September/October 2001

REFLECTIONS ON ACTIVISM IN ONE’S EIGHTIES

by Elise Boulding

Having just had a birthday, I keep telling myself that

It’s fun

To be eighty-one.

In truth, it’s a puzzling time. On the one hand, the body drags the spirit down (irregular heart, bad ears, plus general aches and pains of age); on the other hand, the spirit, hearing the call to help mend the ailing world, lifts the body into action. The mind watches and wonders. And so body, spirit, and I are holding a constant trialogue, from which I am gradually learning a new rhythm, which answers the needs of all three. But it’s not easy for someone who used to have a high energy level to learn that new rhythm!

What keeps me going is the sheer joy of discovering new action arenas that I was too busy to pay attention to in earlier years. And new partners for action. The loss of my lifetime partner, Kenneth Boulding, in 1993 was very hard, but I came to realize that I was now what was left of the two of us, and responsible for carrying on. It seemed right to respond to my daughter Christie’s invitation to move from Colorado to the Boston area, where she lives, and to pick up old threads and new networks in the setting of a nearby retirement community (where everything was new).

Faith communities become very important at such a time, and the Wellesley Friends Meeting was a very welcoming community indeed. I turned to the Peace Committee at once and worked to develop the Friends Peace Team Project (for which I had earlier started a newsletter) in the New England region. The Global Peace Force proposal is an exciting new stage for the peace team movement that will need lots of good energies! The last project from my "old" life, finishing the Cultures of Peace book I had been working on for several years, turned out to be a wonderful framework for all subsequent activities since the UN had declared 2000-2010 a Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World. The Fellowship of Reconciliation was right there with all kinds of valuable materials to use. So was the Interfaith Peace Council, an offshoot of the World Parliament of Religions. Serving on that Council as "the Quaker" opened new worlds of interfaith action for peace in different parts of the world, and I have inspiring memories of our mission in Chiapas, Mexico, with Bishop Ruiz, just before I moved to New England. That form of international service is no longer possible for me now, but I do cheer them on.

After my move to New England, it was very natural for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to reappear in my life. I had been active in WILPF when the children were growing up (including serving as International President). Intervening years of inactivity were simply due to the fact that I had too many other responsibilities during my years as professor of sociology and working to develop the new fields of peace research, women’s studies, and future studies, both as scholar and activist. Now a small WILPF group meets monthly in my apartment at North Hill, and we network with African-American groups in the Boston area on issues of racism, which has no place in a culture of peace.

In my new setting, it was the most logical thing in the world to connect with local peace studies programs at neighboring colleges and universities. In addition to occasional lectures in peace studies classes, I have been involved in forming the New England Peace Studies Association. Meeting regularly at my favorite peace witness location in New England, the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, NEPSA is helping to bring a new level of student and faculty activism to some college campuses. Both WILPF and NEPSA are providing opportunities for me to do imaging-a-future-without-war workshops again–something I thought I could no longer do. But with help to overcome my hearing problem, it turns out I can still do this.

The Buddhist-sponsored Boston Center for Research on the Twenty-First Century, which plays an important role in bringing together different groups committed to peace, justice, and environmental issues, helped me find a group of activists who seek a spiritual basis for social action. Calling ourselves the Contemplation and Social Justice Group, we meet monthly in my apartment to share our spiritual journeys. This same Center helped me find people who were interested in working on a project of great concern to me. We are creating a basic sixth-grade curriculum guide to peacemaking that will involve sixth graders around the world in interviewing local peacemakers to learn how conflicts are resolved in their own community. This is the MAPWIL project, Making Peace Where I Live.

MAPWIL was inspired by a course taught by the International Red Cross to sixth graders in the Caucasus, on the humanitarian laws of war. After taking the course, when boys are pushed into local armies after sixth grade, they will know they are supposed to protect civilians, not kill them. When I read about the International Red Cross project, I immediately imagined a course based on local skills in peacemaking. Since sixth grade is the end of schooling for many children around the world, this is obviously the grade to focus on. Our committed group of educators has now produced a trial manual, which is being tried out with necessary adaptation to local schooling situations by colleagues from various countries around the world. The hope is that eventually a guide can be developed in various languages that will be useful in widely differing cultural settings.* The excitement of developing an international network of MAPWIL teachers provides spice in the life of this eighty-one-year-old.

One major new discovery in my senior years has been the restorative justice movement. I knew it existed, but never had time for it. One thing about getting old is that all those "someday I’ll get around to. . ." murmurs are now out. "Someday" is here, now! So participating in the Wellesley Friends Meeting project of weekly meetings for worship at a local prison, and joining an interfaith restorative justice network to further a variety of projects in the Boston region, including an annual recruitment and training conference, has opened up a whole new world for me, a community of communities. Why didn’t I see sooner that restorative justice is a critical element in the field of peace studies? It strikes at the root of a long-escalating culture of violence in this country that passes through our prisons and out into so many sectors of society, including our foreign policy establishment.

Yes, every day a new discovery. The work of Truth Commissions around the world is deeply thought-provoking. I am thinking now about the need for a US Truth Commission, to reflect on our history of wrongdoing–abuse of Native American peoples, abuse of Africans through the slave trade and slavery itself, abuse of the planet as a whole through unleashing nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the takeover of island societies in the Pacific and in the Caribbean, turning their islands into nuclear test sites–there is a journey of repentance to make if we Americans are to do our part in creating a culture of peace in the world. More to come on this ….

And yes, I am gradually finding that right rhythm of activity and quiet reflection. My own earlier concept of this last stage of life was that it should be spent in reflection and solitude, as I had years ago spent one spiritually rich year in solitude at my hermitage in Colorado. For a time this idea led me astray. Indeed, I now had the opportunity for solitude, but that left me feeling lonely and depressed–while spurts of activity left me feeling guilty. But as the earlier-mentioned trialogue among body, mind, and spirit developed, it became clear that my way was to involve an alternation of quiet and activity, of solitude and community, in a very special rhythm.

I am still learning. Rather than "leaving the world," It seems I am to find new patterns of connection within it. I begin each day with an early-morning meditation walk along a path lined with stately trees on the grounds of North Hill. Then the challenge of reading the New York Times with breakfast, determinedly finding the all-too-scanty reports of good news and posting them on my refrigerator, with a prayer for all those suffering from the bads, all too well reported. Then the day’s pattern unfolds, with space for the joys of visits with old friends and new colleagues and cherished times with visiting children and grandchildren, space for reading the many manuscripts, books, newsletters, and personal letters that come my way, putting me in touch with what’s going on "out there"–time for carefully selected new and old kinds of peacebuilding projects–and time for resting. It is a blessing to have downsized to a one-room apartment here at North Hill with a lovely porch overlooking the woods. Phone yes, Internet no. (I tell my friends that the Universal Postal Union still works.) Each day is complete in itself.

Yes, it’s fun to be eighty-one.

©2001 Fellowship of Reconciliation