A Stitch In Time - By Prasad Dhumane

Time, money and energy all are lost due to just simple things not being taken care of at the right time. A stitch in time saves nine.Sandip stumbled over something in the dark and hurt himself.“Oh my god! What was that? I seem to have stumbled over and broken the bottle of the cough syrup. Who kept in the way like this nonsense? All the medicine is lost now. And moreover I hurt myself too.”“Make

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Ecology of war and peace

If we ever culturally come to grips with the idea that our conflict management methods are not writ in stone--the normal dichotomous assumption of surrender or armed attack--we may finally begin to actually run the methods through a serious evaluative process, a sort of cost-benefit analysis. For the most part, humankind has not done this and certainly the US never has.

What are the potential strengths and weaknesses of the three basic approaches?

Surrender will usually mean survival of more of the members of a society, but at a more miserable, less free, and impoverished level.

Nonviolence will usually mean a more egalitarian outcome without economic advantage over anyone else. It may be used in a needs-based struggle but not in a greed-based search for hegemony.

Violence can win it all, lose it all, and often institute a structural violence that results in perduring inequities, with one dominant party living large and many living the impoverished lives once they surrender.

The sooner a party who is faced with overwhelming violence surrenders, the less damage they usually suffer.

Nonviolence means sacrificing time, some resources, and the ability to exact revenge or seize other people's lands or resources.

Violence requires first a huge commitment to an arsenal, recruiting popular support for the undertaking, suspension or cancellation of environmental laws with regard to military operations, and the acceptance that people will need to give their lives in the quest for victory and dominance.

Of course, most of the military costs are ignored in a country like the US, since the alternatives are not considered. This sets up a bizarre public discourse that sets aside economic and environmental costs and ennobles all the human costs, valorizing the warriors incessantly and labeling those who question the costs as agents or dupes of the enemy, or as cowards who advocate surrender, or as simpleminded windkissing naif-brains, unable to understand the real, the tough, and the requisite stomach for sacrifice and bloodshed for (in our case) 'the American way.' I've been labeled all those things over the decades.

The CBA is coming to roost, however, and the ideas of what is reality are shifting, even though there is still zero grasp of the strategic nonviolent struggle as a viable alternative--viable for defense, not to preserve the American way of ruling the world.

So, for instance, we see the economy, all hollowed out by the decades of massive military spending, finally changing the idea of reality. Little sad cracks open up, such as Senator James Webb (D-VA) opposing increases in medical support for veterans of the war he fought in--the Vietnam War--as they have long sought coverage for the illnesses induced by exposure to Dow Chemical's various defoliants, lumped in the one Agent Orange category. He votes for war at every turn, all weapons systems, every supplemental to drive more occupation and more military involvement in other people's lands, spending literally a $trillion every year, but he suddenly develops a fiscally prudential analysis when it comes to covering health conditions that are caused by exposure during war to the chemical warfare agents we used illegally against Vietnam. He says these conditions might be caused by other factors later in life so no help for the vets who contract leukemia, Parkinsons or ischemic heart disease. The new realpolitik.

A spokesperson for Vietnam Vets of America (pictured) responds well:

Rick Weidman, director of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America, defended the potentially high costs, saying the payments should be considered in the same context as the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We would make the point that many, many times the number of troops originally estimated have [traumatic brain injury] coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan," Weidman said. "Should we not then award it because it's too many people? It's the same argument -- an environmental wound is the same as a blast wound."

Compare. Run our methods of conflict management through a rigorous, honest cost-benefit analysis. Lift a dying combat veteran onto his death bed, as I did with my brother-in-law, when that vet doesn't even reach 45 and is in pain, dying from the common exposure to these agents of empire. Look into the eyes of a working class person who did his duty as he was told and suffered scores of inoperable cancerous tumors that caused him to die in agony before his youngest daughter even graduated from high school. Tim Gilmore is dead and has been for 15 years, but his note that these barrels of chemicals were everywhere, even in the mess halls, is not forgotten. Some years later I met Vietnamese victims of our chemical attack on their poor people and their land, and realized the costs to them were infinitely higher, collectively.

Violence is good for killing. It kills people, jungles, economies, and hope. It gains opulent lives and unjust power for the elite, like the wealthy owners of Dow Chemical, who have prevailed.

The choice is always in front of us. Nonviolence is the only choice full of hope. James Webb or Gandhi? I choose the new realpolitik, strategic nonviolence, given to us with a far better cost benefit outcome.

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Ferris Bueller Found

This story on a couple returning him from a trip and finding their car in long term parking has 724 kilometres on it amuses.

I think Ferris Bueller joyrided the car.

A couple returned to New York from a trip to California and discovered that their car—which had been parked in the long-term lot near JFK airport—had 724 extra miles on the odometer. Which raises the question—what exactly does your car do in long-term car parks?

Since the vehicle was also playing a CD at full volume when the couple, Mimi and Ulrich Gunthart, started it, the logical explanation is that someone borrowed the car for a joyride/road trip (724 miles is roughly the distance from New York City to Pittsburgh and back).

Longterm parking at Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport is $75 weekly. Think I'd let Ferris have the car for the week so long as he topped it up and rolled back the odometer.



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Successful failures

At times I do evaluation work for academic institutions or even governments who want to know if research proposals are valid, promising, or problematic. I just finished one for a government which shall remain unnamed and I gave the proposal a conditional thumbs up. Part of what bothered me was the undifferentiated use of the word success. In the case of this proposal, which I need to treat a bit abstractly since confidentiality is part of what the evaluation system is predicated upon, the word success was used to describe the rhetorical strategies that convinced two countries to go to war.

Evoke an enemy, create a myth of persecution, build another myth of freedom fighting, build up the enemy to high threat levels, put forth a champion who will lead the glorious fight, and poof! War. Success.

We need to really think about success, don't we? We are succeeding right now in alienating much of the population of planet Earth. We are succeeding in polluting the seas, the rivers, the soil, the groundwater, the atmosphere, and each living being on Earth. We have succeeded, even, in changing our climate and worsening our natural disasters (pictured: Pakistan under flood). We are succeeding in hollowing out our economy with military spending that dwarfs all other items. We are succeeding in getting more guns into more hands and suffering more gun deaths by far than qualify for an official war--each and every year. We are succeeding in shifting profits to elites and unemploying millions of regular folks.

We teach our children to strive for success, but do we give them the tools to choose the right goals, so that their success isn't lethal to others, to life? We urge our students to dress for success, to plan for success, to prepare for success, to train for success, but is that success merely excess? Is it producing what will be good for those students or is it bringing us closer to the successful mortal blow to our human experiment?

The right in this country is stressing success in defeating Islam and in protecting gun rights. The left is stressing success in getting a few crumbs from the military corporate masters' table. Little is done by either left or right about our unraveling web of life. How can we redefine success so it means something tangible, something to the generations?

Suggested goals:
* eliminate war
* save the environment
* equalize wealth
* eliminate hunger

A modest proposal. So, what can accomplish all this? One thing. A grounding in nonviolence, as a principle, as a lifestyle, as a social good, as a fundamental approach to everything from conflict prevention to conflict management to conflict reconciliation. Nonviolence is the core and foundation of all worthy goals, and if it is central in our thinking, we will succeed.

There are no shortcuts to success, but there is a bottom-line value and commitment. Grounding ourselves and our children in nonviolence is not our best hope; it's our only hope. Saying no to violence is as important as saying yes to life, and using nonviolent force is how we can succeed. If we equivocate on this, we succeed only in the things that lead to failure. It really requires commitment.

Who is the judge of our commitment to nonviolence? Life itself. War is failure, poverty is failure, hunger is failure, and if our ecology continues to come apart, Mother Nature will show us how She deals with failures. Expect no mercy in that case. Nonviolence is defense against such potential disaster. Time to get serious and educated about this, if we hope for success.

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Getting Ready

Many members have contacted about posting stories. The ball sets rolling from Wednesday - September 1, 2010. It's a repetition of sorts to say that, KEEP YOUR WORK SAFE. IT REMAINS YOUR VERY OWN PROPERTY. There is no question of us asking for stories as our own property. So, get ready and wait for the month to turn over.

Safety Downtown

The Strand condo on Waterfront Drive Safe enough in the day but the park across the street can be very dark.



Los Angeles The 6th Street Bridge before (left) and after (right) the LED conversion (Bureau of Street Lighting )

The Downtown Business Improvement Zone from the downtown has released another study that says that people feel safer living downtown.

The women interviewed said they don't feel safe at night and the BIZ talked about their security programs and push for more police. Fairly standard moves and ones that can and do make people more secure. However, there are other ways for the city to try and make the downtown feel safer.

The one thing that is often heard is that people are afraid to go out at night. And why wouldn't they be? They sightlines are limited, the shadows are perfect for hiding and there are fewer people than the day. One of the big changes that seem to make the most sense is to find better lighting.

All over North America cities are changing from high pressure sodium lights to LED lights. As with many things, Winnipeg seems very slow to adopt the idea.

Los Angeles is well on the way in terms of transforming its streets. The picture above shows the difference. Some people hated the brightness but others emphasized that they are more efficient and also made people more secure in their neighbourhoods. If there is one place where the lights make sense it is the downtown.

I suspect this isn't even on the city's radar.



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Cold cases

There is a serious uptick in research on nonviolence these days as the intellectual baton transferred from Gene Sharp and his Albert Einstein Institution, where they did enormous and meaningful research into aspects of nonviolence, to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which is funded by libertarian capitalist Peter Ackerman. Ackerman preceded Bill Gates as a business entrepreneur with a conscience, and indeed is a moral entrepreneur who funds the way many seek to understand and practice a far less costly and deadly form of conflict.

One of the results of greater funding for such research is the development of how research can serve the practice, that is, how learning about facets of a phenomenon can help those who deal with it. Thus, we find some of the research underwritten by ICNC is looking at quantifying some of the vexing conundrums that many of us know about anecdotally and inductively, often from long experience. And the ability to cite cases to illustrate a point is highly persuasive. Listen to Gene Sharp, Stephen Zunes or some of the other amazing intellects in this field for such illustrative demonstrations of encyclopedic and usable knowledge.

One potentially fecund field of research that is untapped to my knowledge but that might yield volumes of interesting findings is to look for cold cases of possible victory and ask how to treat them. What happens to our analysis when we think we lose in a long struggle to engage using nonviolence and then, quietly, our opponents change everything, effectively handing us a victory that we now feel we didn't earn and aren't struggling to get any longer? It's not like a movement creates a visible mass and the dictator topples, new laws are passed, a colonizing power leaves, a corporation promises better behavior, or human rights are upheld. There is no direct temporal cause, no signed peace accord, and no connecting effect that is easily discernible. There are no smoking memos. There is zero acknowledgement that a movement existed or had any effect on the decision, which is often framed as pragmatic and unrelated to civil society.

Honeywell was a focus of a sustained and apparently fruitless campaign of nonviolent resistance for years. After that movement essentially ended, Honeywell sold off much of its military side. Some claimed victory for nonviolence, but the links were unproven.

Dan (pictured below) and Phil Berrigan raided a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, burning records of young men about to be drafted and shipped to Vietnam. Dozens of other copycat actions interfered with this involuntary servitude, but the draft did not end until the Vietnam War did. Still, it has not returned, even though we are in at least two wars. Is this a victory?

The thermonuclear command center in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, called Extremely Low Frequency, or Project ELF, was the object of sustained civil society resistance--including five Plowshares actions--and the campaign was a total failure in dislodging the base. Fewer and fewer participated. The navy said it would be there for three more decades. Then it quietly left, suddenly claiming obsolescence.


These kinds of cases give rise to some speculation and all the anecdotal evidence suggests a meaningful victory for nonviolence. But the knowledge of these cases is scant and the connection between and among them around the world is nonexistent. There is no named phenomenon here--Sub Rosa Civil Resistance Success? Nonviolent Victory Orphans? Who Knew Wins for Unarmed Force?--but I believe it's a category that would help persuade that nonviolence is a modest and unassuming, but effective, method. It would be a forensic study of these cold cases, but might bring new candlepower to our efforts to illuminate our poor world, so wedded to destructive methods of managing the inevitable conflicts between humans.

The End of McMansion?

Bridgwater McMansion?

The Census Bureau in the U.S. has released data indicating that the McMansions are on the decline.

After years of growth, the Census Bureau recently reported that median new home size fell to 2,135 square feet in 2009 after peaking at more than 2,300 earlier in the decade.

McMansions are described as:

a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood.

Does Winnipeg have McMansions? Well, look at this:

The Manchester can be found at 35 Edington Point in centrally-located Bridgwater Forest.

"This home is a very functional, efficient design," says Menno Friesen of Realty Executives, sales representative for Randall Homes (along with Dave Mick) for 35 Edington. "It's a wonderful design full of great features contained in a floor plan that wastes very little in the way of space."

Due to its well-conceived floor plan, the home -- already an expansive 2,329 sq. ft. spread out over two levels -- feels even larger than the listed square footage. That feeling of space starts in an extra-wide (and long) foyer (with 17-foot ceiling) that provides seamless access to the voluminous great room. It's here that the space and common-sense floor plan merge to create a family home designed for easy living.

Description of McMansions:

Typically it will have a floor area over 3,000 square feet (280 m2), ceilings 9-10 feet high, a two-story portico, a front door hall with a chandelier hanging from 16-20 feet, two or more garages, several bedrooms and bathrooms, and lavish interiors. The house often covers a larger portion of the lot than the construction it replaces.

Add the livable basement space in the Winnipeg house and you have 3000 feet.

I wonder if the Waverley West is building for a market that might be downsizing in just a short time?



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Lipstick and a smiley face

Imagine being a soldier in a place where there are no more combat troops, where all the missions have been accomplished and where all the social indices are worse than before you arrived and the off-stage insurgents, driven back for a minute by your nation's overwhelming and totally unsustainable surge, are now roaring back.

When, in 2006, the official Iraq Study Group seemed to notice that the Bush Cheney plan had no future, our local Congressperson, Earl Blumenauer, posted a statement on his website that ended with this:

“The war in Iraq has cost Oregon taxpayers nearly $3 billion, which otherwise could have provided health care for 655,850 people or upwards of 18,000 affordable housing units. With so much at stake, action on Iraq needs to be measured in hours and days, not weeks and months. It is time to face reality in Iraq, and the President and Congress must rise to the occasion.”

That was four interminable years ago, more than three and a half unsuccessful years into an occupation that was always doomed, and was one month after the American people spanked the Republicans in the mid-term elections, a bruising that the Democrats have now earned and will take for what they've done with Afghanistan.

At the same time the James Baker mushy report was being investigated and produced, I was asking myself why we so-called experts on conflict transformation weren't constructing a plan to transform that ill-advised invasion and occupation. I had no knowledge of the Baker-Hamilton investigation and was simply aghast that my intellectual betters in my field hadn't come up with the answers. Without resources, I started. The first people I approached were not the hotshots at, say, the Kroc Institute at either Notre Dame or San Diego, nor the leadership of the Peace and Justice Studies Association--my field's academic association. I thought that if they had been all about that, I would certainly have known, since I was co-chair of PJSA then. Instead, I just started talking with my fellow nonviolent civil resisters in Portland, Oregon, with whom I had been arrested by Homeland Security at Senator Ron Wyden's office in a successful attempt to get him off his political butt on Iraq.

Christina Hulbe, Linda Weiner, Ann Huntwork and some others thought, sure, we can do better than our federal government on this, since they apparently have done nothing with our billions and the massive State Department resources. Give it that home town try. So I asked a local family foundation for a little money and they provided enough for some airfare for some interesting players (no honoraria for anyone, just all volunteers on all sides), we rounded up some local expertise, invited all the fed elected officials from our area, and held a one-day study at Portland State University. The evening beforehand, we held a public hearing there.

One of our speakers, Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor (ret.)--we just called him "Tank Guy," since he had helped lead the tank rumble in Desert Storm in 1991, and there was a tank pointed at you on his website--advocated immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American military from Iraq. He scorned all the USA Today, Donald Rumsfeldian spin on it and just noted that what was inevitable was that Iraqis would resolve their own situation as soon as we left, that we might not like how they did it, but that unless we wanted to babysit them with big guns and lots of US casualties literally forever, that is exactly what would occur. He had little patience for those who offered a more dignified face-saving US exit, often framed as responsible. "Look," he said, "you can take your lipstick and paint a smiley face on that dead rat, but it's still a dead rat."

Would I get along with MacGregor philosophically? Of course not; he's a violent warrior and I'm a pacifist. But I'm glad we brought him in. His predictions matched what we all knew, or should have known, in our field of Conflict Resolution, but he presented them from his experience and education as a military officer.

Now, more than three and a half more interminable years from that December 2006 watershed, here we are, and USA Today is still painting smiley faces on that dead rat. Suicide bombers are literally exploding all over Iraq and they say it's all just the jostling of civic engagement, that, "Democracy is alive in Iraq." Welcome to the new surrealpolitik.

Some day, perhaps, our wonderful country will discover how to properly acknowledge massive mistakes and make reparations. We need to do that about slavery, about stealing 3,119,885 square miles of land from Native peoples, about propping up military dictators with guns and money, and about multiple invasions of other people's lands. That's the short list.

Owning our actions is part and parcel of democracy. Before we shove what we call democracy down anyone else's throat, we should live up to the decent principles of it ourselves.

Gun Registry

The Liberal party will be whipping their vote on the gun registry in the fall. It is expected that any Liberal who votes against the registry or who doesn't show up will face party sanction. Michael Ignatieff has indicated that he supports a compromise on the bill to waive fees and be less harsh with first time offenders. This seems to have appealed to some of the Liberal MPs who have voted to kill the registry in the past.

The NDP is allowing a free vote for their MPs and this could result in the private member's bill from the Tory side passing and the gun registry will be kaput.

Two NDP MPs in Manitoba have voted to kill the bill in the past. Both are expected to do the same thing in the next vote. Jack Layton says that the public should not blame the NDP if the vote ends the registry.

I think only the most partisan of NDPer will feel comfortable with this particular free vote if ends up killing the registry. The NDP can blame the Liberals, the Conservatives or anyone else but the results of the vote will be the same: the end of the registry and a list of NDP MPs who made it possible.

The two MPs in Manitoba who look to kill the bill are:

* Niki Ashton (Churchill) - T: 866-785-0522 Ottawa: 613-992-3018 Email: Ashton.N@parl.gc.ca

* Jim Maloway (Elmwood-Transcona) - T: 204-984-2499 Ottawa: 613-995-6339 Email: Maloway.J@parl.gc.ca

One thing is certain: I would change my vote if the registry was killed by my MP or by the party I normally supported.

I was opposed to the gun registry at the beginning because I believed the costs were being seriously underestimated to get it started. The Liberals should have been ashamed of themselves for such cost over-runs and poor management.

Now that the program is running, it has passed Auditor General checks and passed muster with the police who utilize it. Medical and social advocacy groups support the registry.

I believe that the registry should be retained given what we are hearing now.

The fate of the bill lies with the NDP since the Tories have always promised to kill the registry. It is the NDP that doesn't seem to have a policy on the gun registry when all other parties have now stated where they stand.



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A Quiet Man

Hiva Alizadeh, right side. CBC picture.

On Wednesday, Canadian police swept up an alleged terror ring linked to radicalized elements of the Muslim community opposed to Canada's involvement in Afghanistan.

There is still a lot unknown about the arrests of the three people in Ottawa and London. Police say there are three other unnamed people they are looking for.

We will have to see in the coming months and probably years how the accused came to be under suspicion and what evidence there is to suggest they planned terrorist activities. And it will be up to the police to prove the conspiracy allegations in court.

One thing is clear: There are Canadians who have been radicalized and who have gravitated to jihad against their fellow Canadians.

One person among those arrested lived in Winnipeg. Hiva Alizadeh attended Red River College and studied electrical engineering, had a home in St. Vital and had a relationship with an aboriginal woman who was a convert to Islam.

Those that knew Hiva Alizadeh are shocked by his arrest. Many say he was a quiet man who didn't talk about politics. From 2003 to 2009 he worked at a halal meat shop, attended school and lived in an apartment with his wife and child. His wife became more devout during their time in St. Vital and she went from a long dress and head covering to full niqab which left only the eyes exposed.

Was this the beginning of a change within the man and the family to something radical? We may never know the full motivation but it is important to know why some people are drawn to the siren call of jihad and would rather fight than using freedoms they have in Canada to call attention to wrongs they feel need remedying.

A quiet man who quietly rages against the society he lives in and quietly plots to act against it violently is a pretty scary concept.

We must know where the radicalization takes place. It seems obvious that those who feel the same things are drawn to one another. How? It seems obvious that those who have these feelings of rage are guided by someone who manages to keep them below the radar while working together? Who?

After the arrests of so many would be terrorists in Canada over the years, I don't know if we are any closer to knowing what makes a terrorist in Canada.



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Equality ethos

Almost no conflict is conducted between parties of identical power; therefore, all conflict is waged by asymmetrically advantaged parties. However, part of the basis for nonviolent power is that we are dedicated to redressing that asymmetry enough to first get to the table and then to earn and agreement that will meet our needs, never our greeds.

“It begins with the formal structural equality of the parties, based on the fact that each has a veto over any agreement; therefore, the parties need to grant each other recognition with equal standing in the negotiations. From this, it extends to the behavioral setting that facilitates exchanges through the courtesy of symmetry that each party gives the other, even if the encounter is asymmetrical in other terms” (Zartman (pictured), 2009, p. 324).

Whenever we do manage to get to that negotiating table we do have veto power, even if the only veto power we can exercise is to walk out. In nonviolent struggle, we hope we only exercise that option when there is clear evidence of dirty tricks that make honest negotiation impossible. Otherwise, keeping all parties at the table, with or without third party neutrals (mediators of some type) is crucial.

Getting to the table is the first goal, of course. Gandhi discovered and the US Civil Rights movement improved upon the methods by which that is accomplished using nonviolence. And once there, understanding that the power exercised by the contending parties is not symmetrical means we can continue to explain that with great transparency to our side and their's. This builds both a new framework of perception and the trust required for that framework to function. It looks from the outside casual observer like a chimera, a completely counterintuitive arrangement, until we properly explain what is going on right in front of the world. That frankness, so reactively avoided in most negotiation, can be our strength, because as we build trust we build knowledge and we create collective memories on our culture of nonviolence.

These dynamics are being dissected and displayed more and more in our academic research on the power of nonviolence and the strategies of negotiation. The race is on, since violent conflict has become the greatest problem on Earth and the two solutions are nonviolence and constructive conflict transformation, linked. How else are we going to solve the evisceration of our ecology and our economy, the two bulwarks of sustainability for all societies? Military solution is an oxymoron, since the mere preparation for success is demonstrably fatal to the ecos, the home (the Greek root of both economy and ecology).

Time for a new homeland security.

References

Zartman, I. William (2009). Conflict resolution and negotiation. In Bercovitch, Jacob; Kremenyuk, Victor; & Zartman, I. William (Eds.). The Sage handbook of conflict. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p.p. 322-339.

Tea Party and Reform Party of Canada

CNN is running a story about how the Tea Party movement and the Reform Party of Canada share some traits in how the right has been shaken.

Preston Manning is quoted widely in the story.

I was in Florida in April and saw the Tea Party with its protest signs about how Barack Obama was not born in America. It was one of the more milder signs I saw.

The Tea Party is going after any person on the right who is not deemed right enough. The result could be that Independents and moderate Republicans might not have a home in the party. It is difficult to say whether this will be an impediment to election fortunes in the U.S. where there are only two main parties. Still, if some on the right decide as Florida's governor has to run as independents, the right might find it splits the vote.

The Reform Party in Canada had a hard time escaping from the narrow politics it had staked out. The party eventually killed off the Progressive Conservatives and I think it can be said that the present Conservative Party of Stephen Harper has no Red Tories or progressives in it. This allowed for a reunification of the right minus this significant component from past decades.

It isn't a reach to say that Harper will have a hard time ever reaching a majority so long as centrists remain uncomfortable with the more ideological aspects of Harper's government.

As far as the Tea Party goes in the U.S., the same desire for centrist politics could hurt the conservative movement from making long term, sustainable gains. The anger now about the recession could see Tea Party people nominated and even elected but hardcore right stances could result in their defeat just as quickly if they espouse racist or hyper intolerant views as some have in the past months.



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Being our natural selves

A dear friend told me recently, "We are naturally good. We worship together to remind ourselves of that."

We are indeed naturally good. And we are naturally indolent and greedy. Mostly, as humans, we exercise choice.

"He was forced to do that." "She had no choice." "All options were foreclosed."

While it is vital to acknowledge that many choices are very hard, they are still choices. Picking up a gun in the name of a religion or a country is a choice. It was even a choice when there was conscription. Sometimes getting in touch with our natural selves and dealing with the opposing internal tendencies reveals our real range of what is natural.

Violence is natural; nonviolence is natural. Regarding another human as the enemy is natural; regarding everyone as an ally or potential ally is part of our natural repertoire too.

Sigmund Freud felt war was natural; so did Albert Einstein and Konrad Lorenz. But Margaret Mead pointed out that, while war is natural, it is also invented and is a choice. Her 1940 essay on that, "Warfare is only an invention--not a biological necessity," was published in the academic journal Asia, and carved out the idea that rejected the deterministic or Marxist notions that we are so brutal we must go to war, or that war will be necessary until we change the structure of society to eliminate class. Instead, she looked at the record from an anthropological stance, a sort of forensic conflict approach that examined the literature on various extant groups of humans who practiced conflict in ways that were simply unique to their culture, each one revealing a new facet of human potential. She wrote about the Lepcha, Eskimos and others who simply have no word or concept for war. Some of the cultures without war are quite stratified, some settle individual conflict with violence, and the permutations are remarkable.

Mead's thoughts on this led to more thinking in her field and in others--she was a public intellectual, after all, and leapt disciplinary lines with impunity--and more creative and scientific evidence accrued. Eventually, scientists met at a conference in Seville, Spain, and drafted the Seville Statement, which simply says that we are hard-wired for choice, not pre-determined outcomes, in group-to-group conflict. Douglas Fry and others have written extensively on this since.

We can change our choices. We can move away from war. It is not pre-ordained that we do these godawful things to each other. We can do much better. It would be only natural.

References

Fry, D. P. (2006). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Mead, Margaret, "Warfare is only an invention--not a biological necessity," in Barash, D. P. (Ed.) (2010). Approaches to peace: A reader in Peace Studies (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

http://www.unesco.org/cpp/uk/declarations/seville.pdf

September 11 and Muslims

In 2001, 24 Canadians perished in the attacks that took place on September 11 in the U.S. A total of 2,974 died in Washington D.C., New York and Pennsylvania.

This September 11 will make 9 years since the event and raw emotions are still close to the surface even as construction takes place to build new office towers and a memorial. Part of the controversy in recent months is in regards to a mosque or Islamic cultural center which is a looking to build a few blocks from ground zero.

There was one Winnipegger killed on September 11. Dr. Christine Egan was a nurse and professor at the University of Manitoba. She lived nearby and by all accounts was an amazing person. She was at World Trade Center visiting her brother, an exec at Aon Corporation on the 105th floor when the planes hit. No one that high up above the impact site survived the attack.

Another Winnipegger affected by the attack was my high school friend Abby Carter. He husband Arron Dack was also at World Trade Center when the first plane hit. He was able to call his wife shortly after the impact but was not able to escape below the impact site.

If anyone is to have a strong view about the Islamic cultural center, it might be Abby. This is what she said the other day.

When I first heard of the Mosque I thought “Good. What better way to teach tolerance on both sides of the coin?” Thoughts of it being “insensitive” to 9/11 family members did not enter my mind. I began to hear rumblings of how Muslims build mosques at the sites of their victories, but have discovered there are various interpretations of that understanding, one being that they build mosques at sites within crying distance of Muslims. Muslims were killed in the buildings too. Muslims have suffered from post 9/11 racism. So yes, building in a place of tears makes sense to me. Building within crying distance for all Americans makes sense to me. We are all finding ways of healing.

I think Abby is pretty incredible.



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National priorities

What blocks the US from instituting a nonviolent national policy toward others on this planet? Our devotion to violence and violent threat. Our military is fearsome and guarantees that we are hated by much of the world, feared by all, and that our ecology and economy are both in downward death spirals.

In the field of conflict resolution we are trained to look for win-win solutions, to examine how to construct possible conflict outcomes that can keep everyone satisfied, if not happy. We seldom say that two bodies of interests are mutually exclusive.

But this is the stalemate we find with the US military budget. It overwhelms and overshadows. It denies and steals. It hollows out everything else and it mandates massive pollution of our natural world even as it takes more and more from the possibilities of full employment, decent universal health care, education and environmental protection. The best source for analyzing this is the National Priorities Project. Spend some time on their website to gain the real numbers that they have made locally relevant.

Economists refer to this as 'opportunity costs,' that is, when we spend limited funds on one thing, we cannot spend those funds on another thing. The opportunities foreclosed by our US military budget are so great that they overshadow and yet are failing to inform our national discussion. It is as though we are stuck in the simplistic Ronald Reagan dictum, "Defense is not a budget issue."

Um, yes it is. And as overwhelming as it is to our economy--make no mistake, it is the root of our recession and unemployment--it is even more corrosive to how the rest of the world perceives us. That is how nonviolent conflict management is made impossible and is the primary source of the stalemate. We cannot be honest brokers of peace and have nearly 1,000 military bases on other peoples' sovereign soil. Everyone on Earth fears the US. What kind of country prefers respect based on fear rather than admiration?

Time to retake and remake our national image. That won't happen until we also solve our other economic problems, since it's all hooked to the military budget, the 1,000-pound gorilla in our living room.

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On the Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio program of 24 August, 2010, those millions of us who were listening to Army Col. Doug MacGregor (ret.) and Lieutenant Colonel Jay Stout (U.S. Marine Corps, Retired) might be forgiven for wondering if MacGregor is in danger of losing his pension and Stout is receiving a bonus for his participation.

MacGregor, as is his wont, critiqued the US military in many ways, though he clearly also loves it. One senses from any conversation with him that MacGregor relishes battle, and if he can't find one with the enemy he picks one with those who kept him from the enemy. I suspect host Neal Conan, a fawning admirer of anything military, chooses to bring on MacGregor for two reasons. One, he is colorful and blunt. Two, he has a great voice. Perfect guest for talk radio. MacGregor does not much veil his anger at his former commanding officers, and his enduring disgust with Norman Schwartzkopf was clear as he bemoaned what he recalled as the stalling and hesitating that allowed the Iraqi Republican Guard to escape the US military in 1991. His position in the military seemed to be second tier authority--he led significant numbers but major decisions were made above his level. As a warrior, he felt betrayed and still feels it sharply. He was also clear in the interview that those decisions cost the US dearly and will into the future.

Jay Stout, on the other hand, seems like the permanent manchild without discernible conscience and a love for risk-free killing. Listen or read the transcript to hear him talk of feeling fear until he realized that no one was going to shoot at him and then his attitude changes from fearful to fearsome, like any 14-year-old who fails to understand the consequences of his actions on the lives of human beings, but instead regards the entire enterprise of military action as an adolescent adventure and a game. He is giddy and remembers to tell us that, "So again, I think it's important to understand that then and now, the United States taxpayer is getting quite a bit of value for their defense dollar."

He was speaking about the training aviators receive. MacGregor was referring to overal costs of decisions made at both top military and top political levels. Stout is convinced that the billions lavished on training flights is a great value and MacGregor is sure that the trillions spent since Gulf War I were unnecessary.

The tradeoffs, of course, are never adequately discussed on national media. What if we cut military spending by two-thirds and took a small portion of the enormous savings for nonviolent conflict management and the rest to shore up our economy and social safety net?

The National Priorities Project does the best work on this entire array of analytical challenges. Subscribe to their low volume, high quality email digest for bombproof data and particularized tools that allow you to look at what your state or even your city spends on war and gets in return. The information boils down to factual documentation that can be used at the national, state and local level to help bring all elected officials into this conversation, since all have a visible and quantifiable stake--or at least their constituents to, and the idea is to help enliven and empower our democracy with usable and crucial information.

I like MacGregor. I am not a violent warrior and I would disagree with him about the use of violence, but his frank and honest appraisal of situations looking at his version of the big picture is genuine and informed, if completely "politically incorrect." His disdain for all Arab military is over the top, but when I brought him to Portland to help us think about Iraq he summed it all up by saying that, at some point, we will leave Iraq, there will be a period of violence, and a strongman or authoritarian coalition will take power and there will be a new stability, the way it has happened for a long time. Every time outsiders try to change that, they simply destabilize it, more lives are lost, and the final result is predictable. His beef was not that the US drove Saddam out of Kuwait but that we occupied Iraq, something he rightly saw as totally futile.

Nonviolence based on measures of human security instead of national security in the interests of gain for profiteers is our only hope for the future. Mother Nature and the bulk of humanity are no longer willing or able to wait for America to get that, and the natural consequences of our failure to transform our approach to international relations will be more and more severe the longer it takes us. Time to get involved.