World Peace Convention 2018, International Symposium, Speaker 4.
Incheon Harbor Park Hotel, Grand Ballroom(2F)
THE ROLE OF THE MARGINALIZED IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
BUILDING ON A VISION
By Max Ediger
4. [Speaker4] Max Ediger.pdf
My experience during most of my working life has been an involvement with informal marginalized groups and movements committed to social change for justpeace. These marginalized groups include poor rural peasants, slum communities fighting for land rights, refugees and victims of violence and war. I believe strongly in a bottom-up approach to building communities of peace and justice and I firmly believe that the marginalized are one of the main subjects of peace building. My sharing today will be about some of the lessons I have learned from these experiences and a little of how I have attempted to apply these learnings to my more recent work with interfaith youth and the movement to confront ethnic and religious violence. I hope it can be of some benefit to our discussions regarding marginalized people as significant actors in building communities of justpeace.
In the 1960s, as the US war in Vietnam raged, I was deeply involved in the antiwar movement on my college campus where I was an active member of our Peace Club and wrote antiwar articles for the college paper. After graduation I went to Vietnam with my church organization, the Mennonite Central Committee, to work with refugees and to write about the realities of this unjust war against the people of Vietnam. I remained there from 1971 to 1976.
During these years of protest, tens of thousands of people all around the US (and the world) were mobilized to speak out against the war and the establishment that fueled it. People gathered on university campuses, in front of the White House, Washington DC, and on streets in cities throughout the country to march, sing and call for a new society. It was an exhilarating time. The energy was high and the determination to change our society was strong. We felt that nothing could stop us.
On April 30, 1975 the war did end and shortly after that the compulsory military draft in the USA also ended. Shockingly the vast movement for social change that could be mobilized at a moment’s notice also began to fade as people went back to their normal lives of raising a family, earning a salary and building a comfortable life. There were, of course, those who stayed with the struggle and many are still active today, but the number is small.
Several years later I visited an activist friend in Chicago who took me around to see some of the struggles still going on in the city. One stop was in a beautiful neighborhood with tree-lined streets, upscale coffee shops, and well-kept apartment buildings. Being unclear why he brought me to this place, I asked the reason for this particular visit.
“This used to be a slum,” he responded. “When many young upward mobile working people saw that land was cheap and the old buildings had character, they pushed the poor out and then restored the community for their own luxury living.”
“Who are the people who forced out the poor so they could have a new community to live in?” I asked.
“The residents here are the very people we marched side by side with to protest the war, the status quo, racism, and other forms of injustice. They now have become the very thing they were fighting against.”
I was shocked! How could our very vigorous movement for social justice suddenly go so wrong? This was the start of my search to find the answer to why movements for justpeace societies are often not sustained for a long period of time. If I could find an answer then I could work more effectively. As we say in our movement, “Don’t just be busy. Be effective!” I want to be effective.
My search took me on a working pilgrimage to Burundi Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong and now Cambodia. Along the journey I had many teachers – people living in desperate poverty, men and women working on Pat Pong Street in Bangkok’s famous Red Light District, slum dwellers, factory workers, rural peasants, refugees, and victims of wars. They taught me that listening to the poor and oppressed is more important than speaking to them, that we must start with what the people already have instead of introducing new theories and models of peacemaking to them, that inclusion and transparency are essential to gain the trust of the poor and oppressed, and most importantly that they must be included at the table as equals and not just labor.
I also learned from them that no matter how many thousands of people gather to change the world, if they are not serious about changing themselves they can never change society. Change begins with me and I must have the courage to first address that responsibility. This kind of change is called transformation as it is a radical move away from what I am now toward what I can and should be. As I transform myself I can begin to join with the oppressed to transform the world.
Paul Freire said that we only transform ourselves when we experience reality, reflect deeply on it and act to change that which is unjust. He called this the action/reflection praxis. In order for us to sustain our involvement in social transformation, it is important that we learn from our own actions and not just from the theories and models of others. We must experience the real life of the poor and oppressed and then reflect on it to learn and to change. We also need to look at our own life experiences and reflect on them for the lessons they teach us. We need to go out into the world of injustice and pain, live with those who are suffering and then reflect on the root causes of this suffering so that we can work long-term for the transformation of the social, economic and political roots of injustice. This action and reflection praxis then must result in new actions based on what we have experienced and learned, followed up with new reflection. This is an on-going process.
Paulo Freire suggested that it is not enough for the poor and oppressed to come together in dialogue in order to gain knowledge of their social reality. They must act together upon their environment in order critically to reflect upon their reality and so transform it through further action and critical reflection.
As I have worked to encourage and support young activists who will take on the very difficult task of building new societies of justpeace, I now recognize that the first important step is in their willingness to change themselves: their attitudes, their approaches to injustice, their focus on the future, and their relationships to different classes in society. These kinds of changes do not happen because we tell the youth they must change, or when we fill their heads with theories and models for social transformation. It happens through involving them in a long process of action/reflection which gives them opportunity to identify with those who struggle for survival and also helps them recognize what changes they need to make in themselves.
Another important lesson I have learned is that people who have been marginalized and oppressed are, in most cases, not victims but rather the most important actors in the struggle against oppressive forces and structures. In the 1990s I worked a lot with victims of the war in Burma. That war had driven hundreds of thousands of indigenous villagers either into border refugee camps or, as internally displaced persons (IDPs), deep into the jungles where they were hiding from the military. In one discussion with a small group of Karen villagers, I talked of the IDPS as victims of the war. One young Karen man was visibly upset by what I was saying. Finally he said in frustration, “Don’t talk about the IDPs as victims. They are not victims. By hiding in the jungle they are fighting back in their own way to prevent the military from controlling them. You need to recognize that they have their own tradition of struggle. Don’t interfere in their process of struggle but rather find a way to support it.
These words challenged me to look more carefully at how I view those under the heel of oppression and whether I was being an asset or an obstacle to their struggle. Do I understand and trust them enough to allow them to lead me along with them in their struggle?
Now, when working with marginalized youth, I no longer introduce the latest theories of conflict transformation or the best known models of peacemaking to them. Rather I encourage youth to go back to their own experiences, their people’s history, their cultures, and their religious traditions to find the best forms of nonviolent struggle which are part of their community’s life experience. That is where they must start seeking the way of struggle which their people can understand and can participate in with confidence. In other words they already have everything they need to begin building communities of interfaith justpeace. Once they are firmly rooted in their own community’s experience and knowledge they can benefit from learning of other models and theories without destroying their own people’s justpeace processes.
An important concept I learned from the men and women working in Bangkok’s famous red light district is that if you want to help those who are different, or have a different life experience, you must learn to empathize with them. Empathy is a difficult challenge for most of us. In Thailand they describe empathy as taking the heart of the other and placing it in our own heart. How can I take the heart of a prostitute, an IDP, an LGBTQ person, a child victim of the war in Yemen, a woman who has been raped, or a child soldier and place their heart in my heart when I have never had these experiences?
In the programs I work with we encourage participants to go back to their communities and spend quality time with marginalized communities and individuals. This is much more serious than going to a slum for a couple of days to play games with the children and giving them some snacks. It requires more commitment than doing interviews with young people working in the red light district and then writing articles or maybe a book about them. It necessitates much more commitment than signing a few statements condemning injustices by our government officials or marching in the streets to protest the war in Yemen or Iraq.
If we wish to develop empathy with the oppressed, we are compelled to integrate with them, listen deeply to their stories and be willing to spend the time needed to begin to feel the pain in their lives, not with sympathy, but with true empathy.
How can these learnings help us find a way to ensure that the movements for justice and peace are sustained until they are firmly in place in our communities and our world?
From these and many other experiences I now believe that the key to building peace activists that work effectively with the oppressed and who do not give up the struggle when they feel tired or discouraged can be found in one word – vision.
It is very important that we develop in ourselves and in our social justice movement a deep and detailed vision of where we want to go. King Solomon, in Proverbs 29:18 wrote that a people without a vision perish. Now I believe that our peace and social transformation movement of the 1960s weakened because it was based on a dream and not on a vision. We had a dream for a world of peace and a society that was not governed by greed and arrogance. But we did not clearly know what that world of peace would look like or what a new society would be founded upon. When the pressures people felt from the war in Vietnam ended and the possibility of moving on to a potentially prosperous and comfortable life emerged, the dream faded and in too many cases simply ended.
If we wish out movement for peace and justice to remain dynamic and to keep the flame of hope and determination alive in the people, we must work to move the dream in our mind to a vision within our soul. That vision will give us a very clear and detailed picture, like a blueprint, of what we are building and the detailed steps we need to take to complete the building. This is not an academic process; it is a spiritual process that impacts our souls in ways which make it very difficult to step away and become normal human beings again. We become focused on what can be, and we stand with the oppressed as one of them to help move toward the vision.
Aristotle said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Educating the mind can give us dreams, but when we move our dreams from our heads to our hearts we move to vision, and vision compels us to move to transformation: transformation of self and transformation of the injustices around us.
If the marginalized are to be one of the main subjects of peace building, then we must work with them, as with ourselves, to nurture the growth of a vision in our souls that has no expiry date.
I would suggest that nurturing such a vision requires much time and patience. We cannot rush it by trying to fill the mind with many new and exciting ideas. We must move slowly, step by step, allowing the marginalized to act and reflect so that they begin to see their reality more clearly and see a hopeful process for transforming it. For ourselves, we must spend ample time with the marginalized so that we can begin to feel their pain and anger. Only then might we be able to empathize with them and move from leading them as victims, to joining them in their struggle as the important actors in the process of transformation.
And above all, let us not ignore the potential of the youth to lead us toward a new and just society. We need the idealism of youth as well as the experience of the older generation. We must all come to gather in mutual respect and teamwork. I urge us to stand firmly with the marginalized, especially with marginalized youth, as the struggle for true peace with justice continues.
http://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/concepts-used-by-paulo-freire
