I don’t think we have a peace council, I think it’s a great idea. This looked like a really fun event! I hope it served its mission well.

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  7. We don’t have a peace fest, Mark, but we do have several art and craft fairs in the area starting in the spring and running thru October. My fave is at Audubon State Park, where my sis and I used to have a booth each October. Gina decided to join us one year, picked some “wildflowers” (flowering weeds) from the roadside, dried them, tied them in bundles and sold out before either of us had the first sale. A few years later Gina was in college, my sis had moved to Colorado, and I was in the middle of a divorce, so the Audubon days were over. Ah, it’s still a great life though.

    As for peace songs, there are so many. Let There Be Peace On Earth, Peace My Friends, Peace Be With You, May You Find Peace, all songs I sang in church back in the day. Several more I have forgotten, but will remember around midnight probably, when I’m falling asleep.

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  8. I’m not sure whether we have a peace council here — the council for peace and justice really works more on homelessness and political justice issues. At a guess if there were such a group holding a fair 98% of the people who’d show up would already be into peace so not sure how much educating they’d do but it would be nice.
    Let There Be Peace on Earth. Unity Churches everywhere seem to sing it at the end of the service. Don’t know who wrote it and, while many cheesy versions have been recorded, I love singing it with a whole congregation holding hands and singing together much more than hearing somebody else do it. This version is pretty sweet though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ubAh9TLko

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  10. I like going to the Columbus Comfest, where hippies “rule” with peace messages, music is varied adn it is outdoors in the summertime. Mark, your photos were fantastic!
    I love the “Celebrate Our Differences mural, the messages on bumper stickers and pins and the colorful artwork in your first photos. Our town has a post which states we are considered a “City of Peace,” it is international, it has Peace written in different languages, too. Delaware (Ohio) is also considered one of the “Tree cities.” Some mayor or citizens must have put in applications? for these labels? I think the Arts Festival with the library Book Sale is a great May weekend, usually Mother’s Day is the final day for this, Mark. Peace is shown in one way or other at this arts festival… I liked Beth’s interdenominational event, Mark, too! Smiles!

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  14. There is no peace festival near where I live, but there is an annual arts festival. Seeing the pictures, I do wish that there was one near where I lived. I really want that evolution is a theory bumper sticker.

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    • Sirius, go to my column on the waer.org site and click the peace council link. They have all the vendors listed. I bet you can hunt out that bumper sticker and purchase it online if you really put your mind to it.

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  16. Honestly, the closest thing to this I have done is helping actively with a scholarship fund which supports rock music education. I know it doesn’t support peace directly, but, really, don’t most fundraising events do a bit for the ‘peace movement’ over all? By the way, not sure if you know, but I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY so love seeing things from the hometown area, especially arts related. These are beautiful!!

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    • I did not know that you, too, were a Brooklyn native, Marissa. Greenpoint for me. Look at my last name, you know? But out to Long Island after kindergarten. Both sets of grandparents refused to move out of Greenpoint, though, so we were always back to “the end of the pickle.” What neighborhood for you, and how long? When did you leave? How did you get to LA? Did you know that I was the music writer and critic for the Syracuse daily for 21 years before being laid off in 2013?

      OK, lots of questions laid out there. Feel free to switch to markbialczak@gmail.com.

      Rockers and folk musicians before them are famous drivers of the peace movement, yes, indeed. I got to interview Pete Seeger and see him perform live. Talk about man of peace!!

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      • Hey mark, since wordpress made their recent changes im not gettin email alerts, notifications, or posts. Working with the reader has been a bit off and on too. Have you been experiencing any of this?

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      • I am still getting my email alerts and my notifcations, I think. I hope. Now you just made me panic about that. I stopped working with my Reader months ago and operate solely through email alerts.

        The notifications … Do you realize that you can go to the reader page, click on my sites, and the new stats page will pop up. And then on the top right header, the bell will have an orange dot on top. Click on that to get your notificaitons. That’s the big change. And perhaps you’ve been doing all that already. I don’t know why they are changing these things.

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      • For some reason it’s not working with my email. I’ll use the other routes for now but hope it’s resolved soon. Since I’m working without my laptop and I’m tech challenged, it adds a new level of challenge to my phone and iPad use )

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      • Oh, crap. I am going to email you my cell number. I only blog on my iPad. You can call with any questions. Maybe I can offer some helpful shortcuts if we walkthrough simultaneously?

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