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.
Stone memorial to civilians killed in war. Courtesy of the Peace Abbey.
by Kathie MM
In a chart in a recent post entitled 100 Living Peace and Justice Leaders, the characteristics attributed to peace and justice leaders and models included:
nonviolence,
inspiration,
tolerating struggle,
empathy & compassion,
integrity,
courage,
and a purpose-driven life.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, 2018, I want to honor one man who exemplifies all those characteristics: Lewis Randa, founder of the Life Experience School and the Peace Abbey
Here are brief examples of each of those characteristics in Lewis’s life:
Nonviolence: Lewis explains, “Martin Luther King said, ‘If you haven’t found something worth dying for you’re not fit to live.’ Nonviolence is something I’d be willing to die for. I don’t torture myself over whether I’ve done a good job or bad job.” (verdict:superb job)
Inspiration: From the founding of The Life Experience School for special needs children and young adults in 1972 (his alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) to his current nonviolent resistance to any governmental move to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Lewis has inspired multitudes.
Tolerating struggle: The nonviolent civil resistance in which Lewis has engaged his entire life has consistently demanded tolerating struggle; add to that his engagement in the stone walk— the project involving hauling a one-ton granite stone memorializing civilians 500 miles in the US, many miles in Ireland, and then later, under the able leadership of Dot Walsh, substantial distances in Japan and Korea.
Empathy & compassion: Because of empathy and compassion for all living creatures, Lewis is a vegetarian—as is the rest of his family — and a proponent of animal rights (You just have to read Emily the cow’s story!)
In Buddha’s worldview, “each life is precious, endowed with freedom and opportunity.” The Buddhist social democratic path to peace offers widespread time and place for deconditioning.
Buddha says the institutions of society ought to serve schools, not the other way around.
Buddha’s politics entail an educational revolution, inspired by Whitehead’s maxim: “Boring teachers should be brought to trial for the murder of young souls.”
The heart of Buddhism is the fusion of wisdom and compassion: the enlightenment adventure, individually and socially. This includes reverence for language, and constant cultivation of the critical thinking skills necessary to combat sophistry in all its nefarious forms.
Buddha understood the perverse impact of sophistry on the welfare of the multitude. Socrates did too, saying at his trial that, actually, Athens was on trial. Socrates today would say King’s quaternity includes a fifth: “Wealth, poverty, racism, war, and sophistry always go together; and we cannot solve one without solving the others.”
As political discourse becomes just another form of the curse of advertising, the more a society sinks to what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of all against all.”
Socrates was condemned to death for his battle against the sophists. In modern America, the brightest lights of two generations – John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon – were assassinated.
A national pedagogy of Socratic-Buddhist insight – with beneficent influence on the world – could slow contemporary America’s repeat of the self-engendered social implosion of classical Athens’ march of folly.
All the wars in the world are sophistically engendered, sustained by citizens seduced by schools and news-media that ignorate instead of edify.
Buddha’s emphasis on respect for language – and for knowing relevant information – is part of his therapeutic approach to healing the world’s woes. “Right speech” is another spoke on Buddha’s eightfold Dharmachakra.
Buddha’s political vision is heart-centered rationality, where the power of the state and all social institutions promote communal well-being. Communal well-being includes each individual’s freedom for self-discovery and creative evolution. Buddha’s politics are educational, pragmatic, organic. A community is a web of life.
The word Buddha means awake. Buddhist social democracy neither intends nor promotes religious conversion.
Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, daily declares he is a socialist, while saying also that the point is not to become a Buddhist but awake. He urges “a common religion of kindness.”
Buddhist social democracy blends holistic education, egalitarian economics, and a culture-wide primacy of cooperation over competition. Pope Francis – igniting a Renaissance humanism to redeem our spirit – echoes the Dalai Lama’s call to awakening.
If humans are walking question marks – and if philosophy is the journey from the love of wisdom to the wisdom of love – then this is what Buddhism teaches, and what the sangha practices.
Groucho Marx said: “Blessed are the cracked, for they will let in the light.”
Now here’s a Kenneth Patchen poem.
The scene of the crime which is also known as civilized living.
Until the Sun’s Wound is healed in our own hearts.
Love (which includes poetry) is to science
as the free and beautiful catchings of a child are
to the vile and unreturning throes of the hangman.
A feeling of passionate mercy. The rest doesn’t matter a damn!
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. . . . A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games of amusement and amusements of mankind. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Jul 12, 1817-May 6, 1862 Walden (Aug 9, 1854)
Introduction
12 Jul 2017 – I call upon the timeless words of Henry David Thoreau, a 19th Century student of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1889-1888), to open this article on the critical consequences of the socio-cultural context for human health and well-being. It is, perhaps, coincidental today is Thoreau’s birthday; his 200th year anniversary, a reminder of the enduring power of great thoughts and words. Guide me, Sir!
I offer only a few lines of Thoreau’s words as an epigram, insufficient to honor the timelessness of his thoughts, but perhaps sufficient to acknowledge his special sensitivities to the human condition of his age and our age. Thoreau’s entire works deserve reading. The unfolding industrial age in which he lived, was the source of problems paralleling the problems of our unfolding socio-technical age.
I can think of no better guide to justify the thoughts and words of this article. In so many ways, we have forgotten the tragic consequences of the psycho-social contexts of life for the human condition; we have become infatuated with “reductionism,” a wondrous gift of technological progress, but a distraction from the realities of human nature.
No one can deny the sheer wonder and glory of our growing knowledge of the CNS, brain, organs, and genetics. Yet, the magnificence of our knowledge must not detract from our understanding the socio-environmental determinants of our life milieu. Political powers, controlling funding have called for various national initiatives: “Decade of the Brain.” Similar initiatives for increasing awareness of psychosocial topics have too hidden agendas (see documentary: America’s War on Drugs) directed toward arms deals, racial oppression, and disguised foreign relations policies.
Psychosocial Contexts
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), one of psychology’s great thinkers, contended behavior is a function of the interaction of organism and environment (B = O x E). It is the interaction of an organism and its milieu which generates behavior, and the problems of disease and disorder. Nothing exists apart from its inner and outer singular milieu. Although physicists may disagree, nothing exists in a vacuum! Life is connections.
As we become increasingly, and deservedly, awed by reductionist discoveries and revelations, and as we seek insights, answers, and solutions to major human problems within reductionist levels, we are failing to address and resolve the challenges of the psychosocial context of our lives. The psychosocial context is the life context in the behavior equation. The psychosocial context has critical implications and consequences for health and well being. It is a formative cause of problems, a precipitating cause, an exacerbating cause, and a maintaining cause. The psychosocial context requires careful attention and understanding in all of the causal relations.
We may be excessively concerned and pre-occupied with the physical aspects of our being, even to the extent of dividing solutions into medical specialties, sub-specialties, and sub-sub specialties. We journey across limb, organ, cell, gene, atom, and molecular space; this journey has proven miraculous for many diseases and disorders. However, this journey alone cannot address nor resolve the tolls exacted on human health and well being forged and sustained within the psychosocial contexts of our lives.
There are many empirical and theoretical reasons concluding many diseases, disorders, dysfunctions, deviancies, and distress arise from the psychosocial contexts of our life than from our body alone. Indeed, the experiences forged and sustained in the psychosocial contexts shape and generate many of these tragic “D” words as the body and mind become war zones for survival struggles – lives of “quiet desperation.”
Today, humans seek respite and relief from “desperation” in prescription pills, illegal drugs and substances, and/or both. Pills and substances are often temporary palliatives, unable to treat and heal the broader destructive contexts of human life, located in the “isms,” poverty, violence, war, and oppression.
There can be no doubt pills and substances alter behavior via neurochemistry and anatomical structure. However, seeking solutions to the determinants of problems requires solutions appropriate to the level generating them and their consequences. Tragically, psychosocial contexts, though obvious, are too often ignored. These are big problems! Too often local, national, and international leaders yield to the preferences to the wealthy, powerful, and positioned. The result is the medicalization of society and human existence; the abuse of power is history’s story!
Many noble minds and hearts sought to awaken humanity to the psychosocial sources of their problems (e.g., Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy), but those in power, continue to dominate, “tossing bones of solace” to reaching hands. Today the world is gifted by many new heroic stalwarts, who are advancing peace and social justice (e.g., Mairead McGuire, Michael Knox, Antonio de Rosa, Glenn Paige, and numerous others). The struggle, however, is endless, and requires a person become a social and political activist. As has been suggested by many, today’s situation requires us to merge personal, occupational, and civic lives; there must be a fusion or a gathering of “self.”
FIGURE 1: PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONTEXTS FOR HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
There are so many more items that should be included, as the “interaction” of the contexts foster yet new contexts and complexity. Amidst this challenging “matrix,” it is easy to become pessimistic, to give up on solutions, and to accept forces and fates as destiny. Do not!
As the struggles appear overwhelming, find inspiration and hope from those about you, especially at local levels, making contributions to peace, justice, and dignity. They are the new heroes our times.
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Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and 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. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 17 July 2017.
by Stefan Schindler
