hope – Engaging Peace

By guest author Charikleia Tsatsaroni

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst violence.” Poverty is also a terrorist.

Poverty means threats of or actual loss of jobs, loss of pensions, loss of one’s home, loss of hope. It means living under the heavy shadow of a big national financial debt, constantly terrorized by the risk that your country will be bankrupted, fearful of reprisals if you protest austerity programs that bring no relief to poverty. After three years of austerity in Greece, freedom from such terror feels unattainable.

All these violent expressions of poverty can have serious consequences to people’s health and psychological well-being. For example, currently the Greek health care and education systems lack adequate materials and personnel, and have become more difficult to access, as well as less egalitarian. Unemployment has reached record-breaking rates.

Greek people seem increasingly distrustful. Such social distrust can sometimes take the form of violent social conflicts. For instance, racist attacks on immigrants and refugees are more common since the financial crisis, because some people consider immigrant groups and refugees to be the cause of unemployment in Greece. Also, for the first time since 1950, the infant mortality rates went up in 2012, as well as suicide rates and psychological problems (e.g., stress, panic attacks).

Poverty is a nearly global problem hurting individuals and communities well beyond the borders of my own country. For decades, many organizations around the world have tried to deal with it. Do they work together or compete or undermine each other? Where do their interests lie–with ordinary people or the power elites?

What can ordinary people do to stop this form of violence? Are there effective ways to help? Are there peaceful ways to protest against poverty and the terror it produces?

I have sought answers and inspiration in different places such as the thought-provoking films from the project “Why poverty?” that aim to inspire people to ask questions about poverty, become part of the solution, and bring positive change. More significantly, I try to remain mindful and engaged.

Charikleia Tsatsaroni, MSc., EdM., from Greece, is the former head of the Department of Human Resource Training and Development of the Greek Organization Against Drugs (OKANA), and is a member of GIPGAP.

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today we again welcome a post from guest author Dr. Dean Hammer, a psychologist and peace activist.]

In 1989, Roger Walsh (a professor of psychiatry at University of California Irvine) wrote a seminal paper entitled, Toward a Psychology of Human Survival: Psychological Approaches to Contemporary Global Threats.

Ploughshares 8, including Dean Hammer (second from left)

Walsh identified several global threats that continue to plague us today including: malnutrition, resource depletion, the ecological blight, and nuclear weapons. These threats to human survival and wellbeing “are actually symptoms of our individual and collective mind set.”

Walsh’s assessment of societal psychopathology provides a useful approach to understanding the pathology of war-making, including the fatalism and Social Darwinism that create a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuating war.

During my 35 years of peace activism, I have engaged in many conversations regarding the possibility of abolishing war. One of the most prevalent attitudes keeping people from imagining a world without war is the assumption that “there always have been wars and there always will be wars.”

This belief system is built upon a pessimistic view of human nature that sees human beings as essentially greedy and self-serving. The super-power nations, who depend on the military industrial complex as the backbone of their economies, depend on and promote this cynical view of human nature.

From a cognitive perspective, this core maladaptive assumption rejects the capacity of human beings to become altruistic and to commit ourselves to the well-being of the entire human family as a prerequisite for our individual well-being.

Therefore, an initial step in developing a revolutionary hope for our future is to promote an alternative vision of human nature that portrays humankind as having the capacity to create global peace and justice.

Dean Hammer