Sharing stories instead of just knowledge and logic is what will lead us to peace and a healthier human community.  I have been waiting and looking for that kind of post from a guest blogger, and I received it today:

Uri Avnery                                                                                    April 20, 2013

                                             In Praise of Emotion

IT WAS a moving experience. Moments that spoke not only to the mind, but also – and foremost – to the heart.

Last Sunday, on the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day for the fallen in our wars, I was invited to an event organized by the activist group Combatants for Peace and the Forum of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Parents.

The first surprise was that it took place at all. In the general atmosphere of discouragement of the Israeli peace camp after the recent elections, when almost no one dared even to mention the word peace, such an event was heartening.

The second surprise was its size. It took place in one of the biggest halls in the country, Hangar 10 in Tel-Aviv’s fair grounds. It holds more than 2000 seats. A quarter of an hour before the starting time, attendance was depressingly sparse. Half an hour later, it was choke full. (Whatever the many virtues of the peace camp, punctuality is not among them.)

The third surprise was the composition of the audience. There were quite a lot of white-haired old-timers, including myself, but the great majority was composed of young people, at least half of them young women. Energetic, matter-of-fact youngsters, very Israeli.

I felt as if I was in a relay race. My generation passing the baton on to the next. The race continues.

BUT THE outstanding feature of the event was, of course, its content. Israelis and Palestinians were mourning together for their dead sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, victims of the conflict and wars, occupation and resistance (a.k.a. terror.)

An Arab villager spoke quietly of his daughter, killed by a soldier on her way to school. A Jewish mother spoke of her soldier son, killed in one of the wars. All in a subdued voice. Without pathos. Some spoke Hebrew, some Arabic. 

They spoke of their first reaction after their loss, the feelings of hatred, the thirst for revenge. And then the slow change of heart. The understanding that the parents on the other side, the Enemy, felt  exactly like them, that their loss, their mourning, their bereavement was exactly as their own.

For years now, bereaved parents of both sides have been meeting regularly to find solace in each other’s company. Among all the peace groups acting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are, perhaps, the most heart-lifting.

IT WAS not easy for the Arab partners to get to this meeting. At first, they were denied permission by the army to enter Israel. Gabi Lasky, the indomitable advocate of many peace groups (including Gush Shalom), had to threaten with an application to the Supreme Court, just to obtain a limited concession: 45 Palestinians from the West Bank were allowed to attend.

(It is a routine measure of the occupation: before every Jewish holiday the West Bank is completely cut off from Israel – except for the settlers, of course. This is how most Palestinians become acquainted with Jewish holidays.)

What was so special about the event was that the Israeli-Arab fraternization took place on a purely human level, without political speeches, without the slogans which have become, frankly, a bit stale.

For two hours, we were all engulfed by human emotions, by a profound feeling for each other. And it felt good.

I AM writing this to make a point that I feel very strongly about: the importance of emotions in the struggle for peace.

I am not a very emotional person myself. But I am acutely conscious of the place of emotions in the political struggle. I am proud of having coined the phrase “In politics, it is irrational to ignore the irrational.” Or, if you prefer, “in politics, it is rational to accept the irrational.”

This is a major weakness of the Israeli peace movement. It is exceedingly rational – indeed, perhaps too rational. We can easily prove that Israel needs peace, that without peace we are doomed to become an apartheid state, if not worse. 

All over the world, leftists are more sober than rightists. When the leftists are propounding a logical argument for peace, reconciliation with former enemies, social equality and help for the disadvantaged, the rightists answer with a volley of emotional and irrational slogans.

But masses of people are not moved by logic. They are moved by their feelings.

One expression of feelings – and a generator of feelings – is the language of songs. One can gauge the intensity of a movement by its melodies. Who can imagine the marches of Martin Luther King without “We shall overcome”? Who can think about the Irish struggle without its many beautiful songs? Or the October revolution without its host of rousing melodies?

The Israeli peace movement has produced one single song: a sad appeal of the dead to the living. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated within minutes of singing it, its blood-stained text found on his body. But all the many writers and composers of the peace movement have not produced one single rousing anthem – while the hate-mongers can draw on a wealth of religious and nationalist hymns.

IT IS said that one does not have to like one’s adversary in order to make peace with them. One makes peace with the enemy, as we all have declaimed hundreds of times. The enemy is the person you hate.

I have never quite believed in that, and the older I get, the less I do. 

True, one cannot expect millions of people on both sides to love each other. But the core of peace-makers, the pioneers, cannot fulfill their tasks if there is not an element of mutual sympathy between them.

A certain type of Israeli peace activist does not accept this truism. Sometimes one has the feeling that they truly want peace – but not really with the Arabs. They love peace, because they love themselves. They stand before a mirror and tell themselves: Look how wonderful I am! How humane! How moral!

I remember how much animosity I aroused in certain progressive circles when I created our peace symbol: the crossed flags of Israel and Palestine. When one of us raised this emblem at a Peace Now demonstration in the late eighties, it caused a scandal. He was rudely asked to leave, and the movement publicly apologized.

To give an impetus to a real peace movement, you have to imbue it with the spirit of empathy for the other side. You must have a feeling for their humanity, their culture, their narrative, their aspirations, their fears, their hopes. And that applies, of course, to both sides.

Nothing can be more damaging to the chances of peace than the activity of fanatical pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians abroad, who think that they are helping their preferred side by demonizing the other. You don’t make peace with demons.

FRATERNIZATION BETWEEN Palestinians and Israelis is a must. No peace movement can succeed without it.

And here we came to a painful paradox: the more this fraternization is needed, the less there is.

During the last few years, there has been a growing estrangement between the two sides. Yasser Arafat was very conscious of the need for contact, and did much to further it. (I constantly urged him to do more.) Since his death, this effort has receded.

On the Israeli side, peace efforts have become less and less popular. Fraternization takes place every week in Bil’in and on many other battlefields, but the major peace organizations are not too eager to meet.

On the Palestinian side there is a lot of resentment, a (justified) feeling that the Israeli peace movement has not delivered. Worse, that joint public meetings could be considered by the Palestinian masses as a form of “normalization” with Israel, something like collaboration with the enemy.

This must be changed. Only large-scale, public and heart-felt cooperation between the peace movements of the two sides can convince the public – on both sides – that peace is possible.

THESE THOUGHTS were running through my head as I listened to the simple words of Palestinians and Israelis in that big remembrance meeting.

It was all there: the spirit, the emotion, the empathy, the cooperation.

It was a human moment. That’s how it all starts.

Philip W did not have a good start.  He was born too early, fourth baby to a mother who had been pregnant almost as many years as she had been married (when those two went together). Philip’s siblings had just or were just learning to speak, and did so all at the same time, clamoring for attention like baby birds for the mother’s worm. The premature little Philip could not chirp loud enough or reach the top of the nest.  The others stepped on him to get closer to the mother. As a result, he didn’t learn to speak properly and could only stutter.

Stuttering is a cry for help: “P p p p p p p please   v v v v v  v v village,  g g g g g g give   mmm m m me  a   ch ch ch ch chance   t t t t t to    j j j j join.”  The mama bird did respond, sought support and gave Philip a chance to sing in the choir.

In spite of his late start, Philip soared and flew circles around his siblings and classmates, excelling, especially, in storytelling and comic relief. He and his dimples could charm himself out of almost all trouble, and he became adventuresome and seemingly fearless.  Being the fifth born and over two years younger, I met Philip, after he had recovered from stuttering, and had only known him as an accomplished storyteller, wit and strong athlete. Learning of his early struggles helped me to see why he regularly rescued underdogs.

I remember when he was twelve and became one of the two biggest students in sixth grade. He was the funniest, brightest and tied for the strongest, winning the alpha position at that school.  Poor little Eddy Spivak sat in the opposite corner, the scrawniest and most teased kid in class.  Philip swooped to the opposite side of the room and befriended Eddy, accompanying him everywhere, providing immediate relief and protection.

Today is Philip’s birthday.  He would be sixty-one if he hadn’t died tragically at thirty-seven. He both entered and left this world prematurely.

I have many stories of how Philip used his strength, especially his humor, for others. What chimes deep within me is without humor, without storytelling and without charm.  Philip and I were standing shoulder to shoulder on a crowded bus in San Francisco, surrounded by teetering people.  When the bus suddenly lurched, Philip’s arms and body were immediately around me, holding and cushioning me.  All of his eloquent, witty or humorous words had never communicated his love for me so directly as that simple reflex.

The number of years that a body lasts is not as important as how it is used.  The Philip stories of strength and laughter that live on are the ones that serve others.

by Leah Zani

I am an anthropologist just beginning a research project on disability in the Lao PDR, a country in Southeast Asia that has experienced some of the most intense bombings in history. I am at the early part of my research project–everything I experience is new and fascinating. I am full of wonder for Lao.

In Lao, most people speak a combination of Lao, French, English, and local dialects. Working in a country where I do not speak the dominant language, I experience a very mundane kind of being langaugeless. I am unable to communicate through words, and must instead speak with people through gestures, smiles, and exchanges of gifts and money. Sometimes I use a translator, and notice, in fascination, how shared meanings emerge out of the collaboration between the speaker and the translator. Working in Lao has also inspired me to new kinds of language: for the first time in my career, I found myself writing my fieldnotes as poems. It may be that my experiences of being temporarily without language are making me engage with the world differently–and out of that engagement comes poetry. Here’s an example of one of my fieldpoems on being languageless:

Marking out cash on the counter
of an almost drug store
I have lost my language.
The shopkeeper and I communicate
through a currency that I cannot speak.
Somewhere on one corner of each bill
is a number I know how to say.
I cannot find it.
My tongue is caught in the turn
of the paper, the way my thumb and palm
occlude half the
edges as I press them into her hands.

The poem describes the multiple kinds of language that people use, and how even when we loose some kinds of language, we continue to use and develop others. I don’t speak Lao, but I still communicate with people through gestures, smiles, and gifts. Money, too, is a kind of language, a currency we speak through exchange.

Taking this idea of loss in language a step further, it might be appropriate to use this to understand disability in Lao, particularly how some survivors of UXO accidents talk differently after a bomb explosion. UXO stands for unexploded ordnance, the legacy of America’s Secret War in Lao in the 60′s and 70′s. Lao is the most bombed country in the world, per capita. America dropped a plane load of bombs every eight minutes for nine years. In total, this Secret bombing is equivalent to one hundred times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Since one-third of these bombs failed to explode during the war, meaning that Lao remains heavily contaminated with bombs today–nearly fifty years after the first bombs fell. More than half of the world’s UXO accidents occur here. Because of this context, disability in Lao is characterized by the successes and struggles of UXO survivors, people who have lost parts of their bodies rather than people born with different bodies. Generally, people are involved in UXO accidents with small cluster munitions, called bombis in the Lao language. These small bombs look like metal balls, spheres of fruit or nuts. Consequently, people involved in UXO accidents in Lao loose their upper limbs and upper senses: fingers, hands, arms, taste, eyesight, hearing, voice, lung functions, and feeling in their upper body.

What happens to language after an explosion, when your body has been radically changed by the blast? The key thing, in Lao, is that UXO survivors experience an immediate loss of language ability, rather than a born difference or a gradual change in their bodies. Focusing simply on gesture, my experience is that people continue to gesture in the ways they did before the explosion, except now they use invisible hands. And, often, people’s bodies are so evocative that I think I see their missing hands, too. In addition to having invisible hands, people acquire other kinds of hands as well: The delicate ends of people’s stumps become pointers and holders and gestures. Their new and different bodies acquire multiple ways of speaking after loss; some are previous habits and some are learned after the explosion. People learn to engage with the world differently. My hunch is that there are always multiple kinds of language layering a conversation: regional grammars and dialects, slang words, ways of talking, gestures, body positions… Loss might just reveal the complexity of these layers of languages while also prompting the addition of new layers.

Leah Zani is a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Irvine. This summer, she will continue fieldwork in Lao to learn more about victim assistance programs for UXO survivors. Any questions or feedback may be directed to her at lzani@uci.edu.

I love us.  We, people, are such funny creatures.

I’ve been indulging myself with early morning café work where I enjoy watching people those few minutes when I’m not working (yes, you’re right, many times it is a few minutes of work when I’m not watching others!).  I see myself and almost everyone pretending to be independent and separate as we choose separate, independent and private tables inches away from another separate, independent and private table.

After choosing a muffin, money that is considered to be earned independently is handed to the baker.  I see how people depend on not only their favorite muffin or bagel or croissant, but are nourished and encouraged by the familiar baker with her hair tied up and tucked out of the way, except that one strand which always manages to escape.  Their morning would not begin as well without her smile showing just half of two front teeth, followed by her cheerful “good morning.”

The persons walking out with paper bags warmed by fresh pastry to go stop to read the many announcements of human activity in town, coming to town or going to the next town. Then they hurry to their little private and separate box on wheels where they continue to pretend they are independent.  Soon after they join other boxes on the shared street, their necks tense reminding them that they have to be aware of and depend on others or someone will die from a collision with a fast, heavy, metal box.

I know that if the streets were empty, the walls were bare, and all the tables were empty, the fantasy of separateness would dissolve. You and I both know that without the baker’s face and smile, the muffin would not taste as sweet.  We do depend on each other.

For example, Zack Godshall, the director of the soon-to-be finished short documentary of A Man Without Words, described a morning a few days ago when he was caught up in some mental distractions, what I call the squirrel brain.

In Zack’s words:
I was walking home from work, a walk which has become rote, a matter of my muscles remembering the way, which in turn allows my brain to wander where it wills, sorting out problems and concerns, the re-editing of a scene, the conception of a new character, what to eat for dinner. On this particular day, I had gotten severely bogged down in worries about finances and bills and deadlines and if I had bought the right Christmas presents or not. My attention and vision had turned totally inward, but not the good kind of inward in which thoughts recede like outgoing tides, thus allowing one to react and interact freely and intuitively with the world, both in and out. This day’s inwardness functioned like a whirlpool, a kind of feedback loop – noise whirling upon itself, confusing itself with its own reflection, thus creating new distortions of noise, a vortex of refractions and distractions – the “squirrel brain,” as Susan calls it.

I had just begun to cross the street where I always do, at the halfway point between work and home, right between a dingy college bar and an old record store. That’s when I noticed him. But it was too late to change directions. Having been so focused on my worries, I didn’t see him, otherwise I may have crossed a little further down the block. I wasn’t afraid of this guy, but I wanted to continue to wallow in my own anxieties.

By all appearances, he was just emerging from the bar after the previous evening, on the tail end of a twelve-hour bender, a bender which may or may not have included, though likely did, a handful of bar fights and blackouts. He was sweeping trash and dirt from the sidewalk in front of the bar, and as I stepped into the street and looked up, he already had me in his sights. He stopped sweeping to watch me as I approached his side of the street. Too late to change my course, I knew a confrontation of some kind awaited me in the future some few seconds away, even if it were nothing more than a polite hello, though this guy looked as if he hadn’t been polite in years.

Before I stepped onto the opposite sidewalk just in front of the bar, he grinned, showing me his two front teeth, one capped black, the other silver. Then he laughed, and as he tilted his head back for a split second, I saw an elaborate half-finished tattoo on his neck – the stencil of a wave done in the Japanese style of the 19th century, tall and white-capping just under his right ear.

“Come on, man!” He looked me in the eye and shook his head, still smiling. “You gotta smile! Some people didn’t wake up this morning. You gotta be thankful you alive, man.”

Immediately, the feedback loop was broken. Tension left my body and mind, and a certain calm and ease washed over me. I smiled immediately. (Was that all it took?!) How absurd it all was – my own noise reflecting and refracting back upon itself. I laughed at myself and thanked the man. “No problem,” he replied, as if he completely understood the gravity of the duty he had just performed, that he knew he had just given me a gift and buoyed me up. And what had I given him for it in return? My gratitude? All I did was say, “Thank you.”

As I walked the rest of the way home, I thought how a gesture not only communicates something, but how a gesture becomes part of the fabric of the world, part of the fabric of any community, the ground where two individuals meet and participate in some kind of exchange, some kind of sharing. I thought how something as simple as a smile can re-create the world and re-create relationships. If any encounter is an exchange, might we consider more carefully what we exchange and how we exchange it? Yet the irony is, if we expect and hope for a return on our investment in this exchange, we have then undermined the supposed sharing nature of this creative economy. There is no gift but the one that is given freely. Receiving, too, is a gift. And any gift given to another is also a gift to oneself. What we express has already taken root and continues to grow in us, long after we have given it away. We share more than can be counted.