The new peace movement calls for healing wounds from the inside out and then cultivating a culture of peace on that basis. The new emphasis is a huge contribution to changing the entire game, since the underlying principles of new-paradigm peacemaking are: Healer, heal thyself and Peacemaker, be peace.
If societies are to heal, they need to examine their attitudes… The ranks of peace workers includes parents, students, teachers, scientists, engineers, scholars, artists, journalists, musicians, social workers, therapists, health professionals, business people, legal professionals, the clergy and spiritual teachers, for all of us are capable of working on the front lines of attitudinal shift and societal transformation.
Peace has the capacity to frame a worldview that supports healing the wounds incurred in our evolutionary story. Embedded in this vision is the notion that we are more than a collection of individuals forced to compete with one another for limited resources. “The survival of the fittest” can be true only if fitness is redefined to mean the most loving, caring, and compassionate. Since science has begun to affirm that these qualities are indeed the ones that match up with wellness and longevity, as well as evolutionary resiliency, we can get beyond the charge that those who think this way are crackpot idealists.
The wound that blocks peacebuilding ideas and ridicules them
as naïve is a deep and seemingly impenetrable cynicism. Cynicism is wounded
idealism, banished hope, and subservience to a false compromise that demands we
knuckle under to the so-called reality of the way things are. Cynicism is
characterized by negative and self-limiting ideas that build walls around a
garden of bitterness and frustrated desires.
At the heart of much of our wounding is the cynical
marketing of otherness. Reasonable
disagreement is deliberately pushed to extremes so that certain parties can
benefit from the polarization. Negative stereotypes flourish in this kind of
environment. The cynic manipulates differences to exacerbate conflicts, while
the peacemaker looks to create dialogue and collaboration where possible. One
breeds an atmosphere of disrespect and distrust; the other takes the long road
to nurturing respect and building trust… In the end, cynicism breeds a world of
haves and have-nots to feed the vacuum created by the loss of faith in human
evolution.
When materialist fixations become an effective surrogate for
the deeper reality of who we are as human beings – with our need for love,
bonding, and acceptance – we create a world wound that threatens the very
essence of the human enterprise. The beauty of the concept of a culture of
peace is that it is understood that we have to re-create community based on
human values and needs rather than on the consumption of stuff or the competition
for dominance.
The peace movement urgently needs to develop strategies to
recruit emotionally intelligent and morally evolved people to run for political
office.Peacemaking has increasingly directed work toward healing multiple forms of trauma… I deeply admire professionals who defy every form of cynicism to demonstrate that we can heal the bitterest of wounds.
If victims fail to release their sense of victimization, they can end up reenacting their wound or projecting it onto others. Imagine a world without the intergenerational transfer of wounding and what that would mean for peace.
At the root of multiple levels of wounding is dehumanization, where ideology comes first, or dogma comes first, or materialist achievement comes first – anything but the sacred value of an individual and the power to transform even the deepest wounding. Revaluing this deep identity in all human beings is at the heart of the contemporary peace movement. That perspective alone permits us to unify in a spiritual movement, a movement within the evolution of consciousness itself rather than one with exclusively political objectives.
Taken from Cultivating
Peace: Becoming a 21st-Century Peace Ambassador
By James O’Dea
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