“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.”
–Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301
I wish I could find a more coherent way to talk about this, about the complex set of emotions I feel in wearing a poppy and believing in peace. Joseph Boyden’s quote reminds me about the humanity that is at war. Whenever humans are involved in something, it’s never simple, so bear with me. I am trying to write about something that lives strongly in my heart, and heart language and word language are different beasts…
Rememberance Day is coming and I choose to remember the men and women that I am paying to fight in Afghanistan. I am not a friend of war, and especially not a friend of this one, and I desperately wish for these men and women that if they have to confront these two fronts that it be rather in the service of a better story than the one we are being told about terror.
Every year at this time I have a deep remembering of the First World War, the Great War, in which Canadian boys – officially children – signed up to fight for honour and die insanely on the fields of France and Belgium. The 20th century produced a brief period where war went from professional skirmishes, to massive conflicts between amateurs and willing volunteers to its current shape – the slaughter of civilians by professional armies. Soldiers die in these conflicts but not in anything like the proportion of civilians that die. It is innocents who are mostly killed now in Iraq and Sudan and Colombia and Afgahnistan.
And why?
The sooner we can bring our young men and women home from central Asia, the better. I have no doubt that they feel like their mission is noble and important. My wish for them is that we as a country find a better use for that willingness to do the dirty work of doing good. They are willing to kill and die for us. They are willing to suffer the inflictions of fighting on these deeply personal fronts to be of service. It is a screwy way to be in the world, but what higher calling can there be than be prepared to offer your life to an ideal?
What else could we ask them to do? What do we wish for them when they come home to their families full of the residue of those killing fields? Even those of us who oppose this war must remember them.
My call for us to leave Afghanistan is not a call to run scared from a foe. It is rather a call for a reasoned use of our troops. There is no exit strategy for this war (and I doubt whether we even have a foe there that we wouldn’t have if we weren’t there). Our political leadership has refused to ever contemnplate negotiating with the enemy. Even at the end of World War ii we negotiated with the enemy. If you refuse to talk to the enemy, you are committing yourself to fight until either of you are dead. We will never kill every Taliban soldier. For thousands of years, Afghans have fought and defended their lands. Are we going to “win?” And what does “win” mean? And anyway, just what are the conditions under which we will leave Afghanistan?
Committing the lives of young people to a mission so vague and hopeless as this, without supporting the troops by telling them what set of conditions they are fighting for borders on criminal in my opinion. And so I wear a poppy today to remember the soldiers that we have sent there to fight a hopeless war with no prospect of victory. They will not return having vanquished a foe, decorated and lauded for using force to defend a true threat to our country and way of life. You will not see scenes like we saw at the end of the last century’s wars when our troops came back having won, having liberated people who were forced beneath the jackboots of facism. We will be bringing home brave and promising Canadians who have fought for a political cause and have suffered life long scars for poll points, opinions and home front glory for those too scared to go themselves.
This is also not to doubt the work that our soldiers are doing. There is no doubt in my mind that it is possible to be in Afghanistan and do good work, and we are also doing that. But we could do it anywhere, and with much more effect. Why are we there?
I wear a poppy today to remember those that are caught in these conflicts – the innocents and those we pay – and to remember that when they come home we owe them wholeness and a responsibility to help them heal themselves from the wars that they fight, on both fronts.
More on the war:
- Previously argued on Parking Lot
- Afghanistan: Wrong Mission for Canada
- Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan
[tags]war, peace, rememberance day, poppy[/tags]
Photo by striatic
A colleague passed last week. Laurel Doersam was my co-host for the Open Space on Open Space in 2001 in Vancouver. We met originally when she sent me an email asking about Open Space and after connecting, she decided to go to Berlin in 2000 to OSonoS where she made the offer on behaf of the both of us to come to Vancouver in 2001.
Laurel ran the business end of the operation, which was not something either of us really had passion for, but she took it on and made sure we didn’t lose any money or any people that wanted to come. During the event itself I opened and closed space on the first and last days and she held space for the evening and morning news sessions, lending us a casual but intentional presence which supported the processing of the day’s work. After the conference was over, she hosted many friends including Lisa Heft, Nuran Yurgit and John Engle among others, showing them a little bit of BC and a lot of her heart and hospitality.
Shortly after OSonOS, Laurel was diagnosed with the cancer that took life last week. I heard from her a couple of times after OSonOS and tried to hook up with her and Rick the few times I was in Victoria, to no avail. I think the last time I saw her was actually at OSonOS, when I handed her a small gift of a medicine bundle to show my appreciation for her partnership in co-hosting the conference.
I have lost loved ones to cancer, and I know what Rick and Chelsea and the others are going through. I wish them peace and solace over the next weeks, months and years as Laurel’s spirit flies.
Here is a link to my opening comments at OSonOS IX in Vancouver. Laurel was there in the room with us all, as she is now.
[tags]Laurel Doersam[/tags]
“The secret of life is to have a question or task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day of your whole life and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!”
— Henry Moore
With thanks to my friend Patti DeSante, and also Michael Jones, who uses this quote in “Artful Leadership” (.pdf).
[tags]Henry Moore, Michael Jones, secret of life[/tags]
Photo of Henry Moore sculpture at Hakone Open Air Museum by Nemo’s Great Uncle
From my friend Roq Garreau:
“Visioning means imagining. At first generally, and then, with increasing specificity, what you really want. That is what you really want. Not what someone else has taught you to want and not what you have learned to settle for. Visioning means taking off all of the constraints of assumed feasibility, of disbelief and past disappointments and letting your mind dwell upon its most noble, treasured, uplifting dreams. Some people, especially young people, engage in visioning with enthusiasm and ease. Some people find the exercise of visioning painful because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people would never admit to their visions for fear of being thought impractical or unrealistic. They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience of the world that they can only stand to explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine, they are needed too. Vision does need to be balanced with skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe that it is possible for the world to envision its way to a sustainable future. Vision without action is useless, but action without vision does not know where to go or how to go there. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate action. More than that, vision when widely shared and firmly kept in sight brings into being new systems. We mean that literally. Within the physical limits of space, time, material and energy, visionary human intentions can bring forth not only new information, new behaviour, new knowledge and new technology, but eventually new social institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings. A sustainable world can never come into being if it cannot be envisioned. The vision must be built up from the contribution of many people before it is complete and compelling.”
— Meadows, Donnella H., Dennis L. Meadows and Jørgen Randers
I’ve had great occaision to think about this quote this week. Roq actually sent this to me and the mayor of the island we live on. Our mayor, Bob Turner, is a guy who is pretty committed to vision, to sustainability and to participation. Yesterday Bob and I were discussing the possibility of a group of us on Bowen Island co-hosting an ongoing “vision collaboratory” which would simply be a place in which Bowen Islanders would be allowed to dream and share good ideas free from the constraints of action plans, resources and even possibility. We could harvest from these conversations using a wiki, Google Earth and other tools to create a simple but powerful ideas bank.
Why would this be important? Because many people want to participate in the life and future of their community, but they don’t want to devote large amounts of time to the formal process, or they don’t have the large amounts of money that allow them to buy and develop parts of the island. Also, there is something incredibly valuable about unfettered dreaming. A vision of 100 years has the luxury of not needing to be perfect and can often provide inspiration and solid ideas for those working on shorter timeframes with more constraints.
And so it looks like that is one project about to take shape here on Bowen Island.
But this vision quote struck me on other levels too, arising out of the experience I had last week in Denver, Colorado where I went to open space at the Placematters 06 conference. I was surrounded by visionary planners and practitioners, including people like Lyman Orton, the founder of the Orton Family Foundation, Tim Erickson from e-democracy.org and folks who run all kinds of mapping projects, visualization tools and instant sketchup kinds of things to help others envision a sustainable world.
I’m inspired to put these tools to work here in my local community, and maybe we’ll learn something about that that can be shared with other people in other communities.
Practice visioning – be sustainable and creative.
[tags]sustainability, placematters06, vision, mapping[/tags]
I am pleased to announce the release of a small book I have been working on for the last three years. It is called “The Tao of Holding Space” and it is a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space. I started this book three years ago, when I began noting parallels between Lao Tzu’s words and my experience of leadership, facilitation and living in Open Space, something many of us have done. In some ways this book chronicles the essence of my own emergent practice of Open Space. In looking over it one more time, I realized that almost everything I know about Open Space is somehow distilled into these chapters
The book is to be shared, so feel free to pass it along and use it whereever that makes sense
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in English
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in Chinese