This logo has been designed for use in standing against hate crime. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Smith390128.
Kathie MM
Today I received the message pasted in below from a number of different groups, and I say Hooray!
Hooray that out of divisiveness can come unity, that out of hate and violence can come love and nonviolence, that out of prejudice can come tolerance and empathy.
It may be too late for you to stand up against hatred in one of these groups today but it is never to late to stand up on your own or with others on behalf of peace and social justice.
Just look at the groups listed below that are coming together today to stand up against the violence and racism demonstrated in Charlottesville, VA, yesterday–violence and racism that are increasingly wreaking devastation on our planet. If anti-hate/pro-peace and social justice groups such as these continue to flourish and work together, I believe they cannot fail while there is life on earth.
Here is the message:
“Stand in Solidarity with Charlottesville – Find an Event
Version of the “Betsy Ross” design of the first flag of the United States. In the public domain. Author: Devin Cook.
by Kathie MM
Dare you ignore him?
He was not just the first President of this country, he was a philosopher, a psychologist, a great and highly revered historical figure.
He has been called the “Father of the nation.”
He refused to run for a third term.
It’s not his birthday yet, but maybe we can honor him today by considering his message:
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.
But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.
The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual…
[S]ooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
It [the alternate domination of one faction over another] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.
It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.”
George Washington
You recognize the name. What do you think about the warning? Is it still relevant over 200 years later? if so, what are the solutions?
Children play with an electronically-driven Gatling gun aboard USS Makin Island Oct. 9, 2010. This image or file is in the public domain. Author: Marines from Arlington, VA, United States.
by Kathie MM
While my younger siblings and I were growing up, my mom wrote regular letters to her mom down in Florida about our adventures, mishaps, squabbles, reconciliations, etc.
The letter below, written by my mom on February 6, 1948, just a few years after WWII ended, strikes me as an odd harbinger of my later life as a peace activist. I am hoping for your comments.
At the time Mom wrote this letter, I was 7 and my brother Teddy was 5.
“At bath time tonight, as I collected clean clothes for the next day, I could hear Kathie and her brother playing a new game. Teddy, at one end of the tub, was America; Kathie was England at the other. A large pan was a boat that sailed back and forth carrying toys from America to the poor children in England.
Before Teddy went to bed, Kathie wanted to train him to be a soldier.
“Do all boys go to war?” she asked me.
“Most of them, if there is a war, and if there’s nothing wrong with them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if their eyes are all right and that sort of thing.”
“Gee, Teddy, “, Kathie said, “You’re lucky! You’ll be able to go to war. You’re not blind and you haven’t got a broken leg or anything.”
“I don’t want to go to war,” Teddy said. “With all those guns I might get killed.”
“Oh Teddy! You don’t understand,” Kathie replied. Then she said uncertainly to me, “Right, Mummy?”
Not understanding wars myself, my sympathies were with her brother.
We decided to make a sailor out of Teddy, so Kathie could train him whether there was a war or not.”
This interchange took place before television and computers, before the universalizing of violent images and ads for glorified weapons; yet there was “war,” apparently part of our everyday vocabulary, with all the deadly questions it raised.
Yet alongside the banality of war in our childish conversations, we played out our awareness of the “care packages” our parents sent to refugees in post-war Europe—including to Germany, which led, quite astonishingly, 20 years later, to a young German man coming to our home to thank us personally for the package we had sent to his family so long ago.
Somehow, out of this mix. my siblings and I all became anti-war advocates, but still, I fear for the future.
What did it do to our society to rear kids to take war for granted? What does it do to today’s children to have images of weapons flooding their TVs and computers? What does it do for humanity when refugees are portrayed as enemies? What does it do for survival when the poor and people of color become the new cannon fodder, and when the fruits of the earth become sacrificed to the greed of the most unscrupulous of the rich and powerful?
Children play with an electronically-driven Gatling gun aboard USS Makin Island Oct. 9, 2010. This image or file is in the public domain. Author: Marines from Arlington, VA, United States.