Recently I stumbled upon a speech, “Visions of Peace through Literature,” that I delivered to the Upper Midwest Regional IRA Conference in 1992 and that was then published in the winter 1994 edition of The ALAN Review. At the core of the speech lay my 1983 novel, Rain of Fire, which had won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for “its effective contribution to peace.”

I don’t often return to what I have said or published in the past, but this seemed so current that I offer it here, amended slightly for length.

Visions of peace through literature. Several times recently, I have been asked to speak on that topic for gatherings of teachers, and I have always agreed. Why not?

The very title presumes that the work I do has the power to make a difference in the world, an immensely gratifying suggestion. And I enjoy being with teachers—the people I have the most in common with except for other writers—to discuss something that every one of us cares about, believes in.

But then I find myself looking into the faces of the gathered teachers, faces that show little enthusiasm and even less hope for the topic we have come to discuss, and I find myself wondering. Do we believe in the “visions of peace” we offer? Really?

Yes, of course, it’s nice to talk to children, to sing to children, to write books for children about peace. It helps them to feel secure, and it makes us look good, too. (Don’t blame me, kids! I’m one of the good guys. Can’t you tell?)

But do we do it with our fingers crossed behind our backs? Knowing that these same children will be the ones we’ll send off to fight the next war. Who else would do it? Not those who remember the futility of the last one.

Isn’t it curious? We take our highest ideals, our purest dreams, and we invest them in our children. There’s nothing wrong with that. Every society throughout history must have done the same. But then—and this is where it gets curious—we expect those children to outgrow what we have taught them! It’s as though we use the “innocence” of childhood—or would ignorance be a better word?—as a repository for ideals we haven’t the slightest intention of living up to ourselves.

I am only a fiction writer, not a politician or a preacher. Professionally and by inclination, I deal in a world of ambivalences, of grayed truths, of feelings, not facts. I am not accustomed to making pronouncements. But there is one pronouncement that has been demanding my voice more and more strongly in my life.

As long as only the powerless believe in peace, we will continue to live by war. As long as we invest our desire for peace in our children’s hearts and not our own, then those same children will continue to die by the war we have taught them is so wrong.

I once wrote a story called Rain of Fire to say that there is no such thing as a “good” war. There is no “them” out there separate from, less important than, less feeling than we are. Violence, I said, always, always hurts the perpetrator as deeply as—sometimes even more deeply than—the victim.

I wrote it to say that wars don’t begin out there, in governments, in armies. They begin right here, in our neighborhoods, in our hearts.

Did Rain of Fire make any difference at all? I know of one change it wrought and only one, and that’s because a kind teacher shared it with me.

A boy in her classroom whose father was a veteran of Vietnam would read only books about war. Fiction, nonfiction, current or past, it didn’t matter, as long as the subject was war. He gloried in them. One day the teacher gave him Rain of Fire, and he read it avidly. When he was done, he walked slowly to the front of the room. “You know,” he said, setting the book on her desk, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe war isn’t so great.”

I wrote Rain of Fire for that boy. If it never touched another, that is enough.

Did my small book change the world? No. Will I ever write a book that changes the world? Of course not. At least not in the way the question implies. I don’t even dream such dreams. But the longer I live, the more convinced I am that the only real change possible begins with changing hearts.

Peace isn’t passive. It isn’t merely the absence of violence, the absence of war. Peace begins with respect, self-respect first, followed immediately by respect for others–all others. Those who are different in culture, ideology, race, religion, class, education, gender, sexual identity.

It begins, particularly, with respect for the powerless: children, the elderly, the disabled, the undereducated, the poor. A society can be judged by the way it protects or fails to protect its most vulnerable members. And I believe that this society, racked with violence, rife with neglect, is being tested and found seriously wanting.

When we are as eager to educate the children of our ghettos as we are to send them to fight (or to build prisons to contain them), when we are as ready to buy books as we are bombs, when we are as willing to train and support and reward our teachers as we are to criticize and complain about our schools, then we will begin to see the rewards of peace.

When we spend as much time paying attention to one another as we do to our screens, when we are as angry about the steady diet of violence being fed our children as we would be if poison were being slipped into their food, when we are is willing to live our ideals as we are to teach them to the young, then we will begin to see the rewards of peace.

Peace requires a hopeful heart. We can’t have it unless we have the capacity, first, to hope for it. And hope is not just the province of children.

Let us give our children hope. Certainly. Let us fill them with stories that tell them, over and over again, that peace is important, possible, worth striving for. Let us give them stories that allow them to understand the differences that separate us, to experience the humanity that connects us.

But even more important, let us feed and nurture our own hope. We have offered our children nothing—less than nothing—if we give them what we expect them to throw away once they come into the “real” world.

Peace is not just possible: it is essential if we are to survive. It is not just essential: it is a choice that you and I have the power to make. But the question is, do we believe ourselves when we speak of peace, write about peace, read stories to our children about peace? Even in the face of our bewildering overwhelming sometimes disheartening adulthood, do we still believe?

If we do, if we believe in peace, if we live peace, if we offer peace up daily in our classrooms and our homes, we will change the world. We must . . . one heart at a time.