Disaster Opens the World’s Heart

As I write, the world is pouring out its heart to the survivors of the Haiti earthquake.  I watch, stunned at the magnitude of the devastation and awed by the magnitude of the generosity this tragedy has elicited. Something about natural disasters brings out the best in people. Perhaps this is because we would want others to treat us with compassion were we the ones in desperate need.

Having

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A Big Change is Coming When I created this blog in April 2008, I announced my intention to publish regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays. I have lived up to this commitment over the past year. Together, my guest bloggers and I have produced over one hundred blogs about peace. My vision of peace was, and is, one of possibility, of what could exist on this planet, if enough people chose it consciously: a world filled with joy, fun, abundance, a world that worked for everyone. This would be a world where violence would become less and less relevant. War would gradually disappear as human beings began to shift their thinking, their listening and their speaking about peace, war and armed violence.  What they intended with the full force of their will, would come to pass.

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The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life.  by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA. 2009 The Three Laws of Performance is not the kind of book I usually review on this blog. Written for an audience committed to improving the performance of business organizations, it might be hard to see what this book has to do with creating a peaceful world. I have also written about transformational peacemaking and shifting the conversation about peace and violence in the world. The ideas outlined in this book, though oriented toward the business community, are eminently transferable to the larger challenge of creating change in the international geopolitical arena where war, terrorism and genocide take place.

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Need for Enemies Keeps War in Place Why do we love war so much? I have struggled to understand war most of my life.  If something  was so horrific you would think human beings would stop doing it, but we keep going back for more. I keep returning to the issue of enemy for without an enemy wars would not take place at all. What is it about us that we have to have an enemy? Does this start with monsters under the bed in childhood? As we grow up  we divide the world into good guys and bad guys, the ones who are with us and against us.

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From Celebration to Discord Watching the nation’s legislators slug it out over the stimulus package in Washington D.C. the past week has been painful.  In the end they will cobble something together but it will not be a bill that will do what needs to be done to get Americans working again. Obama’s election and inauguration were one of the highest points of celebration this nation has ever seen. Now we have descended into fighting.  What is going on? Lessons from My Own Life So I step back and ask myself, “What’s this about?”  I only begin to get it when I  look at my own life.  I have been working incredibly hard at two jobs while I also write a blog about peace, the passion of my life, and try to nurture a business in the free hours I have left.  I notice that things in my life are breaking down: my car, my computer, my health.

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Great Op-Ed NYT piece Opens New Ground for Diplomacy A groundbreaking op-ed piece “How Words Could End a War” by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges” appeared in the New York Times last week.  For years  I have observed how geo-politicians ignore the way human beings think, feel and behave in the real world.  It’s no wonder that diplomats and political leaders fail to achieve permanent peace. Research Into Moral Values Under I/P Conflict Atran and Ginges’ article, based on some fascinating academic research, validates for the first time that both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more concerned with deep moral values than they are with accepting compromises based on self-interest.  They note that:  “Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters . . . will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues.

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Lies of the Mind are Universal Lies of the mind are universal. When a group shares a thinking error it becomes part of the national narrative and is often unchallenged. People who engage in behaviors that support the lie believe they are good, upstanding citizens. Only when the thinking and its behaviors, is repeatedly questioned, does the house of cards collapse. Heyday of Bombing in WW II The idea that one could wipe out one’s enemies probably started in World War II with the heavy bombing of German cities and the use of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unbelievable destructiveness of this bombing resulted in the unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan.

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 The Unfulfilled Longing for Peace I invite you to take a journey with me today.  I want to explore the experience of completion and how this phenomenon could be applied to war. The longing for peace is so deep in human beings and yet, despite ourselves, we revert to armed conflict again and again to try to solve problems with others.  Our cherished visions of peace recede and never seem to come to pass.   Why is peace so seemingly impossible to achieve? What gets in the way?  The Experience of Completion Recently I was reviewing relationships in my life that have healed after long discord.  I call this state of being at peace with someone being complete.  When I am complete a quiet space opens.   After a time I find myself creating a new way of being with that person I disliked before.  It amazes me.  I use the word complete in a special way here.  When I look at a particular relationship or conflict,  I ask myself if there is anything left to say.  Do I still want to argue, defend, criticize, mourn, condemn?  If I feel at peace, I know I am complete. I once heard this described as having “no wood left to burn.” Fascination with the Holocaust is Never Over Over the holidays many new movies appeared with Holocaust themes.  Filmmakers apparently love to mine the Holocaust, especially when Oscar season is coming.  It is as if this last good war and its horrors is still alive, even though it ended sixty years ago.  Many people also see echoes of that war in the endless cycling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What if We Chose to Get Complete with the WWII?

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Passionate Cry From the Heart In a passionate cri de coeur in the Huffington Post, Eve Ensler and Stephen Lewis have drawn our attention to rampant use of rape in the escalation of the ongoing conflict in the DRC (Congo).   We have heard about the hundreds of thousands (mostly women) fleeing the fighting  there.  We have not heard, until now, the reason so many are running-to escape rape. The level of sexual violence there is so extreme that Ensler and Lewis  are calling it femicide.                                                                                                                                                                               Rape as War Strategy There’s nothing new about rape in war which has been  going on since the beginning of time. What is different now is the use of rape as strategy, it’s deliberate employment, along with the use of guns and by armed men, to achieve their goals in warfare.  Consider the impulse to attack, to hurt other people or to make them pay for perceived injustices. How can one  inflict injury?             Physical assault             Knives/spears/swords             Burning/fires             Rape/sexual violence/enslavement             Guns/grenades/rocket launchers             Bombs/landmines/nuclear bombs             Verbal violence Rape Is Easy and Convenient A lot of these methods require that you take a huge risk to your own safety or they may require great skill in their use.

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Laughing as They Killed“ “They laughed as they killed,” read some reports from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I have been unable to verify these accounts but I tend to believe them.  Why do humans behave like this? Two vital questions beg to be examined: 1. Why are so many young people so easily engaged swept up into terrorism such that they become mass killers? 2. What will it take to eradicate terrorism and create a safer world?

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