IN THE '80S, MARCHING TOWARD PEACE

Except for sore feet and windburn, what was achieved by the 1,000 citizens who walked cross-country on the Great Peace March?

Nothing, if you measure results in the number of bombs unscrewed or military contracts left unsigned.

Everything, if you put the eight-month 3,700-mile effort into the context described by Martin Luther King Jr.: "When people get caught up with an idea which is right, and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping short of victory."

As a media event, the march did have a stopping point: a visually rich finish-line rally in front of the White House. As a political event, the journey was part of an American peace movement that in the 1980s is broader, deeper and more grounded than the 1960s model. Then, the protests were necessarily narrow and negative: against the Vietnam war, against the policies of Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger. Today, for every "against" there is a matching "for." The crucial three-letter word appeared in the front-line banner of the transcontinental walk: "The Great March for Global Nuclear Disarmament."

Positive works for peace tend to earn less attention -- from the news media, from pollsters -- than negative ones. Because the peace movement of the '80s is a story of hundreds of small parts, and not one of the parts a cataclysmal outpouring, it is dismissed like the flower blooming in a desert: If it isn't seen, it isn't blooming.

In fact, after a close look eliminates the deception, a full horticulture of peace is visible:

On Election Day in Baltimore, voters approved a referendum for the city government to create a commission to advise the city on the impact of military spending and recommend economic policies that will increase the number of civilian-oriented jobs. The referendum, organized by Jobs With Peace, a Boston-based group that seeks a healthy economy over a war-preparation economy, was opposed by the Baltimore Sun. It called the referendum "a gimmick of peace activists." The voters approved it 59 to 41 percent.

Jobs With Peace volunteers have another achievement in Baltimore -- the establishment of a peace-studies course for sixth and 11th graders in public schools. Along with learning the blood-stained adventures of Napoleon, U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, the students are studying Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. "The methods of these men," the curriculum guide says, are to "be reviewed for the purposes of finding ways individuals and even nations can use for solving conflicts."

On college campuses, peace-studies programs are attracting students in numbers never seen before. According to Prof. Dennis Carey at Kent State's Center for Peaceful Change, "There are now 200 schools that offer degrees, certificates or courses in peace and conflict resolution. A decade ago, there were less than 10. The peace movement is now an educated group. In the 1960s, people knew there was something wrong but didn't always have the background to speak intelligently. Students are now coming out who have the skills and analysis."

Colgate University is among the 200 peace-movement schools. Prof. Huntington Terrell reports that students at Colgate currently have 18 courses to choose from in a concentration of peace studies. "A lot of people," he says, "think the peace-studies students are troublemakers. In fact, they understand the complexities of issues very clearly. We've been able to change Colgate for the better because these students have heads and hearts, ideas as well as emotions. They'll be leaders."

If 1960s-style civil disobedience is a proof of the peace movement's strength, the 1980s are witnessing a surge of citizens defying the government. They are saying, in the voice of conscience, "not in my name" to war preparation. Two days after the end of the Great Peace March, 137 citizens, organized by the American Peace Test, were arrested in Washington at the entrance of the Energy Department. At the same time, 59 people were arrested at the Nevada nuclear testing site, where more than 650 bombs have been exploded in no one's name but death.

Last Sunday, "60 Minutes" profiled Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the brothers in disarmament. They face another prison term for trying to beat a General Electric weapon into a plowshare. If imprisoned -- they are free pending an appeal of convictions -- they will join 57 other jailed Plowshare protesters who have found their way into 17 weapons sites. Among them is the Rev. Carl Kabat, sentenced to 18 years by a judge who sees nonviolent priests as major threats to armed America. "You wonder," Kabat told an interviewer, "when are they going to do something? They've had 6,000 nuclear disarmament conferences, and they haven't disarmed one weapon. So what do I do? I have to do something."

Kabat's something -- along with the somethings of the 1,000 people in the Great Peace March, and the somethings of those in the peace studies courses on the campuses, and the somethings of Jobs With Peace in Baltimore -- is why the peace movement is thriving.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.