Conflict and Life..."blessed are the peacemakers" By Ben Boothe, Sr.
After writing Global Perspective articles for 20 years I find that many of the issues are similar, often almost identical to matters we faced years ago.
- We have cultural conflicts. Religion vs Religion. Within religious people there are those who are legalistic fundamentalists, and there are grace oriented intellectuals.
- Educated and affluent people vs uneducated poor people.
- We see political liberals, thinkers, humanists, vs conservatives, rule bound and legalist reactionaries.
- We have some religious people that believe that most people are going to Hell, others who believe a God of love would not allow a Hell.
- Old vs young.
- Male vs female
- Rich vs poor
- Power mongers, corporate giants vs small business and simple citizens
- Farmers vs city folk
- Peace activists vs red necks
- People who love civilization and people who delight in creating destruction and anarchy.
- Unhappy campers who disguise their anger in terms of religion, poverty, discrimination, or just persecution.
On an on it goes. What are we to do with all of this conflict? I met a man once who was angry with me. He tried to beat me up with a baseball bat. Now I am not a physically trained fighter. He was bigger than I was. But somehow I managed to take his baseball bat from him and throw him out of the house.
He was so unhappy. I have followed his life over the years, and where ever he goes, whoever he is with, he is still angry. When he enters a room the darkness is felt by everyone. He sucks the joy out of the air. People like that can be dangerous to the rest of society. And our angry people can pop up at the strangest places. I spoke for the world's largest Rotary Club in Mumbai, India. They meet in a grand ballroom at the most famous hotel in Mumbai. There I sat with the American Consul, and the wife of the President of the biggest corporation in India. It was of particular interest to me to see the reports, sometime later of a group from Pakistan going into that very same building, while shooting guns and burning rooms. On another trip I was in Cambodia when Pol Pots remaining soldiers came into the capital city to negotiate a surrender. When I went back to my hotel for lunch, they had it surrounded and were pointing AK-47's in the air. I decided to take my lunch elsewhere. Unhappy people can show up in the strangest places.
But you know, happy people are in surprising places as well. In one of the poorest places on earth I visited a rice paddy in Bangladesh. There was a small circle of grass huts where the wives lived, while the husbands worked the rice. There women were laughing, carrying water, and one had started a new business. She had borrowed $90 and purchased a cell phone. She charged people to use her telephone. She was a single handed phone company, with the only phone in town and she charged 25 cents per call. She was so proud of her success that she insisted that I hang around until her daughter got home from school. Soon her daughter, in a neat school uniform and carrying books in a back pack hiked up the trail to the grass hut. Her mom said: "This phone paid for my daughter's clothes and her books, and look at her. She has a better future than I have." she laughed as she said those words. I later learned that her husband got drunk every day and that their life had been difficult. But this brave woman and her lovely daughter had found happiness and joy, because they were working together for the future.
In India I had hitched a ride on an old tractor pulled flat be trailer. As the "put put put" of the old tractor pulled the trailer down the "silk road" highway, I saw a man, standing in mud up to his waist, behind an Ox, planting rice. He was smiling and singing. I was so astonished that a half naked man, with no shoes, covered with mud, could be so happy, that I jumped off of the trailer and slogged out through the rice paddy and took his photo. I blew it up and it is hanging on one of my walls. A poor, muddy man standing in mud and water, smiling at me as if he had won the lottery. Many a time when I have felt hurt or discouraged his photo has encouraged and refreshed my spirit.
During my high school years I read Aristotle, Moses, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peal, and pondered how one could find happiness. It seemed that an important goal of life was to be happy. I finally figured that to be happy one had to live or give a portion, perhaps his entire life to helping others. I decided to try to live with a smile and encourage others. Buddhists in old Tibet would later tell me that they called that a life of "compassion". My Christian friends called it "brotherhood kindness". But often it is difficult to know what to do, how to balance it, and do it appropriately.
When I was in the 4th grade, our school had a program and all of us kids memorized a verse. We went out on stage, one by one, and stood in front of an auditorium of parents and family friends. In those days it was still ok to do a Bible verse in a secular public school. My verse was: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the Children of God." I saw the face of my mother in the audience smiling as I quoted it.
Perhaps if more of us, would act like God's children, some of those conflicts would go away.