The painting by Picasso. The quote by Faulkner:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Guernica is not past
The painting by Picasso. The quote by Faulkner:
"The past is never dead. It's not even past.
J'Accuse!
This site is dedicated to exploring the skills that can make peace an ongoing project, a continuing and mostly successful process of solving problems and resolving conflicts without death and destruction.
But America is waging war, and so we must remind ourselves of what war means, and why developing and learning the skills of peace are so vitally important.
This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.
So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war."
One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:
"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.
War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "
Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.
"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "
So what does this mean?
"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."
Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships.
" Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "
I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!
It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."
That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!
But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.
Judt's article concludes:
" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"
That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.
But America is waging war, and so we must remind ourselves of what war means, and why developing and learning the skills of peace are so vitally important.
This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.
So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war."
One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:
"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.
War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "
Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.
"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "
So what does this mean?
"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."
Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships.
" Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "
I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!
It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."
That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!
But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.
Judt's article concludes:
" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"
That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Words Matter: Euphemisms of American Violence
On Easter Sunday in the U.S., a series of mortar attacks, suicide bombs, roadside bombs and other acts in Iraq meant to kill and maim, reportedly killed at least 50 people, including the 4,000th American soldier to be killed since the invasion of Iraq five years ago.
War cannot be looked in the face for long. That's one reason that we turn our eyes away, and allow or encourage our media to stop reporting the reality of this ongoing war. Why few paid any attention to the Winter Soldiers testimony last week, and some got angry about broadcasting these soldiers telling their stories.It is also one reason that we lie about war. Unfortunately, the ways our leaders lie about it means that needless wars, criminal wars, can be started and continued. As long as we accept the lies, and let them continue lying.
There are lots of ways to lie, and the least obvious way (the most lying way) is with euphemism. In an essay entitled "Euphemisms and American Violence" in the current New York Review of Books, David Bromwich writes that this term--euphemism--dates back to imperial Rome. He quotes Tacitus accusing certain Romans of deception and self-deception: "they create a desolation and call it peace." Bromwich explains:
The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.
Whether our leaders believe it on some level is immaterial. I'm not sure that cruelties matter to them when ideology is served, and massive profits and wealth are the products of war. The point is they use it to makes sure we believe what they say--even when we think we don't.
Bromwich quotes a passage from George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English language," which can't be quoted too much:
" Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
Bromwich then comments:
Orwell's insight was that the italicized phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. He saw a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture. The inventors of this idiom meant to suppress one kind of imagination, the kind that yields an image of things actually done or suffered; and they wanted to put in its place an imagination that trusts to the influence of larger powers behind the scenes. Totalitarianism depends on the creation of people who take satisfaction in such trust; and totalitarian minds are in part created (Orwell believed) by the ease and invisibility of euphemism."
And that's it exactly. Words that sound professional--the jargon of the military or "statesmen"--are adopted in the media. They sound precise but they are really fuzzy, and above all bloodless.
Bromwich discusses some of the Bush era's successes: the "global war on terror" which makes no literal sense, names no actual enemy, and excuses absolutely everything. He writes of their success in getting the media to adopt expressions like "contractors" for mercenary soldiers, and "abuses" for torture.They have been very successful, and not only with the corporate media. Even the progressive blogsites have bought into calling a particular form of torture "waterboarding," as if it were a form of surfing.
As Bromwich points out, "Yet 'waterboarding' itself is a euphemism for a torture that the Japanese in World War II, the French in Indochina, and the Khmer Rouge, who learned it from the French, knew simply as the drowning torture. Our American explanations have been as misleading as the word. The process is not "simulated drowning" but actual drowning that is interrupted."
There is another form of euphemism routinely used in discussing warfare and torture these days: the application of cliches that merge a certain unearned bravado with the latest fad expressions. Bromwich quotes California Member of Congress Jane Harman stringing two of them together when talking about the legalities of ordering torture: "I'm OK with it not being pretty."
This is corporate-speak, TV-speak, the lazy stringing together of buzzwords and cliches into what passes for sentences and thoughts, especially for those who hear consultants and pundits talk that way constantly, and whose idea of a complete thought is something that can be text messaged while driving.To make decisions that mean other people are going to torture and be tortured, kill and maim and be killed and mained, by saying "I'm OK with it not being pretty" is a particularly deadly form of arrogance, even if it is steeped in ignorance or self-deception. But when we let our leaders and our media get away with the euphemisms of violence, we become part of that arrogance.
If we penetrate to the truth of it all, we can make decisions based on realities. We can fight for our lives when we must, but not throw away the lives of so many in order to profit the few whose wealth is already obscene.We have fallen for one lie after another, cushioned by one set of euphemisms after another, until this nation's economy depends on making war, and on fomenting war, so that we can supply the means of making modern war: the means of killing, maiming and destroying on a massive scale.
Last month the Guardian in England reported that the American Secretary of Defense visited New Delhi to promote a $10 billion deal for the U.S. to supply jet fighters to India. With the encouragement of the U.S. (and other arms dealing nations), India has increased its military spending to nearly 19% of its budget, while it spends 1% on public health in a vast country where public health is a severe problem, and 5% on education in a vast country with widespread and severe poverty.
This is the American Way in the world. There are those who defend it according to their views of international situations and human nature. But there are many more who are willfully blind to it, partly because they feel helpless. And part of the reason for that helplessness is there is no way to talk about it, not when we have no clear language in common. When complicated and emotional subjects are further clouded and distorted by the lies enabled by euphemism.
Euphemism is the curtain, behind which the imperial wizards pull their levers, and so many lives are distorted and destroyed.
War cannot be looked in the face for long. That's one reason that we turn our eyes away, and allow or encourage our media to stop reporting the reality of this ongoing war. Why few paid any attention to the Winter Soldiers testimony last week, and some got angry about broadcasting these soldiers telling their stories.It is also one reason that we lie about war. Unfortunately, the ways our leaders lie about it means that needless wars, criminal wars, can be started and continued. As long as we accept the lies, and let them continue lying.
There are lots of ways to lie, and the least obvious way (the most lying way) is with euphemism. In an essay entitled "Euphemisms and American Violence" in the current New York Review of Books, David Bromwich writes that this term--euphemism--dates back to imperial Rome. He quotes Tacitus accusing certain Romans of deception and self-deception: "they create a desolation and call it peace." Bromwich explains:
The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.
Whether our leaders believe it on some level is immaterial. I'm not sure that cruelties matter to them when ideology is served, and massive profits and wealth are the products of war. The point is they use it to makes sure we believe what they say--even when we think we don't.
Bromwich quotes a passage from George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English language," which can't be quoted too much:
" Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
Bromwich then comments:
Orwell's insight was that the italicized phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. He saw a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture. The inventors of this idiom meant to suppress one kind of imagination, the kind that yields an image of things actually done or suffered; and they wanted to put in its place an imagination that trusts to the influence of larger powers behind the scenes. Totalitarianism depends on the creation of people who take satisfaction in such trust; and totalitarian minds are in part created (Orwell believed) by the ease and invisibility of euphemism."
And that's it exactly. Words that sound professional--the jargon of the military or "statesmen"--are adopted in the media. They sound precise but they are really fuzzy, and above all bloodless.
Bromwich discusses some of the Bush era's successes: the "global war on terror" which makes no literal sense, names no actual enemy, and excuses absolutely everything. He writes of their success in getting the media to adopt expressions like "contractors" for mercenary soldiers, and "abuses" for torture.They have been very successful, and not only with the corporate media. Even the progressive blogsites have bought into calling a particular form of torture "waterboarding," as if it were a form of surfing.
As Bromwich points out, "Yet 'waterboarding' itself is a euphemism for a torture that the Japanese in World War II, the French in Indochina, and the Khmer Rouge, who learned it from the French, knew simply as the drowning torture. Our American explanations have been as misleading as the word. The process is not "simulated drowning" but actual drowning that is interrupted."
There is another form of euphemism routinely used in discussing warfare and torture these days: the application of cliches that merge a certain unearned bravado with the latest fad expressions. Bromwich quotes California Member of Congress Jane Harman stringing two of them together when talking about the legalities of ordering torture: "I'm OK with it not being pretty."
This is corporate-speak, TV-speak, the lazy stringing together of buzzwords and cliches into what passes for sentences and thoughts, especially for those who hear consultants and pundits talk that way constantly, and whose idea of a complete thought is something that can be text messaged while driving.To make decisions that mean other people are going to torture and be tortured, kill and maim and be killed and mained, by saying "I'm OK with it not being pretty" is a particularly deadly form of arrogance, even if it is steeped in ignorance or self-deception. But when we let our leaders and our media get away with the euphemisms of violence, we become part of that arrogance.
If we penetrate to the truth of it all, we can make decisions based on realities. We can fight for our lives when we must, but not throw away the lives of so many in order to profit the few whose wealth is already obscene.We have fallen for one lie after another, cushioned by one set of euphemisms after another, until this nation's economy depends on making war, and on fomenting war, so that we can supply the means of making modern war: the means of killing, maiming and destroying on a massive scale.
Last month the Guardian in England reported that the American Secretary of Defense visited New Delhi to promote a $10 billion deal for the U.S. to supply jet fighters to India. With the encouragement of the U.S. (and other arms dealing nations), India has increased its military spending to nearly 19% of its budget, while it spends 1% on public health in a vast country where public health is a severe problem, and 5% on education in a vast country with widespread and severe poverty.
This is the American Way in the world. There are those who defend it according to their views of international situations and human nature. But there are many more who are willfully blind to it, partly because they feel helpless. And part of the reason for that helplessness is there is no way to talk about it, not when we have no clear language in common. When complicated and emotional subjects are further clouded and distorted by the lies enabled by euphemism.
Euphemism is the curtain, behind which the imperial wizards pull their levers, and so many lives are distorted and destroyed.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Happy Birthday
The Peace Symbol is 50 years old today. It was designed and completed February 21, 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist in Britain for the Easter march planned by DAC from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England.
This is a living peace symbol, assembled in Budapest in 2006.
Monday, February 04, 2008
A Transformational Moment
As I write this, America is hours away from what is likely to be an historic, even an amazing day. Twenty-two states will hold Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, so for the first time in American history, millions of people will be voting for an African American or a woman as the party's nominee for President.
That men of all races, ages and classes will vote for a woman, and that people of all races will vote for an African American, is already a giant step towards the kind of change required for a world in which peaceful means become the default method for solving problems and disputes.
But what excites me, and frankly amazes me, is the opportunity this nation, and this world now has in Barack Obama. He is a transformational leader. He and his wife Michelle and his campaign are talking in ways that this country has never heard before.
Obama spoke at Dr. Martin Luther King's church about the national deficit--but not the budget deficit or the trade deficit. "I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."
Michelle Obama spoke about it as a change of soul. When has a presidential candidate talked so much about the inner change necessary to create outer change? Empathy is a a matter of the individual heart, supported by community and social structures. Now we're hearing a potential President supporting it, calling it forth.
It is manifested in the outer world in cooperation, altruism and the working knowledge that we are all in this together, which requires social justice and communication. Obama talks about how there is more than unites us than divides us. He talks about bringing people together to solve problems. He speaks of his comittment to principles of social justice and equality. He speaks of shared responsibility, and calls upon everyone to join in these endeavors.
In terms of the outer world politically, he calls for diplomacy first, and for America to take its place again in the community of nations. As an African American who has lived in the Third World, he begins with a new credibility, and embodies a new image of America. Much of the world is watching this election with great interest.
Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq from before it started. He will end it, and he will not repeat the abomination of making war as an instrument of policy.
He is the most compelling communicator in a generation. And this is what is perhaps even more amazing--the response to his message has been overwhelming. The enthusiasm among young people in particular has doubled the number of voters in early primaries and caucuses. He has won major endorsements and support from more than 100 newspapers across the country.
"Yes, we can!" is the mantra of his campaign, an affirmation with its own renewing power.
I frankly did not think I would ever see a transformational leader like this. Someone who understands what I've called "the skills of peace" and can communicate and touch so many people. As President, he could be the transformational leader I've frankly not even allowed myself to dream would emerge.
I'm voting for Barack Obama in the California primary tomorrow. It may be the most meaningful vote I've ever cast.
That men of all races, ages and classes will vote for a woman, and that people of all races will vote for an African American, is already a giant step towards the kind of change required for a world in which peaceful means become the default method for solving problems and disputes.
But what excites me, and frankly amazes me, is the opportunity this nation, and this world now has in Barack Obama. He is a transformational leader. He and his wife Michelle and his campaign are talking in ways that this country has never heard before.
Obama spoke at Dr. Martin Luther King's church about the national deficit--but not the budget deficit or the trade deficit. "I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."
Michelle Obama spoke about it as a change of soul. When has a presidential candidate talked so much about the inner change necessary to create outer change? Empathy is a a matter of the individual heart, supported by community and social structures. Now we're hearing a potential President supporting it, calling it forth.
It is manifested in the outer world in cooperation, altruism and the working knowledge that we are all in this together, which requires social justice and communication. Obama talks about how there is more than unites us than divides us. He talks about bringing people together to solve problems. He speaks of his comittment to principles of social justice and equality. He speaks of shared responsibility, and calls upon everyone to join in these endeavors.
In terms of the outer world politically, he calls for diplomacy first, and for America to take its place again in the community of nations. As an African American who has lived in the Third World, he begins with a new credibility, and embodies a new image of America. Much of the world is watching this election with great interest.
Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq from before it started. He will end it, and he will not repeat the abomination of making war as an instrument of policy.
He is the most compelling communicator in a generation. And this is what is perhaps even more amazing--the response to his message has been overwhelming. The enthusiasm among young people in particular has doubled the number of voters in early primaries and caucuses. He has won major endorsements and support from more than 100 newspapers across the country.
"Yes, we can!" is the mantra of his campaign, an affirmation with its own renewing power.
I frankly did not think I would ever see a transformational leader like this. Someone who understands what I've called "the skills of peace" and can communicate and touch so many people. As President, he could be the transformational leader I've frankly not even allowed myself to dream would emerge.
I'm voting for Barack Obama in the California primary tomorrow. It may be the most meaningful vote I've ever cast.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Inner, Outer, Interface: New Ideas
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.
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.
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.
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