Making the world safe
Creating safe places is more about whether people feel safe with me than whether I feel safe with them. The more I do to create a place in the world where other people are not afraid or defensive around me, the safer we all will feel.
We understand that model for creating safe places in interpersonal relationships – one on one with people – but what about in international relationships? Many people think it is an impractical, if not impossible, ideal. But why? Because we’ve never really tried?
Fear breeds fear. A defensive posture, putting our money and time into protecting ourselves out of fear of other people or nations, leads to offensive words and actions. Fear and defensiveness lead to attack and to warfare. With individuals such “war” is often figurative, resulting only in emotional shunning or verbal attacks. But with nations such war is often all too real, resulting in death and destruction of homes and lives, of whole nations.
When a group of influential people gain power within a nation with the declared goal of making that nation an unchallenged military and economic power in the world, such as the neocons in Washington today, how will the world ever be safe? (See http://newamericancentury.org/) And when those people seem all to willing to use fear and the natural human tendency to be defensive and self-protective to achieve their aims, how will we ever have anything but a dangerous world?
We are spending $1 billion a day to keep troops in Afghanistan. What would happen if we brought the troops home and turned that money over to the people of Afghanistan to make a better life for themselves? What would they think of us then? Would they still be afraid of us or oppose us as a nation? What would happen if we did the same thing in Iraq where we have not 20,000 troops but over 120,000? What would happen if we spent the same kind of money to rebuild that country and allow them to rule themselves without our interference?
Compassion, grace, and generosity are the practices of human relationship which can help create safe places in our world. Why are we so afraid they won’t work at the national and international level of relationships? Why won’t we even try?
