Pillars of Peace

Expanded Definitions

Compassion

Compassion springs from the heart and helps us to understand the suffering and needs of others. Many great thinkers have sought to define compassion and find their work to be driven by a compassion for others. Compassion, beyond the dictionary definition, is a motivation to provide sustenance, to provide warmth and human kindness, to lift up others. We can reach out to others every day and make them feel welcome with a greeting, with a small smile and conversation with sharing of food and supportive words. Applying compassion more broadly involves speaking respectfully to individuals or groups, recognizing that each culture has value, has a code of morals, and members are deserving of respect.

Antinomic Thinking

Antinomic Thinking comprises the concept of holding two or more possibilities (or sets of values) in mind; it can be applied in the realm of making Peace more resilient. How can we see that our values are as important to us as the values of those in a different society are just as important to them? This viewpoint applies to everyday values such as working to support your family, providing your children with an education, ensuring people are safe on the streets. And it applies to addressing struggles from poverty to crime to general happiness. On an individual basis, this approach is akin to John Koenig’s “sonder,” which is a word to capture the fact that others are leading a life as deeply meaningful (to them) and complex as each of us are. More broadly, the question is: can we see different societal models as different but acceptable? Can we see people in different communities as different but valued, in their eyes and in our eyes.

Respect for Individuals

Recognition of Respect for Individuals is something we can all strive for. 

The story of the Good Samaritan illustrates an example where a Samaritan lifts up a sick and injured person on the street; that sick person is not a Samaritan. But operating from the heart, the Samaritan reaches out and takes care of another individual from a different community. The Samaritan recognizes the humanity of the other person and acts on it, making the injured person well because they recognize that we are all deserving of help in our time of need. In the context of homeless people, we have countless people living on the streets of our cities around the world. Some people support them with a few coins, others through donations to charities which feed and clothe and shelter the homeless, others provide direct service by feeding them either through organizations or through “adopting” an individual. These actions, in recognizing the humanity of others, demonstrate true respect for individuals.

Some people are incapable of recognizing the humanity of others who are dirty and sleeping in doorways, whereas, some people are capable of recognizing human family lines across societal and economic boundaries.  Broadening this concept of Respect for Individuals permits us to recognize the humanity of people in different societies. That simple recognition, will permit us to strengthen the ties across societal borders.

Border Porosity

Border Porosity refers to how easily one can traverse a border.

Our thesis is that more porous borders result in a state for more reduced tensions on both sides. 

Some borders have people streaming across them every day where there might be no visible demarcation. Some borders require identification, but have hundreds or thousands of people crossing in both directions every day. We see those people transiting daily for school or work or transport of goods, then home again at night. The United States/Mexico border is like this at major metropolitan junctions from San Diego, California to Houston, Texas. And despite the political uproar over illegal migration, tens of thousands of people legally cross this very long border every day. 

Tight borders prevent easy transition between communities, leading to a locked in disparity between peoples. We have seen tensions grow in the vicinity of these borders. Strong examples including the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany, the strong apartheid-enforcing borders between the main South African cities and the Townships, the fences separating Israel and Palestinian territories. These three examples demonstrate impermeable borders that result in a brittle border across which disparities grow over time. Eventually, there is a breaking point and the border falls, but only after untold suffering, overwhelming poverty and death, typically on one side of the border.

Respect for the rights of individuals - no matter who they are - allows us to prevent the disparities and the ultimate buildup of tensions across borders. Respect for individuals can drive border porosity and ultimately a more relaxed relationship.

Promoting cross-border ties mitigates the buildup of tensions and ultimately shores up Peace. Most of these interactions are informal and “beneath the radar” of the global media and international politics, so it is difficult to see them on a global scale.

California is a good example of strong cross-border ties. The Tijuana/San Diego cross-border flow is local and primarily routine, so typically goes unnoticed, but I contend that this adds tremendous stability to the region, promoting a great degree of respect for individuals. Ultimately, this permits the acceptance of mixed communities, with strong Latino/American flavors in everyday life. 

Some friends in Argentina have described the Statue of Liberty as the main symbol of the United States. Being from New York, where the statue sits in the harbor south of Manhattan, and off of Ellis Island (where both my grandfathers entered the country from Italy as children), the statue is a powerful symbol for our family and immigrant communities of NY. These symbols and ties across borders keep the world connected and help mitigate the opportunity for conflict.

Compassion+

Compassion+ is based on respect for all human beings, no matter our background, our ancestry, our religious practices, our role in our individual society. It is an expanded, pro-active view of compassion. We wish to broaden our definition of compassion to all people whether they reside in our neighborhood or not, whether their circumstances are better or less than ours. 

Compassion can flow from the heart to all individuals in need. Compassion+ reaches across borders to others outside our community. And with an eye to the future, we can envision compassion reaching along future paths across the world. We can see when life starts to get tough, when a trickle of people are coming across our border to seek jobs, food, opportunity. As humans, we can start to imagine what things might look like in a future with less hope, less resources, less food. If we reach out today with compassion to a future need, we effectively add elasticity across time, thus extending a time of peace and tranquility and neighborliness.

Compassion+ is an active compassion. Rather than just being compassionate to the person in front of you, we ask that you reach out. It takes an effort to step across the street, through a border crossing, across an ocean to reach out. Through these approaches, we can make that Peace - for all of us - more resilient.

Principles of Peace

The Principles of Peace are intended to build a mindset upon which one can act to strengthen the Resilient Peace house/infrastructure. The principles are simple in construction and are meant to strengthen Peace, in aggregate. They are meant to be interpreted and acted upon in our everyday lives. They can be applied in individual situations or within groups in the community. They can be used to drive love and compassion for all individuals and to promote and strengthen Peace where there is the potential for the lessening of Peace. They are meant to drive harmony and respect. 

  1. Strengthen Peace and understanding within a community and across community boundaries

  2. Cross boundaries while respecting them. By crossing boundaries, one creates and strengthens human ties. When you encounter a wall, walk through it with good intent.

  3. Share human warmth and kindness whether through a meal, a warm bowl of oatmeal or some coins.

  4. Reach out with human kindness, warmth in tone, a simple presence, supportive words.

  5. The Earth: share resources. The wind, the water, the land and nature - these are all connected across our human boundaries, and they connect us.

  6. Stand up to power to fight oppression, help lift up those with little power.

  7. Pursue Gandhi’s Ahimsa (non-violence); learn it and practice it.

  8. Provide the tools to help the oppressed stand on their own to survive and feel hope

Non-violence

Practicing Non-Violence to shore up a loving approach:

Thomas Merton writes of Gandhi’s Ahimsa (non-violence) as a basic law of our being. “Since non-violence is in man’s nature itself, it can be learned by all, though Gandhi is careful to state that he does not expect everyone to practice it perfectly. However, all men (people) should be willing to engage in the risk and wager of ahimsa because violent policies have not only proved bankrupt but threaten man with extinction.”

While the whole Resilient Peace structure is meant as a constructive process to shore up Peace, there are people who oppose some of our core beliefs. Consider the US border with Mexico across which many Latin Americans flow. While some Samaritan-style groups support the migrants with food and water and care, there are those who lump the migrants in with drug dealers and violent intruders. These groups which actively oppose the migrants do use violent methods and they need to be avoided in our struggles. We use the term “avoid” or “resist” to mean acting only through societal structures, including law enforcement and courts. 

We refuse to use violent means ourselves for it undermines our whole humanitarian and loving approach to respecting the rights of individuals and to building strong cross-border ties.