Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.
You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.
And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.
Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.
So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.
Be not afraid! You are not alone! There are thousands of advocates and activists across the world who are bringing conscience to the struggle for peace and justice. They are willing to endure the dangers of speaking for peace and justice, wherever human and legal rights are violated by people in power.
In the face of abuses and oppression, we recall the iconic peace and justice leaders of the past, including Mohatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Samuel Gompers, Caesar Chavez, Larry Itliong, Rachel Corrie, Philip & Daniel Berrigan, Glenn Paige, Hedy Epstein, and Malcom X. Peace advocates like these are testimony to the enduring human quest to resist oppression and to claim liberty, even when the cost is life itself.
This is the second list of living peace and justice advocates and activists we have compiled and published to celebrate Reverend Martin Luther King’s enduring contributions to peace and justice.
We are eternally grateful for Rev King’s efforts to free people and nations from the brutal oppressions of governments, nations, societies, organizations, and individuals who support racism, prejudice, violence, and war.
We have chosen to demonstrate our responsibilities and commitment to Rev King by identifying another 100 living peace and social justice leaders and models, starting with 50 new names. You will recognize many of the names, while others have not yet received the attention they deserve.
Please help us make the lists grow. The list will include emerging local community activists as well as some who have already attracted media attention. Although our current lists include mostly journalists and academics, we welcome people from other disciplines. Please use the comment section at the end of this post to nominate a wider range of peace and justice activists.
“Fascism ought more rightly to be called corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”
Benito Mussolini
“That’s how wars start. Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.”
Karl Kraus
“America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”
Mark Twain
To manipulate, ignorate, stupefy, distort and deceive – such is the primary function of America’s mainstream news media, political establishment, and compulsory system of miseducation. George Carlin declared: “That’s why they call it the American dream. You have to be asleep to believe it.”
The Weapons of Mass Dysfunction employed by the national security state and corporate elite have also infected America’s colleges and universities. How else to explain the explosion of high-paid bureaucrats, the implosion of student minds, a 50% faculty of adjunct teachers with slave-labor wages, the astronomical rise in tuition, collective student debt now more than a trillion dollars, and the graduated lunatics who assume positions of political power?
Gore Vidal once observed that in the United States of Amnesia, “words are used to confuse so that citizens vote against their own best interest.”
Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.”
Noam Chomsky adds the koan-like conclusion: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.”
Did I use the verb “ignorate” in my opening sentence? Yes indeed. We have the word “educate.” Why not “ignorate” – especially if it names the fundamental rot at the core of American politics and culture?
Of course, not all graduates are historically illiterate and ethically warped. Great teachers, informed writers, astute students, ethical businessmen and women, brilliant artists, morally authentic political activists and office holders – they are by no means absent in American society.
From William James and Mark Twain to I. F. Stone and Martin Luther King; from Mother Jones and Emma Goldman to Hellen Keller and Dorothy Day; from Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo and James Baldwin; from Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan – the United States has always had its politically enlightened rebels. Of course, they don’t agree on everything. But they are independent thinkers, and they do follow in the footsteps of Thomas Paine.
Nevertheless, their ideas are mostly drowned-out by the blizzard of epistemological confetti blown relentlessly at the American populace by mainstream news, ubiquitous advertising, and pseudo-“conservative” talk radio. Result? An American economic apartheid more egregious than the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression and World War Two.
What is to be done?
In addition to dismantling the American empire – the largest empire in world history, with a thousand military bases scattered across the globe – we can start by integrating “ignorate” into our educational and collective vocabulary, as a way of diagnosing the linguistic poison that more or less began with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was perfected and championed by Newt Gingrich, and climaxed in George W. Bush and Donald Trump, generating the divisive sophistry that went unchallenged and was silently sanctioned by Republican Lite (i.e., the almost equally soulless Democratic Party).
In addition to “ignorate,” we also need to employ the word “interbeing.”
Interbeing names the socially relevant discovery of quantum physics: All things are thing-events, and all thing-events are interconnected, interdependent, interpenetrating. To be is to interbe.
This was illustrated by Chief Seattle when he said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”
Interbeing was also long ago affirmed by Socrates, Jesus and Buddha when they said that what we do to others we do to ourselves. Hence they recommended a pragmatic path to the Peaceable Kingdom by the individual and collective practice of the Golden Rule at the heart of the Torah: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
If we commit to moving in that direction, we could inaugurate an educational and political revolution that would light the world.
Bio: A graduate of Dickinson College, guest author Stefan Schindler taught philosophy, psychology and religion for 40 years at institutions of higher learning, including The University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Berklee College of Music, and the Boston and Brookline Centers for Adult Education. Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.
Coming from a middle class family, I had to learn about what Gandhi called the worst kind of violence: poverty.
Men and women on the streets struggling with addictions or homelessness needed someone to hear their stories and not judge them. I found I could offer kindness and compassion without becoming a victim myself.
Working at STEP, a treatment on demand facility with staff members and clients coming out of prison, reinforced my connection to my brothers and sisters.
Over the years, I have taught a mediation course at a local college and organized and developed a volunteer program at the homeless shelter, Rosie’s Place. I also supervised students from nine schools in the Boston area who set forth emboldened in the quest to show that there are alternatives to violence even in an unjust society.
While at the Peace Abbey, I met and greeted peacemakers from all over the world. I had the honor of presenting Rosa Parks with the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, giving a big hug to Joan Baez, sitting with Maya Angelou, and traveling to South Africa with the Mandela Award. More recently, I participated in giving a Courage of Conscience Award to the Benebikira Sisters of Rwanda (http://engagingpeace.com/?p=1155).
I have found that in every situation someone shows up who can help us find the courage to begin again, to rise above the dark clouds and find the rainbow. This was true even in the closing of the Peace Abbey, a sanctuary of peace not only for me but for countless others.
Before long, I was introduced by friends to storytelling and writing and began telling prison and other stories from my life’s journey. In a world with much violence, we do well to remember the words of Gene Knudsen Hoffman (1919-2010), “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.”
This story-telling venture led to the “Oneness and Wellness” program I am currently hosting for Dedham Cable TV, sharing the stories of guests who seek to make this world a better place for all.
