Abbie Jenks
I am a child of the sixties and bring that unique perspective of the events of that time to the here and now. My work to help others has been, until recently, an assigned role from my family, a duty. Yet it became the beginnings of a personal path to healing.
In my family, I was the designated caretaker and this responsibility in my family had life and death consequences. My mother was a very depressed and troubled woman and two days before MLK was assassinated in April, 1968, my mother took an overdose of sleeping pills, prescribed to her by her doctor for insomnia. I share this because my work to help others became a path to healing and without my ability to heal, I could not have gotten to this next point – that of a peacemaker-- in my life. The significance of the timing of her death, juxtaposed with the death of MLK doesn’t escape my attention, providing a further template from which to understand injustice.
My mother, for all her demons, gave me a belief in the need to work for social change. Before her death, she worked on behalf of Fair Housing in our white, affluent town and taught me to care about the plight of others. She had an innate sense of compassion that she transferred to me and she felt the pain of others deeply. As I grew up and away from home, I became, as a social worker, more adept in this work of helping others. I was able to develop skills of communication, listening to others, handling conflict, group facilitation and leadership skills, and developing boundaries to be able to remain objective about working with others problems. These skills have served me well in my current peace work. As I worked with oppressed groups, I recognized that people are not inherently bad, but that their environment is a primary cause of negative behaviors that create problems for themselves and others. Poverty, oppression, and trauma: All contribute to the dismantling of our humanity, and we engage in behavior we might not ordinarily do. We are caught in the cycles of violence or poverty or drug additions. As forms of structural violence, their impact is no less devastating than being a victim of direct violence.
In my career as a social worker, I worked in Child Welfare, with elders, as a school adjustment counselor for grades 2-5 and taught conflict resolution skills to children and teachers. I witnessed cycles of violence, in the form of domestic and child abuse, poverty, prejudice and oppressions, over and over again. Those particular experiences helped me in my current work and later I came to understand them as a form of structural violence. In 1998, I was offered and accepted a position at Greenfield Community College (GCC) as faculty and the Human Service Program Coordinator. I had to create a new curriculum, update it, and make it more relevant -- borrowing from my own experiences as a social worker. I am now grateful for that first attempt in creating curriculum for it was critical in informing me of what I needed to do to eventually create the Peace and Social Justice Liberal Arts degree program at GCC.
Then in 2001, the events of 9/11 happened.
There was recognition on my part that everything changed on that day. I thought of my sons, and I realized how this would forever affect their lives, just as the assassination of JFK, MLK and Robert K, and the Vietnam War have marked me. It all became more personal. I raised my sons to be empathic, sensitive and able to connect with others and to be involved in their world. I also gave them a sense of hope and happiness that I did not have in my beginnings. The 9/11 event troubled me, as I intuited that the ensuing societal changes would deeply affect my sons. My innate activism kicked in at this point and I joined a grassroots group, SAGE, that works for peace and justice. And I found other ways to realize my hope of creating a permanent way to study and learn about peace at GCC. It was here that I first realized that I wanted to do more than just provide forums that would come and go. I wanted something more permanent to exist at Greenfield Community College.
Then the Iraq war began.
At this point, I desperately needed to find a way to engage in preventing the unique and long lasting destruction that only war brings. And I also needed to feel more at peace in my own self. I was despairing, feeling powerless in the face of this ill-begotten war on terror.
Call it serendipity, divine intervention, sheer luck, but as I struggled with what to do, I stumbled across Division 48: The Division of the Psychology of Peace, Conflict and Violence on the American Psychological Association website. I also discovered a conference in Canada on Peace Education! Wow! What a concept! So I went to Canada and my life’s course found its direction.
I came away from that conference with the recognition that I am now a teacher and I was in a perfect position to develop courses to study peace! I began my work in this interdisciplinary field from my field of psychology and developed the first course: Psychology of Peace, Conflict and Violence. In this course, we studied how and why humans engaged in such horrifying behaviors towards one another, through dehumanization, attribution theory, groupthink, distancing, defense mechanisms, PTSD, need for groups and identity and other psychological processes. I began to study how to use the same processes to promote peace instead of violence and how to heal from trauma; to move towards a place of forgiveness. I discovered the concepts of a culture of peace.
I was successful in creating and passing this course through the curriculum review board, and I began to teach it using an interdisciplinary pedagogy. Learning communities is a model to teach content using an interdisciplinary method reflecting the principles of peace education. Using an overarching theme, we combined two “stand alone” courses. For two semesters I taught Peace Psychology with English composition/Creative Writing and two other semesters with Women in American History. These were the most satisfying classes for me, as we spent double periods together and I co-taught with another professor. It created bonds and safety for students and teachers in the learning process as well as helped to dismantle the hierarchical nature of the teaching and learning process. We became a true community. I loved working so intimately with other teachers, learning from their styles, learning about their expertise and extending this to the students who also became our teachers. Sadly, due to budget issues, the learning communities were discontinued.
In the meantime, I continued to research and study how other colleges taught and offered peace studies. I furiously bought books and read them, subscribed to several journals, was trained in Basic Mediation, took workshops in economics because I realized how much I needed to know about the determining factors of war and peace. I feverishly read about nonviolence. As a result, I next created a course called Introduction to Peace Studies. I saw the wisdom of this as we all needed, like myself, a grounding course in the basic constructs of the field of peace education and studies. Within this course, we study the big questions regarding peace and conflict, using an interdisciplinary set of readings borrowing from psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, economics, history, and the teachings of peace activists. The questions we explore are: is humankind hardwired to commit violence? Is violence ever justified? What do we mean by peace? What does it mean to us? We explore the concepts of direct and structural violence, of the role of international law and human rights, how to create a more just economic and political system, the power of nonviolent actions, the pedagogy of the oppressed. Freud, Margaret Mead, Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Thich Nhat Han, William James, Paolo Freire and many others become our teachers as we explore the thinking and viewpoints across time. It was at this point that I first detected my emotional and spiritual process. It began emerging in the classroom.
Being so deeply connected with the students caused me to feel great emotions, mostly positive ones of joy, love and respect for their journeys. I shared some of mine, but held back. We explored the material, often with differing and contentious points of view, but the basis of the trust and connection allowed us to manage it all and taught us to listen to understand. This became the basis of some of the transformation that was beginning to take place within me.
As the final piece of work in establishing a degree in Peace and Social Justice, I created two more courses: Conflict Resolution and Mediation and Peacemaking in Practice: Seminar in Nonviolence and Social Action. Four years ago, the full degree program in Peace and Social Justice Studies was approved and offered at Greenfield Community College. I’d reached my goal, or so I thought.
About two or three years into my studies of peace, I began to feel terribly upset but wasn’t sure why. Part of it was that as I learned more about our world, the terrible role that our country was taking on a global level, the advent of the Iraq war, and my growing suspicions that our leadership was taking us down a path that I couldn’t tolerate, it led to despair. However, for the first time in my life, I felt that I wasn’t alone. One transformation for me was that my belief in helping others had transformed from one of duty to one of love. As I realized that we were all in this together and that it was through the sense of belonging in a community that studying peace together created, that we would overcome! It was this love given me by my students that sustained me. As I gave, I received. I was gift-ed in so many ways as the students stepped up. If not for them, this program and my transformation would not have happened. I’m learning to let others in, to help me, to allow gifts and to believe that I can ask them for help and they are there, with their love. We are bonded in the collective work of creating a culture of peace.
Studying nonviolence and recognizing that it is simply a further extension of working through conflict successfully, is when I began to feel the powerful spiritual nature of this work. Observing and reading about groups of people who successfully engaged in nonviolent action to create social change became my inspiration: to see the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, to see the Suffragists survive jail, hunger strikes and forced feedings, to see the Danes successfully hide and smuggle out 7000 Jews when Hitler’s army occupied their country, to see the Solidarity movement in Poland and Gandhi’s Salt March achieve an overturn of oppression of large groups of people, this became my path. I cannot, anymore, walk through life without examining myself and my behavior as I try to achieve an integration of my beliefs and my actions. In as simple a context as driving home from work, when I ask myself how am I behaving on the road in reaction to the sometimes annoying behaviors of others, to as complex a thought as to how do I speak up against injustice when I’m afraid? What is it I am afraid of? How do I voice my concern in a nonviolent way? Can I even do this? I understand, now, how becoming an agent for social change, becoming participatory in our own governing, leads us out of our despair. My students taught me that. And it is through our collective work that change happens.
What I have learned is to recognize when I AM afraid, for it leads me to examine what it is that inhibits me. As I increasingly see how we are all connected, how we all affect each other, as I realize the inherent spirit in all of us, I work towards my ever changing goal of becoming the Spirit. What I’ve concluded is the spirit is us. We embody God, Buddha, Allah, the Universe -- whatever we want to call the Spirit. It is through this realization and connection to our higher selves that I found my path. My path is one of developing nonviolence in all that I do, for unless we create a culture of peace, we are not going to survive. I believe we have untapped capacities for goodness, compassion, forgiveness, working in community and finding a way to solve our conflicts and differences in a way that meets our needs. We can find ways to work without powering over, but by finding our power within, leading to powering together. My research, studies and personal experience have demonstrated this capacity in us. My experiences in teaching peace and holding blessed relationships with my students make me believe that another world is possible.
In the words of my students:
“…forgiving the perpetrator of a violent crime does not excuse or tolerate the behavior, it is a way for the victim to become less burdened by the event and/or loss.” –Evan
“We can speak loudly if we listen to each other, understand what we are trying to communicate to each other, and then express that in action as a large organized group of autonomous individuals in solidarity with each other and for total freedom from injustice and organized violence.” –Ryan
“By engaging in insurrectionary mutual aid and direct action we break the psychological illusion that we are unable to change our circumstances. We break through the tragedy of the commons—the feeling that in respect to the whole each of us can affect no change. Instead, it suggests that each of us is infinitely capable of improving our conditions and those of the people around us.” –Ryan
“The inequality of the distribution of the world’s income and resources is a simple equation for violence and hate. Addressing poverty today especially in children means a brighter tomorrow. …. By providing all children with equal skills to succeed in life, we are giving peace a chance.” –Elyse
“Justice means equality. It means all parties involved are getting their needs met and that all parties are willing to acknowledge that the other side has needs. Justice is a word that requires a lot of empathy and compassion. It is strange how it has been twisted and used as a way to coerce people into participating in acts of mass violence.” --anonymous
“Whether the oppression is from a structural violence, social injustice or direct violence keeping a person from feeling safe will hinder their ability to heal.” --anonymous
“Forgiveness is not an act intended to absolve or heal the perpetrator but rather to heal the harmed individual.” –anonymous
Inspiring.