“Game Over: Love Glasses On”: A Constructive Follow On to Dr Seuss’ Butter Battle Book
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Start Again: Artist Call for an International Participatory Peace Project
Do you often see conflicts that escalate as if putting gas on fire? What do you do when conflicts erupt to avoid them turning into explosions of great proportions?
Imagine Creatively – a storytelling-for-peace platform launches an international appeal for illustrators and political cartoonists to contribute to a peace education storybook. Each interested artist will be asked to contribute an illustration to an educational and humorous book which aims to educate children about constructive peaceful conflict-resolution necessary in the global arena.
This will be another bedtime story for children and a waking up story for parents and adults. It is envisaged as a constructive follow-on to the Butter Battle Book of the much endeared Dr. Seuss. It also includes an additional workbook with an ABC of how to handle emotions and conflicts constructively.
A story to challenge intellectually, touch the heart and offer creative and constructive ways out of conflict and find solutions good for all.
If you’re drawn to draw a contribution, read on.
Contact Ina@imaginecreatively.com for additional details.
More on the “The Why”/ background to and the inspiration for this project
“The Butter Battle Book” is one of Dr. Seuss’ less known books depicting the escalations of weaponry and the insanity of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that was part of the Cold War between the East and West in the 1980s and is still adhered to today.
The storybook ends with both parties arming themselves with the nuclear bomb and the lingering fear that one party might use it first.
The increase in armament and intensification of enemy images, the Cold War mindset and the threat of nuclear weapons being used one day is as big a problem – if not even worse – today as it was in the 1980s. The international arena is fraught with threats, blackmails, enemy images and low emotional and relational intelligence exchanges.
Can we be wiser this time? How can we be more creative to draw a signal of public alarm? More poignant, humorous and effective when suggesting constructive ways to integrate all voices, parties, former enemy images into one global consciousness operating?
Could we turn war thinking around to Waging Artful Resolution of Conflict?
“Game over. Start again“– the story for which this International Artist Call requests contributions – is another waking up story from Imagine Creatively that puts forward a simple therapy for the same old given reality: looking through the love glasses to reconcile differences.
Description: Game Over: Start Again (illustrated storybook ages 3-99)
The cold war arms race continues as does the international tension around the use of nuclear bombs. Dr Seuss’ Butter Battle Book ended in suspense about who will press the button first. Game Over: Start Again picks up the theme to take it one step further and offer love glasses as a new lens to find constructive solutions.
The story is written on a model of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, offering not only an overview of the current situation with aggravating risks but also a model of intervention that can be used starting in kindergarten where emotional wars are full-fledged. This model borrowed from medicine to peace studies gives hope for cure to the seriously ill patient. There are solutions and they can be enacted daily to build up a culture of peace and creative conflict resolution, from kindergarten and family level to international relations.
Excerpt:
“Remember the battles in the bad old days?
Successors today have not changed their ways,
The Zooks and the Yooks up scaled their game
The boys in the back room don’t want to play tame.
Now they have even more dangerous toys,
Eager to anywhere anytime simply deploy.
Vooks and Wooks they now call themselves
Mirroring each other and their former selves”.
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To get involved, please contact Ina@imaginecreatively.com
Ina Curic who Imagines Creatively here is a peacebuilding specialist with international work experience. Currently, she is a member of the board of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research pondering on what can be done constructively to raise the profile of critical peace thinking and action globally.
- For more on the background and the WHY of this book project follow up, here: