A-conferencing we will go....

Well, here I am again, at yet another conference. I refer you to my earlier post (April 11/06) where I pontificated on conference basics that everyone leaves with:

1) Feel the love.
2) Be the change.
3) The moment is now.

Seems to hold true yet again. Arun Gandhi spoke to us today about non-violence. A lovely man, grandson to Mahatma, bringing with him a gentle message of hope. Standing ovation all round. But I have to admit I didn't agree with everything he had to say. Hard to disagree with such a cultural icon, but then again, I never said my life would be easy. I was particularly struck by his view that we are not born violent - it is a learnt behaviour. That's why we need all these military schools and army drills. I would disagree. I think we need these schools and drills to learn to kill more effectively and efficiently, in a more organized manner. Our fight or flight reactions are still very close to the surface, and we can lose our veneer of civility very, very quickly. Witness New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When our comfy structures collapse around us, survival mechanisms click in pronto. Survival of the fittest - dog eat dog and cat eat dog too.

So am I still being wooed by conference messages of hope? I would say yes, but perhaps I have brought a more critical analysis to this one than the last.

Seems I'm not ready to start humming Kumbaya quite yet.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm not so sure. Maybe some babies are afflicted with violence from the get go, but I don't think so.

Here's my theory ... we're all born with a fairly unique nervous network which (from the time of conception) receives & registers a myriad impulses from whatever context we're in. Depending on the nature of the receiver and also the nature / intensity of impulse, each of us reacts a little bit differently each time, and of course the results are cumulative. Many of us become violent because we are bombarded with continuous assaults (psychic, physical and emotional) and so the patterns are set. The thing is they can be set very early in life and then we go about our daily lives completely unaware just how violent we are. And so the pattern repeats, reinforces the assaults on our own nature and registers as assaults on others we encounter.

The good news? We can learn to be fully aware of our own violence (however 'benign' it may be)and we can learn to generate peaceful ways of being. That's what the Mahatma learned to do and why he is, as you say, a cultural icon. Hard work, though!
Anonymous said…
Thanks. Now I've got Kumbaya stuck in my head.

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