the obscenity of greed

 

“Displacement means the end of the family.” ~ Clemencia Carabali

There is something obscene about evicting whole communities, who have lived for centuries in a place, because someone wants the gold that can be mined from their land.

The sheer greed of it is only part of the obscenity. The other part is the collusion by the government–that entity which is supposed to protect its people.

This sort of greed is systematic, totally intentional and thoroughly unforgivable. It places no value on the very thing that civilized culture must value above all else– human life. It cares nothing for the lives that it will destroy, not only directly, but in generations to come. It divides the world into 2 groups — WE, who are worthy (and therefore, justified) and THEY, who are disposable. MY life is more valuable than YOUR life.

It is myopic in its view of long-term consequences, blinded by the short-term personal gain. It is methodical, organized, business-like, collective evil.

"Listen, you're going to die..."

The War We Are Living premiered last night on PBS, as the 4th installment in the series produced by Women War & Peace. The film follows several Colombian women fighting for their communities, their culture, their families and ultimately, for their lives. These women have stepped into the role of leaders to fight the Goliaths, drooling over the gold-rich land they live on.

Wayuu massacre

God wants me alive to help my people.

They are part of the largest group of displaced people outside of the Sudan. They live with death threats. They have had family members tortured and murdered before their eyes. They have had to leave the communities where they’ve lived their entire lives. Daily, they live in fear of the military, the paramilitaries, and the far-away government which decides their lives. At one point, their entire existence was denied. Greed has no shame.

Cauca, Colombia

But, they do not go gently into the night. Instead, they go to Washington DC, speak to congressional committees and convince the US to investigate their claims.

Ultimately, they won their war. With their testimonies, they drew US attention to their plight. Subsequently, the US let their government know that the nearly $700 million (American dollars) in foreign aid it receives annually will be in danger if it doesn’t attend to this problem. The Colombian government back-pedaled very quickly.

This is what is called, fighting fire with fire.

  ©2011 Stephanie Ericsson

Watch the entire film below, or go to  Women War & Peace, where you’ll also find the previous episodes as well as podcasts, articles and links. Women, War & Peace is a comprehensive global media initiative on the changing roles of women in war and peace.

The War We Are Living

Watch The War We Are Living on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

 

Next Tuesday, the final film in the 5-part series, War Redefined, will air on your local PBS station.

Watch War Redefined Promo on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

Check your local PBS for times.

More on Women War & Peace below…

Just scroll down for more blog posts about this remarkable 5-part series.

 

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war, women & columbia

fourth episode premieres tonight on PBS

 

Walk with two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women who are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community for centuries. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

Debora Barros tries to regain her composure as she stands in what was once her aunt’s home. Violent, sexually explicit graffiti directed at the Barros women now covers the walls.

The War We Are Living is the fourth film in the 5-part series produced by Woman War & Peace, challenging the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain.

The series reveals how the post-Cold War proliferation of small arms has changed the landscape of war, with women becoming primary targets and suffering unprecedented casualties.

Even as this reality emerges, women are simultaneously emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.

 

 The War We Are Living trailer

 

Watch The War We Are Living on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

 

Check your local PBS station listings for the time it’s on in your area. If you miss it tonight, check back in the next couple of days on Women War & Peace website, where you can watch all of the previous episodes.

 

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thwarted at every turn

Women, War & Peace Series

Afghan women need some serious miracles

Photograph Jalil Rezayee EPA

I have long wondered why women are so threatening to Muslim extremists and after watching Peace Unveiled, I confess, I still can’t fathom the reason. Perhaps this film would be more aptly named, Peace Veiled. The women profiled in it, courageously fighting for women’s rights in the peace negotiations with the Taliban, are thwarted at every turn. Warlords guilty of genocide are given amnesty for their crimes as they’re granted seats in the peace jirga while the women peacemakers are given only 7 seats out of 1600. It’s tantamount to a mouse trying to convince a pride of rogue lions that they really do have the right not to be eaten.

The history of women’s rights in Afghanistan plays out like a bad magic trick—now you see their rights—now you don’t. From 1919 until today, women are given rights one year, and deprived of them the next. They are shrouded and kept barefoot, pregnant and helpless for 4 decades, and then suddenly, the state declares equal rights for men and women. For the next 20 years, the burquas are thrown off, women are educated, work, go into politics until the 1980’s when the country begins sliding backwards. War with the Soviets and collapse of a cohesive government attracts mujahideen and the country becomes fractured until 1996, when the Taliban win power and impose Shariah Law. The burquas are put on again as the Taliban sends the entire population of women back to medieval subservience through the use of intimidation and terror. Terror that you will be beaten or even executed for such heinous offenses as smiling at a boy, rushing your injured baby to the doctor without a male relative or showing a patch of skin.

Yet, it is also important to emphasize that women’s advocates in Afghanistan are not necessarily looking for a symbolic representation or a slice of the power cake. What Afghan women are seeking goes far beyond conventional power-sharing. What they seek is, rather, a sustainable peace, based on foundations of a principled justice system in which law and order is dominant—indeed, in which law is the basis of order. Only such a system can ensure women’s active role in the society, in all fields from sociopolitical to economic to cultural. It is the same foundation of a sustainable peace that minority ethnic and religious communities require—except that, in the case of women, they actually are the majority. ~ Afghan Women at the Crossroads: Agents of Peace—Or Its Victims? Orzala Ashraf Nemat, A Century Foundation Report

Punishment for running away from husband

Afghan women are fighting for the right to contribute good to their country. To bring education to everyone. To make sure everyone has access to health care. To help women create businesses and jobs so that they can also contribute to their country. To have a voice of sanity and reason in governing and policy making. To provide their people with peace, fair treatment and equal rights.

So, what’s the problem? They’re not fighting for the right to practice devil worship. They’re not insisting on the right to parade naked in the streets. They are not fighting for the right to buy 3,000 pairs of shoes. They’re fighting for the very fundamental role of being one half of the population of their country—and therefore half of its natural resources. Elementary math makes this a no-brainer…

The film was hard to watch. Peace Unveiled covers a current crisis that seems to have no ready solution. Unlike Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which is uplifting in its ending of the successful outcome of the women peacemakers, Peace Unveiled cannot offer its viewers a similar inspirational boost. Rather, it embeds us into the real frustrations and dead ends that the Afghan women are currently facing. It must have been a hard film to make especially as Americans. I shook my head in disgust at the reception they received from the idiotic Karl Eikenberry, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and his condescending wife, Ching. His attitude towards the whole meeting seemed to be to cajole these riled-up women. Truly, they deserved more thoughtful and dignified advice than to stop complaining about their past injustices and present their case with a more positive spin…  When General David Petraeus turned off the cameras in order to speak frankly with Melanne Verveer, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, I had a déjà vu that George W. was still in office… Hillary sounded strong in her speeches–“We will not abandon you. We will stand with you always…”—powerful words but how will she make good on them when she’s no longer Secretary of State?

Photog Steve McCurry

In the US withdraw of troops from Afghanistan, which I am sooooo in favor of, there is the very real probability that the struggle of the Afghan women for basic human rights will be swiftly forgotten. There will be new photo op, another issue de jour, a new administration who isn’t particularly motivated to keep the promises of the old one. I fear that we’ll want to forget them as soon as we can out of a collective shame at abandoning these valiant women to deal alone with the Taliban who regularly threaten they will behead their children, burn their daughters alive, oh, and kill them while they’re at it.

Frankly, if I were a man, the thugs of Afghanistan would be an insult to my gender… and if I were an Afghan woman today, I would seriously consider suicide…

Tune in next week, on Tuesday, November 1st, for the 4th film in this brilliant series by Wide Angle’s Woman War & Peace entitled The War We are Living.

 

 

 

 

 ©2011 Stephanie Ericsson

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sanity vs being in your right mind

Signs by Coffea

Every once in a while, I step back and look at the world from the eyes of an alien who has just stepped off his spaceship. It’s a dangerous endeavor because it nearly always makes me feel insane. It tears off all the filters that have indoctrinated me not to question things like policy… which is merely a set of rules that decides what is important and what is not.

If I am trying to make sense of world events—like how war is fought today or our current economic situation, I am nearly always tripped up within the first few steps as the new visitor from another world. For example, how does bailing out the very institutions that got us into this world recession solve it? Or, how did invading Libya make sense, considering our own dire economic situation? For certain, there are plenty of answers at the ready, but none of them actually makes any kind of logical sense—at least if the agenda is our own Constitution.

Years ago, I read an essay that finally put into words what I experience when I’m trying to figure the world out—“Devout Meditations on the Memory of Adolf Eichmann”, part of a collection of essays by Fr. Thomas Merton called, Raids on the Unspeakable. Merton wrote this essay after he’d read Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial in Jerusalem in 1961 of Adolph Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust. Here is the excerpt that restored my confidence in my own sanity ~

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, “well-balanced,” unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently, he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course, what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty. And proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity, they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be “sane” in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly “adjusted.” God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own? Evidently, this is not necessary for “sanity” at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate “sanity” with “Christianity”? None at all, obviously. The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be “sane” like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must be “realistic” about it. We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in

Class Warfare

the past…. No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can be considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach inkblots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that “sanity” is no longer a value or an end in itself. The “sanity” of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane … perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally “sane.”

~ “Devout Meditations on Adolf Eichmann”, 

Raids on the Unspeakable by Fr. Thomas Merton.

Father Merton, a Trappist monk, does not spare his own religion from being prone to this insanity, nor should he.  If you were that alien, just stepping off your spaceship, seeing our world today, who would be the ‘sane’ ones today and who would be the ‘psychotics’?

 

 

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peace unveiled ~ women of afghanistan

Women, War & Peace Series

 

what if you looked at war

as though women mattered?

Tonight, (Tuesday, October 25th), Peace Unvieled will air on your local PBS station. It is the 3rd film in the 5-part series by the Women War & Peace Project, a PBS Wide Angle production, which ~

reveals how the post-Cold War proliferation of small arms has changed the landscape of war, with women becoming primary targets and suffering unprecedented casualties. Yet they are simultaneously emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict. With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan and Colombia to Liberia, placing women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security, and reframing our understanding of modern warfare.

the most important question this series asks is ~

What if you looked at war as though women mattered? What if you looked at peace as though women mattered? These two questions are at the heart of Women, War & Peace, a comprehensive global media initiative on the changing roles of women in war and peace.

As women, we have left peace brokering to men for too long, with too few results. The most remarkable thing about Women War & Peace is that it not only tells the stories of women in the front lines of war, but it tells the story of women as international peace-makers. It is empowering to all women. It is enlightening to everyone. And it confronts the fact that ignoring half the world’s population has not worked. 

 

Also watch Women, War & Peace extended preview on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

I encourage everyone to tune into tonight’s show, and to visit the Women War & Peace website to see the previous shows, as well as the many features, podcasts, articles, links and ways to become involved.

You can find out what time it is airing on your local PBS station here. If you miss it, you can watch it tomorrow online on their website.

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first they ignore you…

Women War & Peace Series

 

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. ~Mohandas Gandhi

olaf hajek

What impressed me immediately about the events described in Pray the Devil Back to Hell on PBS last night was how quickly the women of Liberia mobilized and produced results once they had enough. I’m sure that it did not seem fast to any of them, considering the extreme violence that had been going on for years and especially during the peace talks in Ghana, when the women protestors sat by helplessly as the violence escalated back in Monrovia against their families.

But if you are to move an immovable object like a government, one must be an unstoppable force. The attacks on the refugees in Liberia’s capital were intended to weaken the force and influence of the Women’s Peace Initiative in those peace talks. It did not work. But at a huge, personal cost to these women.

The women of Liberia had bonded together as that unstoppable force and nothing would deter them.

Over and over in the film, the words, “We are tired…” are repeated, again and again. We are tired of war, tired of being raped, tired of being murdered, tired of begging for a cup of rice, tired of running, tired of suffering… We are tired.

These ordinary words, we are tired, put into a sentence alongside descriptions of atrocities had a staggering impact for it describes that exact moment when a human being hits a bottom and finally chooses to change directions. Enough is enough.

olaf hajek

Lest you think that these women were fed up with trivial things, let me describe what they had been living through: starvation on a long-term and mass scale; their sons being kidnapped and forced into drug addiction and thuggery for the militia; their homes being looted and burned to the ground; being raped and forced to witness their young daughters being raped by soldiers, both children and men soldiers; being terrorized regularly; being murdered often; having to flee on foot from the invading bands of rebels or government forces who were committing crimes against humanity without conscience.

Then something happened that was the spiritual equivalent of nuclear fission—Leymah Gbowee, a social worker and mother of three small children had a dream.

Leymah Gbowee

In that dream she was told to mobilize the women of all the Christian churches into a woman’s peace initiative. But, Leymah’s divine instructions didn’t stop there—and Muslim women were invited to join the Women’s Peace Initiative. Muslim women were just as ripe for change as the Christian women and for the first time in the history of that country, Christians and Muslims worked together toward the same goal—peace.

“Can a bullet pick and choose? Does a bullet know the difference between a Christian and a Muslim?”

President Charles Taylor’s total dismissal of the Woman’s Peace Initiative protestors backfired on him. The women continued to show up in public to protest. Days and weeks went by without any response from his office throwing the women together for long periods of time. The women did what women do—they got to know each other. Solidarity grew.

Brilliantly, the women avoided any political posturing or siding. One could be immediately imprisoned for anything resembling anti-government activity. Peace was their only agenda. Networks formed—both the above ground kind and the underground kind. When the rebels started moving weapons, the women in the market were always the first to know so now, they passed on the information to the peace protestors. The women showed up in white t-shirts, with placards for peace, and they sang and danced and sang and danced and sang some more. Their numbers grew until they were no longer ignorable

In carefully chosen the language of respect and decorum, the women cornered Taylor into agreeing to peace talks with the rebels. Fortuitously, the international community began calling for Taylor’s government to end the violence or his resignation. Peace talks were scheduled to take place in Ghana, and the women stepped up their mobilization to be a visible, visceral force at those talks.

olaf hajek

But neither Taylor’s delegation nor the rebels treated the talks seriously in the first few weeks. For the rebels, it was a vacation from sleeping in the bush, with private suites and room service. Taylor continued with his rhetoric while also ordering attacks on the refugee camps back in the Liberian capital. Frustration built up and disillusion grew as the women felt nothing was being accomplished. Then, BBC announced the breaking news that Taylor just had been indicted for war crimes in the Sierra Leone War Crimes Court. Forced to flee Ghana and the peace talks, he stepped up the violence against his own people in his capital. The moment came when it looked as though the peace talks would collapse.

Again, pushed past the point of unimaginable tolerance, the women put down their collective foot. No! No one would leave the peace hall until a peace agreement was agreed on. Locking arms around the building, the women blocked the men inside from the exits, saying,  Let them go hungry, let them go without water. Let them taste a small bit of what they are doing to their own people. They will not come out until we get what we came for.

In a seminal moment, a voice over the PA system announced that “General Gbowee and her forces have seized control of the peace hall.” Security forces moved in to arrest Leymah Gbowee for obstruction of justice. That was her melt-down point. “Obstruction of justice?! Let me make it very easy for you to arrest me…” she told them as she began stripping off her clothes right there. In Africa, it is a cursing to see one’s mother naked, especially if she strips deliberately, so the security forces backed off.

Two weeks later, the agreement to form a transitional government with the goal of a free and democratic election of a new government was signed. Obviously, the women had taken pity on the men in the meantime and let them out to eat, drink and sleep, but nothing more.

It took nearly three more years for democratic elections to be held and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman president on the continent of Africa was elected.

I was so impressed that during that time, the women were hands-on in every aspect of the transition. They successfully disarmed the rebels when the UN botched the job. War lords who were given positions in the transitional government were closely monitored. The child soldiers began rehabilitation. Anti-rape campaigns were launched.  Infrastructure was planned and acted on. People worked on forgiving the perpetrators of the past as a necessary part of moving on. Free, uncorrupted and democratic elections were held. And, all throughout this transition, dialogue took place.

Last week, both Sirleaf and Gbowee were two of the three women awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

The power of Woman has been unleashed.

©2011 Stephanie Ericsson

Peace Unveiled, about the women of Afghanistan fighting for women’s rights will air next Tuesday as 3rd in the 5-part PBS series from Women, War & Peace. Check local station for times.
 
 

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last night I almost died

 

My son’s call at 7:30 to let me know that he needed a ride home had awakened me. I hate falling asleep so early in the evening because it means that I will be up most of the night but it happens on a regular basis whenever I’ve over-taxed my body.  So I was grateful for the wake-up call and switched on the blue ray player to watch something that would keep me awake until I had to pick him up.

The next thing I knew, there was a loud banging on my front door. My clock said it was nearly 8:30. I should have left the apartment by now to pick up my son! As I got up to answer the door, my body felt as if it had lead-weights attached to it.

“Who’s there?” I called.

“The caretaker,” came back an alarmed voice. I opened the door to see a young man and an older woman.

“Hi,” he said, but he was frowning. “Someone smelled gas in the halls and we’ve been up and down the halls, looking for the smell. I smelled every door and it was strongest coming from here. Would you check your burners to see if they’re off?”

I’d cooked dinner that afternoon for my son. It’s only been a couple of months since moved out on his own, and he hasn’t been getting enough hours on his job to eat properly. It had not been difficult to tempt him home with my white chicken chili recipe. He had to go to work at 5 so I made sure that it was done by 4 so we could spend a little time together eating and then I’d drive him to work. I thought I had turned off the burner at 4 pm.

I mumbled something and opened my door wider so they could come in, but they stayed in the hall looking worried. As I went to the kitchen, the woman called out,

“Whatever you do, don’t switch on any lights!” I looked down at the nobs on the stove—the first one was on 3, but without a flame. I turned it off and returned to the front door.

“Yes! It had been on! Thank you sooooo much! I fell asleep and I’m supposed to pick up my son from work right now! I have to go!” I said to them.

“You need to open ALL the windows right now and DO NOT SWITCH ON ANY LIGHTS!” the caretaker reiterated. I opened the door wider again to invite them in and again, they stayed out in the hall. In the living room, I slid open the huge sliding glass door and started to switch on the fan, but stopped short. I grabbed my purse and keys and returned to the front door.

“Thank you…”I said, “Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t banged on my door…” The two looked at each other and exchanged a look of relief and then they both smiled.

“We’re glad you’re OK,” said the young man as they walked away. Over her shoulder, the woman called back, “Make SURE that you don’t switch any lights on when you get back until you’re sure all the gas is out!”

I told my son what had happened when I picked him up.

“Mom! God!” was his only reaction as he shook his head. Both of my children worry too much about me, as if it is a miracle that I’ve survived 58 years all by myself. They’re not unjustified—I suffer from pretty acute ADD and they grew up with me always being late or even forgetting important things like picking them up… which I’m ashamed to say, has actually happened.

This time, it was serious. The gas had been on for 3 hours when my son’s call had come in at 7:30. My apartment is only 800 square feet. I’d closed the sliding glass door because I had a chill so the gas had filled up the apartment and I’d fallen asleep out of oxygen deprivation, not out of exhaustion.  All totaled, I’d been slowly deprived of oxygen from 5:15 until 8:30—over 3 hours. It was a miracle that I even heard the caretaker banging on the door. How many more minutes more would have made me unresponsive?

I thought about what would have most likely happened if they had not been able to wake me. This isn’t a Hollywood movie where the guy kicks down the door, so most likely, he would have had to hoof it over to the main office to get my key and hoof it back. How many more minutes would have killed me?

What a way to die, I thought, with my son waiting outside of his work and getting no answer on my cell. He would have chalked it up to me forgetting him yet again, and found another ride home, not knowing that his mother was dead. The thought made my stomach churl because knowing my son the way I do, he would have tormented himself with those never ending if-only-I’d… survivor doubts. He certainly wasn’t ready to lose his mother—he wouldn’t even be 19 until next month. My daughter wasn’t ready either, at 22 with a 3-year-old son

Bridget Galway

I thought back to when my mother had died suddenly. I was only 23 and she was only 50. I’d been devastated—she was too young to die. I was too young to be without my mother. I’d locked myself into my house, closed the drapes and curled into a fetal position for the next month. When a letter from my father in Spain arrived soon after, casually mentioning a minor operation he’d just had, I packed my bags and flew there the next day. I wasn’t ready to lose him, too. Both of my parents had protected me from their problems so I was terrified that he wasn’t telling me the whole story.  In retrospect, my impulsive trip to Spain had been a good thing because it would be the last we’d be together for he died suddenly, in his sleep three years later. Neither one of my parents lived to see me succeed at my dream of becoming a writer, although they never doubted it would happen. Neither one had lived to see the birth of my children. I had needed my mother’s wise counsel so many times over the years. Whenever I imagined my mother seeing those milestones in my children’s lives, the pain shut me down—Don’t go there…—I told myself so many times over the years. This had been more on my mind the past three years as I fell hopelessly in love with my grandson. I thought about what she had missed and it hurt me that she had not been able to enjoy the sheer bliss of her grandchildren. She had deserved that pleasure more than anyone else I’d ever known. I, too, had missed out on the bliss of watching her bliss with grandchildren. My children had missed out on having an exceptional grandmother—for as I raised my own children, my own appreciation of my mother grew and grew. Life is like that—we keep running into pockets of ignorance that is suddenly illuminated by walking in the shoes of others.

I contemplated a lot last night, as I reflected on my almost-death. The prideful part of me was almost indignant—certainly I would go out of this life at least as dramatically as I lived it! Dying by asphyxiation from a gas stove leak was simply not the way I did things in life. There was absolutely no panache to it at all. I’ve always had a cavalier attitude towards death, which William Saroyan captured when he wrote:

“Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.”

Yet, truth be told, I have often wished that I didn’t have to wake up in the morning. I’m not proud of this, but over a decade of chronic pain and the ensuing degeneration of the body have given me these thoughts at times. It’s always my children who keep me from wishing for this too fervently. When my husband died suddenly while I was pregnant with our daughter, it had taken a major act of will to stay on with the living. I wanted to join him. Half of me had died with him, and I could literally feel this in my body. If I had not been pregnant, I believe I would have died from the grief. It happens more often than you think—up to about 70% of surviving spouses died within 3 years of losing their mate—and not just with the elderly, either.

But it had been the tenacious exuberance of my little baby girl that dragged me back into the world of the living. If you knew her, you wouldn’t be surprised. She was imbued with a natural entitlement to me as her servant in life. I, myself, am imbued with a natural resistance to enslavement of any form (as the men in my life will attest to!), but with her there was never any choice. I rarely resented it either. Looking back over the years, I can see how her very existence thoroughly dismissed my self-limiting beliefs and literally shoved me out onto life’s stage to accomplish things I never imagined I could.

I said that it must have been my guardian angel in the form of the caretaker and my daughter said “It must be that silly old man of mine watching over us…” Whoever or whatever it was, it is clear that it’s not my time yet. I have too much I haven’t finished yet to exit and leave undone. I have too much I want to see yet to check out right now. Yet, does that ever really make a difference? My late husband wasn’t ready either. How many people really are? Yesterday, there was a news article about the oldest man to complete a marathon—he is 100 years-old. I wonder if he’s ready now…

©2011 Stephanie Ericsson

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i came to look him in the face

Women, War & Peace Series

Mary Cassatt, c.1900

Just after my son was born, I remember hearing about mass rapes going on in Bosnia. I cannot remember where I heard about this, but I remember that not only were women being raped on a mass scale, but that the rapists were so brazen, they actually aired these rapes on their local television.

What stunned me most was that no one was intervening. Yet, we, the great USA, had spent $36 billion dollars invading Kuwait to stop the Iraqi invasion and protect our national ‘interests’.

Sitting in a sun-filled room, nursing my newborn son, I was totally smitten—gaga in love with my baby. Those were my halcyon days with both of my children, nourishing them from my own body, drunk with love. Two tiny lives born of love between a man and a woman. Becoming aware that a half a world away, that very act, which for me is sacred, was being ‘committed’ against women for the intention of erasing their humanity was bad enough, but the lack of any action of the part of not only my government, but any government was chilling. What was it that Edmund Burke had said?

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Fingerprints by Fredrik Ekren

Did none of these men—the good ones or the evil ones—have mothers? Had the entire world gone mad and forgotten where we all come from? I asked myself as I marveled at the miracle of my son’s tiny fingers and toes.

When  my children were born,  I was overcome with the most contradictory feelings—a sudden awareness that I was capable of killing anyone who would harm my child while simultaneously, I felt a tenderness that I had never felt before. I was aware I had crossed over into motherhood, just as billions of women before me had and billions after me would. The atrocities just did not compute. How could the world turn a blind eye? But we did.

Last Tuesday was the premiere of the first of a 5-part series called Women, War & Peace, called:  I Came to Testify which is about that time in Bosnia and the courageous 16 women who stood up before International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague tribunal and testified against 3 Serbian military men from their own villages. These testimonies led to the first time that rape qualified as a crime against humanity, second only to genocide, as the worst of the worst crimes that can be committed. They were guilty of genocide too, but maybe it was politically incorrect to push your luck in the international courts…

“The rapes were used for not only the immediate impact that they had on women, but the long-term destruction of the soul of the community.”  ~ Refik Hodzic — Tribunal Spokesperson & journalist.

Rape not only destroys the humanity and dignity of a woman, it renders her man impotent. It taunts: I can do whatever I want to YOUR woman and you cannot stop me. It aims to destroy the most primary part of a human being—where we come from. It emasculates the men of the culture as it defiles their most precious treasure. It turns women into objects to be reviled. It is worse than shitting on an altar. Its intention is to obliterate whole human beings while still keeping them alive.

Killing them would grant them more dignity– but they weren’t even worth that. Killing them would have actually been compassionate.

No, this was evil at its most flagrant. These men did not just DO evil things, they were Evil.

Even with such depressing subject matter, I Came to Testify left me feeling surprisingly empowered by these women who went against their pride and instinct for survival to testify anyway. One of the women said,

“I wasn’t ashamed. I was actually proud and full of strength. I looked into his face and wondered why HE wasn’t ashamed.”

These women spoke at length with such genuine sanity that, however long over-due it is, they changed the way the world sees rape. But don’t get too excited because we’re still a world away from this being a unanimous consensus in the world. Still, it’s progress from the first Nuremberg trials which dismissed prosecuting Nazis for rape so as not to ‘have a bunch of crying woman in the courtroom’.

The healing is as private as the wounds are from such horrific crimes but one witnesses said it all when she said,

I came to look him in the face. I came to testify.

Watch Episode 1: I Came to Tesify on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

You can watch the entire first episode here:

Next Tuesday night, tune into your local PBS station for the second in the series of five and watch  the remarkable documentary, Pray the Devil  Back to Hell, about the women of Liberia who’d had enough of war and put a stop to it by banding together, literally.

©2011 Stephanie Ericsson

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to be a cog in something turning

For those of us old enough to be able to put down ‘hippie’ in our resume of life, there are certain points in time that epitomize an exhilarating shift in the collective global mind. Woodstock 1969 was the quintessential metaphor for my generation. It wasn’t just a concert. It stands out as the concert of the century. Never before or since has a single concert assumed the identity of a movement. All you have to do is say, Woodstock, and everyone immediately understands.

It was supposed to be a gathering of 50,000 people which, in itself, would have made a statement. But, instead, nearly a half million people showed up to Max Yasgur’s little farm in upstate New York.

The logistics of dealing with this unexpected influx of people had to have been a nightmare in epic proportions. Dealing with the human waste of nearly 500,000 people is a far cry from 50,ooo. Food, water, emergency services, communication, ad nauseum, had to be improvised on the spot.  But Max rolled with it.


Let’s face it, the fact that Woodstock was an epic party was a huge draw–but I’m sure it was only a way the gods sweetened their invitation to an entire generation to show up and be counted. If there were accidental pilgrims, all the better. No one who was there left the same as they’d come.

The fact that it didn’t turn out to be a major humanitarian disaster is evidence of a shift in consciousness of my generation and the mark of a new form of activism that characterized us ‘hippies’. Everyone pitched in. Everyone took on a job, picked up a soup ladle, organized everyone else. We were united in our common disgust with the war in Vietnam, in our parent’s repressive sexuality, in the materialism that grew out of the prosperity of post-WWII, in the roles we were supposed to play and the attitudes we were supposed to adopt from our parents. We were a generation that began thinking for ourselves. We were idealistic, defiant, and incredulous about inhumane events. We weren’t afraid of anything new. We shocked our parents by hanging out with people who weren’t the same color or class that we were. We flipped the bird to our parent’s generation by growing our hair long, refusing charm school, reading Marx, demonstrating in the streets for civil rights and smoking pot.   We pursued dreams and schemes, started movements, raised conscientiousness about our environment, equality, education, freedom and more. We embodied the essence of the original ideals of this nation. Thomas Jefferson would have been proud. We discovered our government was lying to us and that pissed us off. We witnessed our most promising leadership shot down literally in cold blood to silence our movement toward not only peace, but humanity. Ultimately, we stood for what is just and right in any society.

Probably the single most unifying element of my hippie generation was the music which broke all the molds from previous generations. And Woodstock 1969 was the proof. With a venue that would immortalize the musical artists who showed up,  every song represented some important aspect of our generation. Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Santana, Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Credence Clearwater, Jimi Hendrix, just to name a few. And the ones who didn’t show up, like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin must had kicked themselves in the ass for the rest of their lives. Only Joni Mitchell had the humility and the guts to publicly regret it. There is irony that Joni Mitchell’s song, Woodstock, immortalized the festival because she’d turned down the gig so she could make an appearence on the Dick Cavett. Show. The gods have a wicked sense of humor sometimes.

 The fact that the songs from those three days are still full of life only confirms the sincerity of my generation of hippies who felt entitled to a world where love, justice, fairness, and peace are the elements that bind us together as one people.

If we face all of the same old tired issues still in this country and world, it isn’t because the ‘movement’ failed. It’s because it takes time to turn something as big as a planet onto a new orbit.

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©2011 Stephanie Ericsson