Fear, anger, discouragement, and a sense of helplessness are running rampant in this country today, and they have been charging towards this sorry state for generations.
But as pointed out in our recent series of posts , there are thousands of individuals around the world working actively on behalf of peace and justice. Most started out pretty much as ordinary people, but they saw injustice and oppression and cruelty and had to act, no matter how big and frightening and indomitable the Big Brothers appeared to be.
You may be closer to belonging in their ranks than you realize.
Just think of the following:
Did you ever, as a kid, stick up for some other kid who was being bullied?
Did you ever try to be nice or include in activities some kid who was shy or shunned by others?
Did you ever, as a child, try to enlist the help of an adult to stop bullying or harassment ?
Did you ever, as a parent. confront a teacher or a principal or some other adult because you thought your kid or some other kid was being bullied or mistreated?
Did you ever, as a parent, take time to help your children understand prejudice, injustice?
Did you ever attend a school board or town meeting because you believed something harmful was going to happen to people in your town if particular policies or procedures were enacted?
Did you ever call upon family members or friends to join with you to protest something harmful to people or the environment that a city council or state senate or big corporation was trying to promote?
Have you ever signed petitions or written to politicians, or participated in rallies against injustices?
Have you ever voted for a new politicalcandidate because you did not like what the incumbent was doing?
If you have done any of these or similar actions, tell us about them — and recognize that you’ve been a protestor on behalf of justice. Keep it up. People all over the world are taking actions such as those and achieving successes. But that’s a subject for another post.
By Anthony J. Marsella and Kathleen Malley-Morrison
Note from Kathie MM: Enjoy this culmination of the quest in which we have engaged the past two weeks to identify 100 examples of peace and justice leaders, illustrated with enticing and enlightening new charts.
Introduction
26 Jan 2018 – The annual memorial holiday on January 15, 2018, celebrating Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s enduring contributions to peace and justice, has passed.
The events of the day linger in our minds, eternally grateful for Reverend King’s efforts to free people and nations from the brutal oppressions imposed by governments, nations, societies, organizations, and individuals, who willfully continue to support and sustain the evils of racism, prejudice, violence, and war.
Reverend King’s commitment to freedom from oppression and abuse compel us to continue his efforts far beyond the words, songs, and promises of his day.
To this end, we, (i.e., Kathie Malley-Morrison & Anthony J. Marsella), the authors of this article, have chosen to demonstrate our responsibilities to continuing the work of Reverend King, by identifying 100 living peace and social justice leaders and models.
The number is arbitrary for there are tens of thousands more who deserve citation. Many are not listed, but will be listed in future efforts. Do not be dismayed! Patience! We believed it essential to create a dynamic list of living peace and justice activists and advocates to encourage peace and justice work.
The individuals included on our list are from all genders, ages, roles. They are from many nations, ethnocultural groups, and “races.” We sense a rising tide of commitment to peace and justice, and an intolerance of the corruption, cronyism, and asymmetric power sustaining current abuses.
We consider our efforts a beginning, and we will continue to publish new lists. This is because the struggle for peace and justice is endless, and each day new people are rising to the call.
This is as it should be, and must be, until such time the forces of oppression yield to the forces of good; evil will continue, but human virtue, endowed in conscience will triumph! While the work of many included will be recognized, some of those listed may not be apparent. We have attached website information after each name to offer insight into their efforts.
Before sharing our list, however, we wish to include two charts offering graphic displays of essential material for understanding and appreciating living leaders.
CHART 1: PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PEACE AND JUSTICE LEADERS AND MODELS
CHART 2: ROLES AND STATUSES OF LIVING PEACE & JUSTICE LEADERS AND MODELS
TABLE 1:
One Hundred Living Peace and Justice Activists, Advocates, Models
This is our continuing contribution to the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. His work continues in the lives of those who share his commitments.
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Kathleen Malley-Morrison, Ed.D., Director of the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP), is Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. She is the author or coauthor of several books, including Family Violence in a Cultural Perspective, and Family Violence in the United States, as well as editor of the four volume series: State violence and the right to peace: An international survey of the views of ordinary people. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on violence within relationships and nations. Her current efforts to advance peace and social justice are centered primarily in her blog, Engaging Peace. http://engagingpeace.com. She can be reached at: kathiemm@engagingpeace.com
Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 21 books and more than 300 articles, tech reports, and popular commentaries. His TMS articles may be accessedHERE and he can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
“Do we want to preserve the traditions – the history, prayers, rituals, and faith – which make Judaism distinctive, or do we want to become just a bunch of ethicists?” An ethicist advocates virtue, and the rabbi’s question was rhetorical. Now stay with me here; this is not complex.
Sabbath is the Hebrew holy day, beginning on Friday evening and extending through Saturday. Satori is a Japanese Buddhist word for enlightenment. One Saturday morning long ago, when I was still a child and attending a religious instruction class at our local temple, I had a mini-enlightenment.
I was only 12, and I found the Sabbath morning class inspirational. It was intellectually stimulating in a way that school was not. That morning, the rabbi’s question struck a chord. The name of that chord is irony. A Jewish education is ironic because, at its best, it’s Socratic: it teaches one to doubt and inquire. The same is true of Buddhism.
I was too shy to voice my response to the rabbi’s challenge; besides, he was on a roll. But I have always remembered that moment. Adding a retrospective flavor, here’s what I thought:
Although my mother was a Christian, she converted to Judaism to please my father. During the process of her conversion, my mother asked the rabbi if there was a conflict in being both Christian and Jewish. She wanted to convert, but she also wanted to keep her Christian values.
The rabbi responded that ethics is the heart of the Torah; therefore, at the deepest, most important level, there is no conflict. He told the story of the Hebrew sage who was asked to summarize the Torah, standing on one leg. So the sage stood on one leg and replied very simply: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
And so, dear rabbi, on this glorious Sabbath morning for which I do give thanks, kindly allow me to say: I would much rather have a world of ethicists, committed to peace and the Golden Rule, than a world of religious rivalry and strife. Religious distinctiveness has its beauty, but it also contributes, tragically, to what Hegel calls “the slaughter-bench of history.”
I would, therefore, gladly abandon all religious difference in favor of – and here comes irony again – a postreligious world committed to what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness.”
After all, isn’t what all religions have in common more important than how they differ?
And at the heart of all religions, is there not a common urge, prayer, and path to the Peaceable Kingdom on earth?
Note from Kathie MM: Abby Zimet, from Common Dreams (an online real news site to which you should subscribe only if you want more honesty, more courage, more speaking of truth to power in your news stories), tells it like it is. School shootings, mass murders, are becoming so common in our society that they barely make a ripple in the news. So, you have to ask yourselves–are you going to continue to vote for politicians owned by the NRA? Are you going to let the NRA scare you into thinking that violence stops violence rather than begetting violence?
Please read this article by Abby Zimet and act to end gun violence.
Another one. This time on Tuesday in Benton, Kentucky. Two teenagers killed, 18 injured – three shot in the head, and in critical condition. So much ghastly same old same old: Small close-knit town, people shocked and grieving, good kids and “sweet souls” who will be missed, police still searching for a reason for a 15-year-old to open fire, residents coming together in their pain to plan prayer vigils, politicians sending – yes, really – more thoughts and prayers. It was the 11th school shooting of the year, and it’s still January. It was barely a blip in the heedless news.
Maybe because the day before the Benton shooting at Marshall County High School, there was a shooting at Italy High School in Texas. Or because, the same day, someone in a pickup shot at a group of students in New Orleans. Or because, also on Tuesday, there were at least 81 other shootings around the country; they killed 28 more people and wounded 40 more. Or because, in the gruesome new normal, a quarter of U.S. parents fear for their children’s safety while they’re at school, which, by all grim accounts, they should. Or because, in the bloody wake of Benton, local pols could only talk up armed guards, not gun control, which would “politicize” the horror, and the NRA-backed Enabler-In-Chief had to be shamed before he even offered his own crappy bogus thoughts and prayers.
Moms and other gun control advocates are still demanding action. What, we wonder, will it take, besides Preston Cope and Bailey Holt? We need to say their names. “In our time,” writes Sandy Solomon in her “Little Letter to the Future”, published in Vox Populi, “we reckoned our dead in firearms” and “grew ill/from (our) excuses for poor, innocent guns.” In the end, she writes, “About death,/ you know. We knew too much.”
Little letter from the future
In our time we reckoned our dead in firearms—
handguns, rifles, automatic weapons;
in much-parsed constitutional clauses;
in politicians bought by lobbyists
and salesmen. In our time, we objected
most of us, but we couldn’t stop those guns.
They squatted beside the desperate, the guy
who craved suicide; they incited
wild-eyed murder, mass murder.
In our time, we just hoped we wouldn’t
be unlucky, that a sick boy toting
what we called an AR-15-style
Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle,
wouldn’t burst into another first-grade
classroom where our kids studied addition,
subtraction; or into another night club
where we celebrated Saturday night;
we just hoped that a stray bullet wouldn’t
cross Central Park to reach the shady
bench on which we sat talking with a friend,
that no cop would imagine our hand reaching
for a pistol instead of a wallet or a phone.
We had to calibrate for guns. And those
with darker skin had to calibrate
more (no talking back, no attitude,
no running away, no looking tough or strange
or hard, no looking like yourself most days).
We knew the slogans: people, not guns,
kill people, a gun in the hands of a good
guy trumps a gun in the hands of a bad
guy, and on and on. We grew ill
from those excuses for poor, innocent guns.
They were everywhere—inside the jacket
of a man at the next table, in the glove compartment
of the car beside us at the light. Ubiquitous
and lethal, they entered our wild logic
awake or asleep. In those days, we let
our toddlers discover a parent’s gun, safety
off, badly hidden under a pillow
or jammed, for our own protection, inside a bag
under a restaurant table, and when our sweet,
curious children wrapped their little fingers
around the gun’s shape so they could gaze
into its empty maw, while we looked
away or dozed, we let them pull the trigger,
we let them kill themselves. About death,
you know. We knew too much.