The skills of peace, I maintain, are skills applied to the outer world, the inner world (of individuals, groups, cultures) and the interface--communication.
So I read with interest a piece in Monday's SF Chronicle called "Inviting Everyone to the Party to change the world" by Ellen Freeman Roth, about innovative ideas and actual accomplishments discussed at the annual Pop! Tech forum, its purpose being "to fuel positive social change through innovation and technology."
Some approaches were "outer peace" and technical :Victoria Hale described how she created this country's first not-for-profit pharmaceutical company, OneWorld Health, whose drug to treat the parasitic disease Leishmaniasis could save thousands of lives annually. Marine ecologist Enric Sala discussed the devastating human impact on the oceans and the potential to reverse the damage. (Consumers can start by limiting fish purchases to those certified by the Marine Stewardship Council.)
Other approaches were "inner peace" attitudes: Carl Honore, author of "In Praise of Slowness," said we're so connected electronically that we're disconnected emotionally from each other. "We need to create new cultural norms around technology," he said, touting the spiritual and creative benefits of slowing down. "I, for one, have rediscovered my inner tortoise."
In an approach that combines "inner" and "interface," Nina Jablonski, evolutionary biologist and head of anthropology at Penn State University, warned that in this abstract electronic age we must remember we have bodies, and touch is important. We're still primates.
The need to integrate these skills came up in the presentation by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind. He suggested that in addition to logical thinking, we're going to need imagination, empathy and synthesis.
The piece ended with some ideas for homemade carbon offsets. You can read the whole thing here and there are podcasts with more ideas and inspiration from that conference at the Pop!Tech site. Yeah, some of it may make you squirm with suburban NewAgey cooties, but on the "inner" peace, we never did learn the real lessons of the 60s before it all got distorted, and there's been considerably more info and refined ideas since on integrating body and mind, feelings and spirit: the constituents of soul.
And it's hard to argue with many of the "outer" innovations--including heartbreakingly cheap solutions to terrible problems in the vast areas of the earth where people are poor and sick, for want of a few simple medications, and a pair of cheap reading glasses. Some of these were discussed in the latest in the Charlie Rose Show Science series (Episode 10 on Global Health.) It may be a bit hard to get past the Pfizer sponsorship, or for quite a few Mac and indie computer people to accept what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are accomplishing, but let's face it, some much needed money and attention is going to dreaming up solutions to some of the worst health problems on the planet, that plague the poorest. Not to mention what the Gates Foundation and the millionaires involved in Bill Clinton's projects are doing for the natural environment. Criticism is part of the process, but so is doing what needs to be done for real.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
"Normal" Viciousness
For the Rabid Right these days, no "new low" stays new very long, before they take themselves and the political dialogue even lower.
There's the latest attacks on the children and their families who provided their stories to support what's called the S-Chip program, that helps working families pay extraordinary medical bills for their children. A couple of families made commercials explaining how the program made a major difference in their lives, and supporting its expansion to other families.The attacks include the usual viral lies but also a call for them to be hanged. These are children severely injured in an accident, and even after extensive care, the boy speaks with a lisp and the little girl is blind in one eye.
When Keith Olbermann asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who'd just written about why Al Gore drives Republicans insane) if this attack didn't just leave him speechless, Krugman said it was not really exceptional, that it was "normal in its viciousness."
What happens to a democracy when viciousness becomes normal? Some say it has always been so, but I wonder if that's much consolation. I think we all wonder what happens to a society when viciousness really becomes normal. The answer would seem to be: it ceases to be a society. There is a continuum between civilization and savagery, and we are clearly moving towards savagery--faster than we realize.
But apart from the pragmatism of those like Krugman who are exposed to this political viciousness pretty much every day, this savagery can be seen to follow logically from the belief that this is a dog eat dog world, that the winners are those who destroy their competitors by any means necessary. Ironically, it is a twisted variation of Darwinism, a natural selection based on the simplistic but (to some) viscerally convincing criteria that the winners win by being clever (including deceptive) as well as by using power (including violence) without conscience.
Our "entertainment" these days is often about those situations in which survival depends on using any means necessary, especially violence. There is something reassuring about these movies and TV shows, in an elemental way--the way that children are reassured by stories in which the hero and heroine survive the wicked witch in the forest, the ghosts, the monster. It reassures us that the bad forces aren't all powerful, and in this bewilderingly complex society, we aren't powerless.
But we all know that these situations are relatively rare--that more often, in our human-dominated world, we survive through non-violent means--through responsibility and keeping our word, through negotiation, conciliation, cooperation--as well as by helping each other. That's the basis of every civilization, including (ironically again) the ones we consider primitive. It's not the kings and the armies--they change things, they destroy, but they mostly serve the rulers, not the society.
For most people, it's playing fair and expecting fair play, it's empathy and altruism, and there's no getting around it. It's the Golden Rule, it's "you'd do the same for me."
And not very ironically, in fact both sadly and grandly, civilization depends on precisely the people the wingers are going after now: the families who are grateful that their government helped them literally save their children's lives, and provided them with help towards something like a normal life, but who haven't just taken what they were given--they want it for others, as many others as possible. And they have the courage to say so.
But this isn't about the program--it's about who we are, what we value, and what kind of a society we want to live in. We might start with a civilized one. We're going to need it.
There's the latest attacks on the children and their families who provided their stories to support what's called the S-Chip program, that helps working families pay extraordinary medical bills for their children. A couple of families made commercials explaining how the program made a major difference in their lives, and supporting its expansion to other families.The attacks include the usual viral lies but also a call for them to be hanged. These are children severely injured in an accident, and even after extensive care, the boy speaks with a lisp and the little girl is blind in one eye.
When Keith Olbermann asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who'd just written about why Al Gore drives Republicans insane) if this attack didn't just leave him speechless, Krugman said it was not really exceptional, that it was "normal in its viciousness."
What happens to a democracy when viciousness becomes normal? Some say it has always been so, but I wonder if that's much consolation. I think we all wonder what happens to a society when viciousness really becomes normal. The answer would seem to be: it ceases to be a society. There is a continuum between civilization and savagery, and we are clearly moving towards savagery--faster than we realize.
But apart from the pragmatism of those like Krugman who are exposed to this political viciousness pretty much every day, this savagery can be seen to follow logically from the belief that this is a dog eat dog world, that the winners are those who destroy their competitors by any means necessary. Ironically, it is a twisted variation of Darwinism, a natural selection based on the simplistic but (to some) viscerally convincing criteria that the winners win by being clever (including deceptive) as well as by using power (including violence) without conscience.
Our "entertainment" these days is often about those situations in which survival depends on using any means necessary, especially violence. There is something reassuring about these movies and TV shows, in an elemental way--the way that children are reassured by stories in which the hero and heroine survive the wicked witch in the forest, the ghosts, the monster. It reassures us that the bad forces aren't all powerful, and in this bewilderingly complex society, we aren't powerless.
But we all know that these situations are relatively rare--that more often, in our human-dominated world, we survive through non-violent means--through responsibility and keeping our word, through negotiation, conciliation, cooperation--as well as by helping each other. That's the basis of every civilization, including (ironically again) the ones we consider primitive. It's not the kings and the armies--they change things, they destroy, but they mostly serve the rulers, not the society.
For most people, it's playing fair and expecting fair play, it's empathy and altruism, and there's no getting around it. It's the Golden Rule, it's "you'd do the same for me."
And not very ironically, in fact both sadly and grandly, civilization depends on precisely the people the wingers are going after now: the families who are grateful that their government helped them literally save their children's lives, and provided them with help towards something like a normal life, but who haven't just taken what they were given--they want it for others, as many others as possible. And they have the courage to say so.
But this isn't about the program--it's about who we are, what we value, and what kind of a society we want to live in. We might start with a civilized one. We're going to need it.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
We Do Forget
It would be helpful if the cliches and pronouncements were true, that horrific events like the Holocaust or Hiroshima and Nagasaki "will never be forgotten." But in terms of their weight, import and meaning, both factually and emotionally, they are forgotten. This becomes evident when other Holocausts are ongoing with no effective effort to stop them (as arguably is happening now in Darfur and Burma, for instance) or when policies are being pursued that would be universally condemned as reckless and horrifying, if those great lessons were truly remembered.
I've written before about the horrors of nuclear bombs, specifically in relation to the casually mentioned nuking of Iran. But the Iran threat just won't go away, and although less is being said about the U.S. using nuclear weapons against Iran, recent (and disturbingly ignored) statements and signals from the Bush White House suggest an attack is still "on the table."
It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheny government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power is that it is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.
But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran would turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.
On the subject of nuclear weapons, a Daily Kos frontpage post today outlined the positions of the leading Democrats running for President, based on questionaires. A more extensive treatment is available online from the Council for a Livable World.
It would be helpful if the cliches and pronouncements were true, that horrific events like the Holocaust or Hiroshima and Nagasaki "will never be forgotten." But in terms of their weight, import and meaning, both factually and emotionally, they are forgotten. This becomes evident when other Holocausts are ongoing with no effective effort to stop them (as arguably is happening now in Darfur and Burma, for instance) or when policies are being pursued that would be universally condemned as reckless and horrifying, if those great lessons were truly remembered.
I've written before about the horrors of nuclear bombs, specifically in relation to the casually mentioned nuking of Iran. But the Iran threat just won't go away, and although less is being said about the U.S. using nuclear weapons against Iran, recent (and disturbingly ignored) statements and signals from the Bush White House suggest an attack is still "on the table."
It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheny government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power is that it is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.
But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran would turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.
On the subject of nuclear weapons, a Daily Kos frontpage post today outlined the positions of the leading Democrats running for President, based on questionaires. A more extensive treatment is available online from the Council for a Livable World.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Beginning With Mindfulness
Largely unheralded in the daily media, schools have been successfully experimenting with various methods for resolving conflicts, and preventing violence. I mention several in my original Skills of Peace article. They include such innovations as the "jigsaw" and Peace Games.
But outer peace and the interface of communication to reach it require inner work as well. The self-knowledge that allows for psychological awareness, for example. And the ability to calm the mind, to center and concentrate. The New York Times writes about one school in Oakland, California using a very ancient technique: meditation. In their case, it is derived directly from Buddhist practice. The Times story starts:
The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.
Just another Bay Area fad? Well, first of all, Oakland is not San Francisco. The school is mostly black and Latino. And more to the point, real results are in the very next paragraph, from out of a student's mouth:
I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”
The story continues: Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.
Years ago, Jon Kobat-Zinn revolutionized medicine with his program of meditation and yoga applied to the most intractable back pain patients at the University of Massachusetts. Now these efforts in schools are adapting his methods.
Like the back pain efforts, this also zeroes in on a felt need: the ability of students to concentrate. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”
It also applies to other problems students have, caused by anxieties and peer pressure. Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.
The mindfulness program didn't begin in Oakland. Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.
Teachers report mixed success, which wouldn't surprise anyone who has tried to meditate. Even those who have been meditating for many years have problems--it is a vital part of the process, which is not always obvious to the inexperienced. But the need is so great in a generation surrounded by violence, even among their peers, that even a small help constitutes progress. Above all, linking outer peace with inner change is a crucial step forward toward equipping us all with effective skills of peace.
Largely unheralded in the daily media, schools have been successfully experimenting with various methods for resolving conflicts, and preventing violence. I mention several in my original Skills of Peace article. They include such innovations as the "jigsaw" and Peace Games.
But outer peace and the interface of communication to reach it require inner work as well. The self-knowledge that allows for psychological awareness, for example. And the ability to calm the mind, to center and concentrate. The New York Times writes about one school in Oakland, California using a very ancient technique: meditation. In their case, it is derived directly from Buddhist practice. The Times story starts:
The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.
Just another Bay Area fad? Well, first of all, Oakland is not San Francisco. The school is mostly black and Latino. And more to the point, real results are in the very next paragraph, from out of a student's mouth:
I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”
The story continues: Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.
Years ago, Jon Kobat-Zinn revolutionized medicine with his program of meditation and yoga applied to the most intractable back pain patients at the University of Massachusetts. Now these efforts in schools are adapting his methods.
Like the back pain efforts, this also zeroes in on a felt need: the ability of students to concentrate. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”
It also applies to other problems students have, caused by anxieties and peer pressure. Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.
The mindfulness program didn't begin in Oakland. Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.
Teachers report mixed success, which wouldn't surprise anyone who has tried to meditate. Even those who have been meditating for many years have problems--it is a vital part of the process, which is not always obvious to the inexperienced. But the need is so great in a generation surrounded by violence, even among their peers, that even a small help constitutes progress. Above all, linking outer peace with inner change is a crucial step forward toward equipping us all with effective skills of peace.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
RFK
The anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's death comes at a dark moment of intense political polarization, in a nation roiled by an unpopular war characterized by official deceit. Many of Robert Kennedy's words on Vietnam could be dropped into the newspaper today and they would be just as relevant.
It is a time of violence in word and deed. It is a time mortal peril for this country and its institutions, the country and the institutions of which he had a deep knowledge, for which he had a deep commitment. It is a time of mortal peril for the world and its life. His son and namesake knows this--Robert Kennedy, Jr. has been and remains one of our greatest champions of our environment.
1968 was a time of political upheaval as well. In this election year it is well to remember that the revered RFK, if he were a politican today, would be criticized and castigated from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and all over the Internet. He would be charged today, as he was charged then,with opportunism, cynical and self-centered politics, and trading on his name and wealthy family.
Kennedy was himself a polarizing figure, although his words were of reconcilation. That in part was what made him polarizing. His positions on various issues did not satisfy the templates of the left or right. Yet he was the only white politician who had the passionate support and love of many blacks. He was the only political leader who spent time on Indian reservations and tiny Inuit villages as well as southern rural and white West Virgina mountain shanty towns.
He inspired passions for and passions against. People wanted to touch him, and he needed to touch others--he seemed to learn through touch. He learned through children, extending the feelings of a father to compassion for all children.
He grew up in privilege, and his early meetings with black leaders were not warm. Yet by 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, his widow asked Robert Kennedy to arrange to have his body moved from Memphis to Atlanta. His impromptu speech, passing on the news of King's assassination in a black neighborhood where he happened to be, is one of his most famous.
Kennedy's first major speech was just after King's death, and after the violent riots that torched and destroyed significant parts of many cities. In some cities, like Washington, it would be more than a decade before those areas recovered.
I could quote his Vietnam speeches, emphasizing the horror for the victims of war. But Robert Kennedy's life, and a great deal of the promise of America, was ended by an act of violence in June 1968. I remember those hours and days. The primary emotion I felt I later understood as this: loneliness. Robert Kennedy's death made this a very lonely country for me.
Robert Kennedy took on that last political fight, knowing the odds were against him, knowing that violence was in the air. He was a warrior for peace. It is important to remember even as we stand up against the cynical and cowardly violence of the rabid right, that Robert Kennedy's last crusade was this: as he said to a largely black audience in that unwritten speech on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
In his next major speech, in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 4, he said this:
"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact. The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."
It is a time of violence in word and deed. It is a time mortal peril for this country and its institutions, the country and the institutions of which he had a deep knowledge, for which he had a deep commitment. It is a time of mortal peril for the world and its life. His son and namesake knows this--Robert Kennedy, Jr. has been and remains one of our greatest champions of our environment.
1968 was a time of political upheaval as well. In this election year it is well to remember that the revered RFK, if he were a politican today, would be criticized and castigated from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and all over the Internet. He would be charged today, as he was charged then,with opportunism, cynical and self-centered politics, and trading on his name and wealthy family.
Kennedy was himself a polarizing figure, although his words were of reconcilation. That in part was what made him polarizing. His positions on various issues did not satisfy the templates of the left or right. Yet he was the only white politician who had the passionate support and love of many blacks. He was the only political leader who spent time on Indian reservations and tiny Inuit villages as well as southern rural and white West Virgina mountain shanty towns.
He inspired passions for and passions against. People wanted to touch him, and he needed to touch others--he seemed to learn through touch. He learned through children, extending the feelings of a father to compassion for all children.
He grew up in privilege, and his early meetings with black leaders were not warm. Yet by 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, his widow asked Robert Kennedy to arrange to have his body moved from Memphis to Atlanta. His impromptu speech, passing on the news of King's assassination in a black neighborhood where he happened to be, is one of his most famous.
Kennedy's first major speech was just after King's death, and after the violent riots that torched and destroyed significant parts of many cities. In some cities, like Washington, it would be more than a decade before those areas recovered.
I could quote his Vietnam speeches, emphasizing the horror for the victims of war. But Robert Kennedy's life, and a great deal of the promise of America, was ended by an act of violence in June 1968. I remember those hours and days. The primary emotion I felt I later understood as this: loneliness. Robert Kennedy's death made this a very lonely country for me.
Robert Kennedy took on that last political fight, knowing the odds were against him, knowing that violence was in the air. He was a warrior for peace. It is important to remember even as we stand up against the cynical and cowardly violence of the rabid right, that Robert Kennedy's last crusade was this: as he said to a largely black audience in that unwritten speech on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
In his next major speech, in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 4, he said this:
"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.
For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact. The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Monday, March 05, 2007
Resource: In Print
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace
Edited by Maxine Hong Kingston
Koa Books
In her book The Fifth Book of Peace (which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, and was complimented by the author for understanding it), Maxine Hong Kingston described her work with a group of Vietnam and other military veterans, combining meditation and community dialogues and activities ("singing, hugging, dancing") with writing.
This sturdy volume of more than 600 pages presents the writing of more than 80 veterans. These are personal and searingly honest accounts of both war and peace, including some uncomfortable observations on the peace movement. (Joe Lamb for example writes that he found that "the unexpected kindness and tolerance that I often encountered in the military were sometimes jarringly absent in my interactions with the civilian peace movement.")
These pieces--essays, narratives, poems and hybrids of several forms--testify to the need for comprehensive skills of peace--inner, outer and interface--for making peace in the world requires making peace within us and among us.
That Koa Books in Hawaii published this volume is especially fitting given Kingston's rapturous descriptions in the Fifth Book of Peace of her fictional character's adventures there (Sing, the protagonist of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey.) This book is essential for its eloquence, and the reality check against more theoretical and programmatic works on the themes of war and peace.
Edited by Maxine Hong Kingston
Koa Books
In her book The Fifth Book of Peace (which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, and was complimented by the author for understanding it), Maxine Hong Kingston described her work with a group of Vietnam and other military veterans, combining meditation and community dialogues and activities ("singing, hugging, dancing") with writing.
This sturdy volume of more than 600 pages presents the writing of more than 80 veterans. These are personal and searingly honest accounts of both war and peace, including some uncomfortable observations on the peace movement. (Joe Lamb for example writes that he found that "the unexpected kindness and tolerance that I often encountered in the military were sometimes jarringly absent in my interactions with the civilian peace movement.")
These pieces--essays, narratives, poems and hybrids of several forms--testify to the need for comprehensive skills of peace--inner, outer and interface--for making peace in the world requires making peace within us and among us.
That Koa Books in Hawaii published this volume is especially fitting given Kingston's rapturous descriptions in the Fifth Book of Peace of her fictional character's adventures there (Sing, the protagonist of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey.) This book is essential for its eloquence, and the reality check against more theoretical and programmatic works on the themes of war and peace.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
The End is Just the Beginning
“I grew up during the Vietnam War, but I never protested it and never had my lottery number called to go fight,” said David Quinly, a 54-year-old carpenter from Prairie Village, Kan., who arrived here Friday night with about 50 others after a 23-hour bus ride.“In my view, this one is a war of choice and a war for profit against a culture and people we don’t understand,” Mr. Quinly said. “I knew I had to speak up this time.”
That's from the New York Times report on today's antiwar demonstration in Washington, where "tens of thousands" of protestors focused on the Iraq war. From the podium, Susan Surandon said, according to the Times:
“We need to be talking not just about defunding the war but also about funding the vets,” Ms. Sarandon said, adding that more than 50,000 veterans had been injured while benefits for them continue to be cut.
The Washington Post has this quote:"When I served in the war, I thought I was serving honorably. Instead, I was sent to war ... for causes that have proved fraudulent," said Iraq war veteran Garett Reppenhagen.
Reuters reports that similiar demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco today were attended by thousands.
For those of us who were antiwar activists during Vietnam, it all has a familiar ring. What apparently we did not learn sufficiently then was that the end of a war does not mean peace. Peace is an ongoing, relentless process requiring skills, attention and care.
The Iraq war can serve to illustrate the role of the skills of peace--of inner, outer and interface skills. I hope to make that case in this space in the future.
For today, we rightly concentrate on ending this war. War is inferno that keeps growing until resources are exhausted, and with the weaponry of today, this war could rage much longer and spread much farther, and be that harder to stop before its destruction becomes overwhelming. We're already going to be paying for this for generations.
Stop the war. But even before that happens, we need to begin the peace.
“I grew up during the Vietnam War, but I never protested it and never had my lottery number called to go fight,” said David Quinly, a 54-year-old carpenter from Prairie Village, Kan., who arrived here Friday night with about 50 others after a 23-hour bus ride.“In my view, this one is a war of choice and a war for profit against a culture and people we don’t understand,” Mr. Quinly said. “I knew I had to speak up this time.”
That's from the New York Times report on today's antiwar demonstration in Washington, where "tens of thousands" of protestors focused on the Iraq war. From the podium, Susan Surandon said, according to the Times:
“We need to be talking not just about defunding the war but also about funding the vets,” Ms. Sarandon said, adding that more than 50,000 veterans had been injured while benefits for them continue to be cut.
The Washington Post has this quote:"When I served in the war, I thought I was serving honorably. Instead, I was sent to war ... for causes that have proved fraudulent," said Iraq war veteran Garett Reppenhagen.
Reuters reports that similiar demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco today were attended by thousands.
For those of us who were antiwar activists during Vietnam, it all has a familiar ring. What apparently we did not learn sufficiently then was that the end of a war does not mean peace. Peace is an ongoing, relentless process requiring skills, attention and care.
The Iraq war can serve to illustrate the role of the skills of peace--of inner, outer and interface skills. I hope to make that case in this space in the future.
For today, we rightly concentrate on ending this war. War is inferno that keeps growing until resources are exhausted, and with the weaponry of today, this war could rage much longer and spread much farther, and be that harder to stop before its destruction becomes overwhelming. We're already going to be paying for this for generations.
Stop the war. But even before that happens, we need to begin the peace.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Let's Not Be Fools
"If Dr. King could speak today he would tell us to stop this madness and bring our troops home. He would say that war is an obsolete, ineffective tool of our foreign policy. He would say that we must struggle against injustice, we must stand up for what we believe, but if peace is our goal, then peaceful ends can only be secured by peaceful means. He would say as a nation and as a people we can do better; we must do better. We must find a way to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish as fools. "
John Lewis on Martin Luther King Day.
"If Dr. King could speak today he would tell us to stop this madness and bring our troops home. He would say that war is an obsolete, ineffective tool of our foreign policy. He would say that we must struggle against injustice, we must stand up for what we believe, but if peace is our goal, then peaceful ends can only be secured by peaceful means. He would say as a nation and as a people we can do better; we must do better. We must find a way to live together as brothers and sisters or we will perish as fools. "
John Lewis on Martin Luther King Day.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
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