Peace Quest Chapter 2:  Adult Development for Peace

    Having argued that a culture’s prospects for being peacefully oriented are greatly affected by its child rearing practices, I also want to emphasize three ways that adults, who may or may not have had gentle upbringings, can further the cause of peace: 1) psychotherapy for healing from trauma, 2) peace and justice activism, and 3) insight meditation. Also, I’ll tell the stories of a couple of peace activists whose parents were supportive and gave them a positive legacy to follow, and of one man who overcame the effects of extreme violence directed against him in childhood and who subsequently has worked as an adult for peace through children’s rights advocacy.

Therapy for a Culture of Peace:

Limbic Healing from Trauma

    If our life experience as adults shows patterns of conflict-ridden relationships with aggressive or self-destructively submissive behaviors, we probably do not know how to relate peacefully to others or ourselves. This is inevitably due to our early emotional needs not having been met. In other words, we lacked peaceful role models in our first years.  Our caretakers, in their childhoods, had themselves lacked peaceful role models.  This is not a matter of placing blame on others. Rather, it can be a recognition that helps us to stop blaming ourselves and instead to take responsibility for our own healing and learning and to find appropriate helpers for our process of self-transformation.

    Discussions of peace are too often premised on effecting behavioral change through cognitive revision, that is, changing how we act by changing how we think. While this is necessary, it is not sufficient. Changes in the verbal patterns of our thinking and speaking may occur when we gain information from reading, or when we adopt a new philosophy, religion, or political ideology. Such changes are neurologically organized in the speech and thinking centers of the neocortex. These changes do not automatically affect the deeper lying limbic and brain stem levels. As noted previously, our emotional ways of feeling and relating are centered in the limbic brain, and are influenced by our earliest primary relationships. When we have been severely traumatized, the instinctual survival levels of the brain stem are affected. If the reaction to trauma has not been fully resolved, we may remain in a chronic state of hyper-arousal, ready at the slightest hint of threat, whether real or imagined, to fight, flee, or freeze. How relatively peaceful or aggressive we are, therefore, involves all levels of our biological being. When we are not able to live peacefully in the present because of negative influences from the past, we need help.  Psychotherapy, at its best, offers such help. The therapist needs to be a skilled helper and also a healthy, open human being with good boundaries, which gives us the opportunity to be in a healthy relationship with a clear and accepting emotional witness.  In this way, we can be helped to release post-traumatic stresses from our bodies, including our nervous systems. We can gain insight and self-acceptance. We can learn new, more peaceful ways of relating. The therapist’s compassion for us becomes internalized. Through a sustained therapeutic relationship, our limbic brains can become encoded with new patterns of healthier relationship possibilities in all areas of our lives.79 Limbic revision is the level for effecting truly peaceful transformations. This is the promise of therapy and why it is so needed in our conflict-ridden world. Therapy can help people become healthier. Being emotionally healthy is tantamount to being peaceful.



Fortunate, Intermediate, and Catastrophic Altruists

    Being peaceful is also tantamount to being altruistic. The late, Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin conducted pioneering studies on the development and dynamics of what he termed creative altruism. He reached his insights on the basis of trying life experiences as well as research. He had witnessed tumultuous famine, warfare, and revolution.  Because of his independent thinking and outspoken stand against oppression, whether of the right or the left, he was declared an enemy by both the Czar and Lenin, and came harrowingly close to being executed by the latter. He went on to found the sociology department at Harvard, where he culminated the later years of his career with research into creative altruism, convinced that the survival of humanity depended on widespread cultivation of this quality. Through exhaustive historical and contemporary research, Sorokin distinguished among three sorts of altruists, whom he called fortunate, catastrophic, and intermediary types. The last shared a mix of traits in common with the first two.80

    The fortunate ones, such as Albert Schweitzer, were born into families where love, kindness, and generosity, even for people who were different, were the rule. In the best of circumstances, communities with congruent values supported these families. Therefore, it was natural for people raised like this to treat others justly. Subsequent research, including what has been learned in neurobiology about the limbic brain’s development, has confirmed Sorokin’s earlier conclusions on this subject.

    Drs. Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 800 interviews with Europeans who had risked their own lives to rescue Jews during the Nazi holocaust. They found the rescuers came from warm, caring family backgrounds where they were raised with empathy and reason and given positive examples about caring for others rather than being subjected to the punishments and authoritarian dictates that were common features of most child-rearing in their cultures.81 Dr. Christie Kiefer came to similar conclusions about the family backgrounds of those she termed “natural” altruists in her interviews of people known for their humanitarian work.82 My own oral history research into the backgrounds of peace and justice activists is consistent with these findings.

    Sorokin advisedly chose the dramatic term “catastrophic” for peacemakers from less favorable families of origin because he discovered that the altruistic transformation of their personalities was difficult and painful, taking from months to many years. It was often precipitated by catastrophes such as deaths of loved ones or crises. These people’s egos, values, and group affiliations became rearranged. Kiefer’s research found the late altruists had a few different sorts of transformative experiences that resulted in self-integration and increased energy, capacity for confident action, and ability to give.83 Buddha, Francis of Assisi, and St. Augustine are well known examples of catastrophic altruists.84

    Please note, however, that catastrophe is neither a sufficient nor a necessary precursor to being a peaceful and altruistic person. Suffering does not inevitably lead to moral uplift. Sorokin observed what he called the law of polarization:85 some people react to extreme misfortune by becoming more creative and altruistic, whereas others become more brutal, suicidal, violent, or mentally deranged. Many victims become victimizers, perpetuating the cycle of violence. Peace builders who have not come from loving backgrounds are able to transform their own pain into compassion and empathy for others. Whatever their hardships may have been, their capacity for depth of feeling and thinking is intact, as is their willingness to act justly. The intermediate altruists, such as Gandhi, experience a transition to creative altruism that is not as smooth and organic as the personal development of the fortunate altruists, nor as tumultuous as that of the catastrophic altruists, who go through profound disorientation and crisis prior to the reintegration of their egos around values of love and service.



Portrait of Two Altruistic Peace Builders: Wally and Juanita Nelson 86

    Wally and Juanita Nelson are an African-American couple who are long-term nonviolent activists for peace, justice, and civil rights. At the time of this writing, he is 92, and she is 79. Both Wally and Juanita sparkle with the vitality and good humor that are often characteristic of altruistic elders. They have lived for decades in voluntary simplicity at the Bean Patch, their small, organic farm in the Pioneer Valley region of Massachusetts.  In order not to support war by paying income taxes, they chose to earn just enough money as was necessary for basic needs. Both Wally and Juanita were fortunate in being raised by supportive parents whom they credit as being positive role models for the paths they chose as adults.

    Born in 1909 into a poor, sharecropping family in rural Arkansas, Wally grew up with a strong sense of self-worth because he was loved and nurtured by both his parents. It is this solid ground of experience that led to his belief that,“If we do something to help parents the world will evolve. I don’t know what to do for the parents. They are even more lost than the kids. You have to start with the parents.”

    Wally told this story about his own parents: When I was a child, my parents had strong morals. They believed in honesty, truth telling. One of the most important lessons they taught me was that I tell the truth. They could be upset if I did something wrong, but if I told the truth about it, they understood. I knew I could count on this, and they practiced believing what I had to say. You need to remember how kids were treated in those times.  During World War One, children were meant to be seen and not heard. Another kid wronged me, but he turned it around and told his grandmother, a powerful woman in our church who was feared by nearly everybody else, that I had hurt him. She came to our house to demand that my father punish me. She was really upset. She was ready to tear me apart. He said, ‘We’ll call Wallace to ask him what happened.’ That was already an insult to her. He asked me, ‘Did you do it?’ ‘No, father, I didn’t do it.’ He believed I didn’t do it because I said so. He trusted my word over an adult’s. This has a terrific effect on a child.”

    Just as Wally’s father trusted his son, he also believed in his wife. “On one occasion, my father was talking with his best friend. They didn’t know I was around. I overheard Father say, ‘Mac, I don’t think my wife could lie if she had to. I was strongly impressed. I got much of my beliefs about nonviolence from them, even though they never heard of nonviolence.”

    In a culture of male supremacy, the respect and equality between his parents also deeply influenced Wally as a boy, and was a model for the mutually supportive, equal relationship between him and Juanita. Perhaps this was one of the sources for his thinking on male gender identity, as the following story illustrates.

    “You have to stop this idea of a he-man as the way to go. When I was a youngster, I used to enjoy being tough and being able to take care of myself. I was in a rugged situation. I was looking for what it is to be a real man. I was hoping to become one some day.  I was a strong supporter of WWI, and I asked father to write to President Woodrow Wilson to start a little boys’ war. When I got older in my teenage years, something happened.  There were two groups of us who used to play ball against each other. The others were larger and still would cheat. They couldn’t play a straight game. One day we were in the game when they cheated again, and we said we weren’t going to take it. About twenty of us were yelling across at each other, saying we were going to fight. The leader of other gang was named Tom. He was the biggest and the meanest. All in his gang and ours were afraid of him. He lost control of himself and began to swing his fists in air. If he had hit someone, he could have caused some harm. A little voice said to me,‘Why don’t you hit that fool?’ I let go a haymaker, and he went down to the ground. I was one of the smallest people in our group. He didn’t know who did it. When someone told him I did, he was so surprised that I had the nerve to hit him he didn‘t know how to deal with it. He dove into me. I stuck my fist out. He ran into it. It happened again. Over he went. He lunged at me and grabbed me around my waist. We fell, with me on top of him. He was so shocked he took his teeth and dug into my back. My brother told me to get up.“I can’t; this fool is biting me.” Finally Tom was so confused he gave up. When it was over, I had beaten this gang leader. I knew I hadn’t really beaten him. He thought I had. I didn’t feel great because I had this so-called victory. The next day the other kids asked me to be their leader. If I wanted a gang, I had one. I said no. That was the second-to-the-last physical fight I ever had.”

    On the basis of this experience and others, Wally became wary of charismatic leadership of any kind. He noted that even a benign leader can be ultimately harmful by conditioning people to need leaders to follow rather than relying on their own intelligence. If they depend on following a “strong” leader, they will lose the ability to discern helpful from harmful policies advocated by the leader.

    Also at a young age, Wally learned how racism divides working people against one another. Laboring alongside his father as a sharecropper, he experienced firsthand how both white and black farm owners were equally cruel and exploitative toward the laborers. Therefore, he learned, race could not be a measure of character or human decency, and Wally made friends from all backgrounds throughout life.

    Wally’s philosophy as an activist developed when he was a young man. “In Chicago in the early 30s, when I learned about nonviolence and pacifism it was the most terrific thing I had ever heard. I was in a group that studied it. What excited me was that it was a method of standing up against something you didn’t like and opposing it like a man, not a wild animal. I gravitated to it because it was a more dignified way. As long as I knew I could develop the courage it took, I realized I could be nonviolent.”

    A conscientious objector to war and firmly committed to nonviolence, Wally was imprisoned during World War II. In 1947, he participated in the first Freedom Ride to protest segregation on the buses in the South. Called the Journey of Reconciliation, it was organized by the ecumenical Fellowship of Reconciliation. This was the prototype for the many Freedom Rides that took place a decade and more later.

    Wally recalled a time in the 1960s when he entered a restaurant in Chicago and sat down at the counter to be served. The young, white, male waiter took the order from other white people to Wally’s right and left but ignored him. After a while, Wally said, “Would you mind taking my order?”

    The waiter retorted, “I’d just as soon kill a nigger every day.” He grabbed a large meat mallet, swung it wildly in the air, and walked menacingly toward Wally.

    “I stood up. I folded my hands because I didn’t want him to think I was challenging him. But I also held my ground because I didn’t want him to think he was scaring the pants off of me. As he jumped toward me, I said, ‘Fellow, you don’t know what you’re doing.’  He lowered his hand. Just then the door swung open, and two black men who had seen the goings on through the restaurant window rushed in to hit on white-skinned people. I said, ‘What’s the trouble, guys?’

    They didn’t know what to think. They said,‘We saw you by yourself.’

    I answered,‘I’m not by myself.  All these other people are here.  There was just a misunderstanding.’  This particular time I was nonviolent.  If I hadn’t been, you would have read about a riot.  It could have spread.  A lot of people could have been hurt or killed.  I felt pretty good.”

    As for peace within their marriage, Wally and Juanita developed a policy that if a conflict arose between them, they would sit together to talk it through to resolution, no matter how long this took or how much work needed to be done in the garden. They knew they could express their feelings fully and that whatever they would say, neither would ever abandon the other. The same kind of loving trust and commitment they had each known with their parents prevailed in their marriage and saw them through difficult moments.

    When I asked Juanita about her commitment to peace and justice, she answered, “I suppose I got that partly from my family. In 1939, when I was sixteen, I went with my mother by train from Cleveland, where I was born, to her original home place in Atlanta.  I saw that everyone in our car was colored. I knew this was wrong. I told my mother I would go sit in another car with the white people. She didn’t join me, but she didn’t try to stop me because she knew it was right.”

    This episode from her youth illustrates how Juanita’s mother trusted and respected her, just as Wally’s father treated him. Both were empowered by their parents to live by their values, which included peace and equality.



Portrait of a Catastrophic Altruistic Peace Builder: Norm Lee’s Story 87

    At the age of 74, Norm Lee lives at the foot of Mt. Graham in southern Arizona, where he gardens organically and dedicates his energies to advocating for children. His free on-line publication, Parenting Without Punishing, is available at his website, www.nopunish.net. Begun in the autumn of 1999 as a local newsletter, it now has readers on five continents, and its issues have developed into chapters of a book of the same name. On the site also is Norm’s monthly Step Up to Prevent Hitting, inviting people around the world to pledge to intervene nonviolently in public when they see a parent or anyone else about to hit or shake a child, whether under the guise of discipline or for any other reason. These initiatives are his contribution to peace. As we have already stated, helping children to be raised nonviolently is one of the most significant contributions to peace anyone can make. As a father, Norm raised his own two sons democratically, through communication, and without punishments or rewards, proving to students and colleagues that punishment, threats, and ego-inflating rewards are serious impediments to raising mature, considerate,happy children.

    As a high school English teacher and a college professor of prospective teachers, he taught creatively and humanely, practicing what he taught about respecting each unique individual. He also founded, wrote, and published the national magazine for self-reliant living, Homesteaders’ News, which taught innovative, simple ways to live close to the land. He was closely associated with the pioneering educational critic, John Holt, who taught the Home Schooling Workshop at Norm’s annual self-reliant festival in the Finger Lakes of upstate New York. Norm continued Holt’s home schooling advocacy work after the latter’s untimely death.

    Norm’s beginnings in Barre, Vermont did not presage the unfolding creative, altruistic, and iconoclastic life path he chose, nor did it give him any positive role models. Quite to the contrary! His mother, having suffered excessive abuse for eight years, fled from the dysfunctional family, leaving four-year-old Norm, and his two sisters,motherless. When Norm was seven,his father in turn abandoned the children to an even more abusive woman for whom they were required to work for their keep. Her method of childcare was to beat Norm frequently with a hardwood stick, while forcing him to endure exhausting physical labor as a front for her illicit abortion racket. Norm remembers it as his personal Auschwitz in Hardwick, Vermont. For those five years in the Thirties, no one in the village—no pastor, teacher, police officer, or neighbor—stepped up to rescue Norm and his sisters from the psychopathic, defrocked nurse whose livelihood was not child care but performing kitchen-table abortions, chopping up the fetuses and flushing them down the toilet. There was no one who intervened to witness to the children’s suffering.

    That Norm’s capacity to give and receive love was not obliterated, that he had the intelligence and resilience to mature into the spirited person he is today, is remarkable. Of course, such mistreatment as he received leaves its mark on both body and psyche, especially since it entailed elements of torture. Forced to keep his hands in lye to make soap, his fingernails are deformed to this day. Teeth-grinding destroyed his teeth and affected his jaws. Winter nights in a wet bed in an unheated barn crippled his lungs. Repeated beatings—some 300—disfigured his posture and left him physically debilitated with a score of scars and hundreds of hidden bruises, including damaged nerves to ears and eyes.

    But it is the emotional mutilation that has required a lifetime of “inner work.” Unrelenting dread and fright allowed him no rest. Shouted insults shattered any hope of self-esteem. Daily threats of punishment left him a trembling bag of bones, with nervous tics, compulsive movements, terrorizing nightmares.

    But very gradually over many years Norm was able to reclaim his sense of self-worth. He credits literature as an early support. Early on, having taught himself to read, he found that in reading great stories about others who survived hardship, he felt less alone. After his escape from the “gulag” at age 12, in another state, he set for himself the life goal of healing by creating and embarking on a deliberate program for self-recovery. Self-improvement began with reading Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. Then he joined the Boy Scouts to learn to relate with other boys. For bodybuilding he trained himself on parallel bars; for social status he excelled in choral club and taught himself jazz piano.

    As a teenager he was obliged to work six additional years for his abusive father and to endure the humiliations of his psychotic stepmother. At age 18, he enlisted in the Air Force, determined to develop confidence, self-esteem, and courage through travel experience. He volunteered for duty in the Korean War, and gained respect and self-respect teaching classes of pilots and crew members and writing combat reports for the military newspaper. He left the service after seven years to attend Syracuse University, where he earned three degrees. He also became a philosophical pacifist and peace activist while at school.

    When he was about to become a father at age 34, he was determined he would not unleash on a child the rage that still dwelt within him. He sought out the top psychiatrist in the county for help. Norm then researched the psychological literature for alternatives to punishment, but he could find none. He and his wife and two sons, in the early 1960s, proved that well-behaved, responsible children can, with a little know-how and a change in view, be brought up without any punishment whatever. That began what is now known as his Non-punitive Parenting Paradigm, as described in his book, Parenting Without Punishing.

    When the children were still small, he benefited from therapy with the famous Thomas Szasz, with whom he shared a mutually respectful rapport, and who supported his releasing the unexpressed terror and rage he had felt as a child. Later still, he left college teaching and entered a Buddhist monastery, where he learned yoga and mindfulness meditation, which he continues to practice today.

    While the transformation into a peace-building altruist was not an easy one, Norm succeeded in progressively actualizing his best human potentials, including working compassionately to help others. He exemplifies what Sorokin called a “catastrophic” altruist, that is, a peace builder who did not have the good fortune of peaceful beginnings. It is important to recognize that this kind of personal transformation is possible. Stories such as Norm’s may inspire hope in others. Also, while we have described the kind of childhood that leads people to become “fortunate” altruists, we can recognize that there is more than one pathway to becoming peaceful.



Activism: Opposing Injustice and Violence

    Activism for peace and justice is a form of leadership, and it is one of the ways adults can develop their consciousness 88 and enhance their health. In the United Kingdom, scientists from the University of Sussex found that people who get involved in altruistic campaigns, labor strikes, and political demonstrations report their activism helps them overcome “stress, pain, anxiety, and depression” and that the results are long-lasting and provide feelings of deep happiness. 89 Arising out of alarm and dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions perceived as wrong, activism is an attempt to make them right. At the same time, it is a call to others to examine both the status quo and their own consciences.  Activists often put themselves at risk as revealed by the history of abolitionism, the labor and civil rights movements, anti-globalization, environmentalism, and so many other causes. Activism against injustice inevitably elicits emphatic, sometimes brutal, resistance. Therefore, working for peace paradoxically involves choosing to engage in conflict. Peace building is not a quiescent endeavor in a world where so many people’s identities, ideologies, customs, and material interests are vested in oppression, injustice, intolerance, and violence. Such indecencies divide people against one another and against life itself.

    Gandhi premised his activism on two principles, the unity of life and the unity of means and ends.90 Because of the former, he opposed not only British imperialism but also the caste system and the subjugation of the so-called untouchables, and he espoused vegetarianism and kindness to animals. Because of the latter principle, his activism was nonviolent. Such congruence of action with core values is important.

    The issues of injustice that need to be addressed are multifarious, so activists need to find the calling that touches them the most, the one or few causes to which they are best able to contribute, and to persevere in serving. No one can take up all deserving causes, so we work in the hope that the collective effect of many who assume a variety of responsibilities will make a difference. I shall now narrate one situation in which I was faced with the opportunity of applying the maxim first stated by Saul Alinsky, namely, “think globally, act locally.”

    In the autumn of 1999, I felt compelled by reasons of conscience to put my job at risk by engaging in peace activism in opposition to a lucrative policy of my employer of nine years, Norwich University. I taught sociology, advised foreign students, and directed a Peace Corps preparatory program at this school, a major part of which was the nation’s sole remaining private military college. Only three faculty colleagues joined me in openly advocating that Norwich sever its contract with the Indonesian military, a deal that was bringing the university a half-million dollars a year. Two administrators gave me secret moral support but would not expose their position publicly. Most other faculty members and administrators were silent bystanders to this controversy, which gained national media attention after an investigative journalist published in the Boston Globe her discovery that Norwich had enrolled officers and prospective officers of the Kopassus, Indonesia’s most corrupt and murderous military unit.91

    Norwich had negotiated its contract with two Indonesian generals cited by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty

International for crimes against humanity.  The Indonesian military were guilty of extensive and ongoing atrocities in the provinces of Aceh and West Papua, and of genocide in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony Indonesia had invaded in 1975, subsequently killing 200,000 people, a full third of the population.92 Norwich’s new masters’ degree program in military science and diplomacy was tailored expressly for about a dozen Kopassus officers who had been on active duty in East Timor. Another cohort of undergraduate Indonesians would be obligated to serve ten years in the Kopassus upon graduation from Norwich.

    To my thinking, this was unconscionable because it validated perpetrators of genocide with the respectability conferred by U.S. academic diplomas, and it could give them more polished airs and skills for carrying out the corrupt, murderous policies for which their army was notorious. Overcoming fears of job loss and harassment, I felt energized, exhilarated, and lucid, when I expressed my views in letters to the university president, in radio and television interviews, and in a public debate held on the campus of the University of Vermont. I met the other three faculty members who shared my position when they came to be part of the audience of the debate. We had each arrived at our similar conclusions independently. Most of our other colleagues were indifferent to the whole issue, as if the safety of the distant people of East Timor did not matter one bit to them. Another faculty and staff faction, much more numerous than our group of four protesters, vociferously denounced us and ridiculed our conscientious objection to collusion with genocide. This intramural conflict came to a climax when I invited the human rights activist and journalist, Alan Nairn, an expert on East Timor who was almost killed there during the infamous Santa Cruz massacre, to speak on campus. He was met by a mostly hostile crowd in military uniforms, who were ignorant of the issues, but intent on rallying around the U.S. flag. They used the same spurious argument that was often heard in support of the notorious School of the Americas, namely that having foreign soldiers trained in the U.S. would make the trainees more ethical. Never mind that the U.S. had already been training the Indonesian army until Congress put a ban on such activity, partly because of Nairn’s testimony about East Timor. Never mind that weapons made in the U.S. were used in the genocide. Never mind that the war criminal generals had already been trained in the U.S.

    Nairn’s well-documented talk garnered more press and helped my associates and me put more moral pressure on the Norwich administration. We persevered in our protests although we could not foresee the outcome. My one ally and confidant on the president’s cabinet told me they had been discussing how to punish or fire me ever since I first began speaking up. He also informed me that the president was utterly self-involved, primarily concerned about his own image. While he did not want to lose the half-million dollars of revenue, even more than that he did not want to lose face by backing down on his claims that he was right to make this deal with the Indonesians. Finally in December, Norwich tried to salvage its tarnished image by issuing nationwide press releases that it was severing its Indonesian ties. My allies and I were stunned and elated. In the spring of that school year, the university announced a reduction-in-force. I was not surprised that my position was eliminated, despite consistently superlative job ratings by supervisors and students alike. My friend on the cabinet, who had spoken to the president privately in opposition to the Indonesian contract, also lost his job. A few sympathetic people at the university said that other silent allies there viewed my severance as spitefully and politically motivated. I have no regrets about what I did and can only hope that the ethical dilemma that was raised affected some students and others in ways that will lead them to act on their consciences when they are in a position to do so.

    When we choose peace activism, we do not know fully whom we might reach or inspire. In the 1940s, the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, an African-American, sat down on a seat in the third row from the front of a bus he boarded as a paying passenger in Tennessee. By the racist Jim Crow laws still in effect, he was required to sit in the back of the bus. The bus driver got up and ordered Rustin to the back, but he calmly refused to move, thereby affirming his equal human status and right to sit anywhere he chose. The bus driver called the police who came and demanded that Rustin move. He replied, while pointing to a little white child about seven years old sitting across the aisle, “If I move, this child will not know that injustice is taking place here.”  He was already thinking of the potential influence on an upcoming generation by giving an example to just one of its members. As Rustin was being taken away by the police outside the bus, a white man who had been impressed by his dignity throughout this confrontation offered Rustin his business card and any help he could provide. George Hauser, who narrated this event from his deceased friend’s life, commented,“You resist injustice partly for yourself, partly for your adversary, and so other people will know injustice is taking place.”93

    Bayard Rustin was one of the people who later taught Martin Luther King, Jr. the philosophy and practical strategies of Gandhian nonviolence. He personally influenced King to rid his home of firearms. Although Rustin never became as famous as King, his vision affected millions through his substantial influence on the direction taken by one of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement. Who knows how Rustin affected that anonymous child on a bus one day decades ago when racism still appeared firmly entrenched in the laws and customs of the South?

    I believe activists who are civil and dignified, as was Rustin, are more likely to awaken the consciences of others who have not yet committed themselves to peace and equality.  At times the apparent adversary may even be affected. Richard Deats, the editor of Fellowship magazine, spoke about a former Ku Klux Klan leader who abandoned his robes and renounced racism.94 The pivotal event for his awakening conscience occurred on a bus when a black woman and her baby were moved to the back. He said, “She had such dignity and inner strength, I realized segregation was wrong.” She didn’t know who he was or that she had affected him in that way.

    Gandhi is often quoted to the effect that “we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.”  While it may not always be possible, it is a worthy aspiration. Activism focuses on the issues we want to see changed. Our way of being and behaving embodies these changes.

Meditation

    Meditation can contribute to a person’s ability to live peacefully. Many different practices from varied traditions are called meditation.  When I use the term here, I am referring to what is known as mindfulness meditation or insight meditation. This is the art of being non-judgmentally aware of what is happening in the present moment in one’s own body sensations, feelings, and thinking, and in one’s environment, including other people. Developing such mindfulness on a moment-to-moment basis can be aided by regularly setting aside special time for quiet practice. The practice is usually done sitting in a relaxed, alert position in which the body is well aligned in the gravitational field, and in which witnessing one’s own spontaneous breathing can help with centering.

    I do not intend to give meditation guidelines here. A teacher is invaluable, especially in the beginning. A standing mindfulness meditation, known in Chinese as zhan zhuang, with its complementary chi kung movement practices95 may also be beneficial.  Individual needs and tastes differ. In fact, for

some people meditation is not congenial. Each person who is interested in meditation needs to find out what practice works for him or her.

    Hundreds of research studies have documented the physiological and psychological effects of various forms of meditation. Among the benefits reported are slower heart rate, deeper and slower breathing, synchronization of brain waves in the two hemispheres, reduced muscle tension, lower blood lactate levels, more functional responses to stress, clearer perception through all senses, increased concentration, higher empathy levels, and improved memory and intelligence. Such changes are indicators of a calmer, more present and sensitive way of being, conducive to more peaceful interactions with others.96

    To illustrate how meditation can contribute to more peaceful relations, I will cite material from the Peace Wisdom of the Elders interview I conducted in 1995 with Thynn Thynn, a former medical doctor, originally from Burma, who decided to devote herself to teaching a mindfulness approach to daily living. While she comes from a Theravadan Buddhist tradition, her teachings are non-sectarian and humanistic. She told how meditation affected her ability to relate peacefully with her teenage children:

    “With adolescents, as with children, there is a lot of turmoil.     I found my natural response was to engage in a kind of battle situation. If they were aggressive, I tried to get them to a state where I could control them. The practice of mindfulness helped me to look at my feelings and thoughts throughout the whole day. Normally we are so caught up with the external world, we don’t look within.” The habitual mind creates the rigamarole of wanting to control.  Mindfulness conditions the mind to want to stop itself. It     affords an automatic break. With insight into what I was     doing, I stopped wanting to control, to defeat, and to be the     righteous mother. I was able to see my child with vivid clarity. I asked myself: what is happening there with them, where are they coming from? It  wasn’t about me. I was able to see their suffering, feel for them as they suffered through their confusion. Mindfulness brings clarity, insight, and also compassion spontaneously. These are the benefits I have experienced. Through repeated incidences, I learned to keep silent, let them talk. It was fine for them to express themselves, but in a way that is nonabrasive. I don’t need to convey I have compassion for them. It is just a matter of my     being there 100% without judging or controlling them. They feel whatever I feel. Their response is positive. They feel safe when they know I won’t be judging them. Then they open up.” 97