A year or so ago I considered making a proposal to the Express-News that would have saved me a lot of time. Instead of having to come up with a timely topic, spending hours researching it, then eking out 650 words of incisive prose, I could boil my thoughts down to eight words.

Whatever Roddy Stinson wrote today, think the opposite. Every week: if Roddy says "yada yada" I say "aday, aday." The opposite.

I reluctantly scrubbed that idea. It would leave the Insight section with a 642-word hole every Sunday that the editors might decide to fill with son-of-Roddy. And I do believe that there was one column he wrote, back in 1996, that I sort of agreed with. I like to keep my options open, remote as they may be.

This Tuesday I was tempted to revive the eight-word scheme. While scrambling for a reason why the proposed U.S. Department of Peace is a bad idea (to which I say: aday aday) Roddy Stinson wrote: "Remember in the early '90s how teen gangs rampaged through San Antonio, murdering and maiming innocent citizens by the dozens? Remember what happened when members of the peace community appealed to gang members to stop the slaughter? The gangbangers felt really bad about what they'd done. And they felt even worse when the killings escalated."

I must have been living in an alternate reality in April, 1994. The month after the Gang Peace Summit, San Antonio was blessed with the largest drop in violent crime in recent memory, a trend that continued for three years. That killer escalator was doing down, down, down.

Despite predictions that there would be a bloodbath, there was not one incident during the summit, attended by more than 500 people. According to the Express-News more than 100 gang members from four rival West Side gangs stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the stage at Grace Lutheran Church and announced their agreement to "put down their arms."

It would be the height of hubris to attribute the entire drop in crime to the Gang Peace Summit. There was a nationwide drop in violent crime. The San Antonio Police Department's Cellular on Patrol program started at about the same time; the first class, tied to the Eastside Substation, graduated six months before the summit. San Antonio Fighting Back, a program designed to offer solutions to drug and alcohol abuse, was just hitting its stride.

No, the drive-bys didn't stop. There are still gangs - more than 700 of them - in San Antonio. One could argue that gang peace summit was insignificant, or that its effect was fleeting. The one thing that can't be said is that it caused more violence, more killings. That would be a lie. Aday, aday.

Which brings us to the Department of Peace. Congressman Dennis Kucinich will propose it to Congress in September, and I'll be there when he does. I already have the press pass in my hot little hands.

The Department of Peace was inspired by the theory that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What if we gave peace the same cabinet-level status as war? What if there was a U.S. Peace Academy, with free college-level education on par with West Point and Annapolis?

The Defense Department budget is currently at about $500 billion. If you throw in Defense/Civil programs ($44.5 billion); Homeland Security ($33.3 billion); Veterans Affairs ($68.3 billion); State Department foreign military assistance ($4 billion); spending hidden within other departments, such as Justice, Energy, and NASA and the cost of the bonds to pay off past military spending, we are projected to spend $789 billion for military projects in 2006 . That's 30.7 percent of the Federal budget.

What if we spent as much on peace as we do on war?

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.