Peace

Mark Krueger

Like many of you, I imagine, I have been thinking about peace, and what it means in relationship to youth work. On the one hand it seems so simple. Most people want peace I believe. We seek peace, not war because we know that there are no winners in war, just as we know we can not think of our work as a battlefield. We do not misuse our power as human beings, anymore than a good youth worker would misuse his or her power.

We recognize, struggle and respect different points of view and experiences as part of the journey we are on as we strive to connect, discover, and empower in our daily interactions. Competent workers are always trying to move and speak across the spaces of their experiences with awareness that they build and shape themselves with youth into the world through unique cultural, familial, and communal experiences. These workers are curious about and respectful of the stories of others (colleagues and youth) in their efforts to live and learn together. Youth workers who misuse their power to physically control or abuse others are generally thought of in youth work as being insecure and unaware. They must impose their power on others because they feel powerless, just as youth who try to hurt other youth and us, are often afraid and insecure.

So why do we let leaders who need to exercise their power by waging war steal peace from us? Is it that we are not brave enough to stand up to them? Why are we so silent, especially in the US (I would say my country but lately I have not been feeling like I am a citizen of the US) when it comes to peace? Shouldn’t youth workers be at the forefront of the marches? After all aren’t we the experts on conflict resolution? Has our field become populated by so many insecure and powerless workers that we can not mobilize for peace anymore than we can mobilize for improving the care of youth through professional development?

Are we now a profession of mostly victims who let the “man,” or the “woman,” dictate the conditions of the battle to us? Have we lost an ability to frame the conflict and resolution? Is it acceptable to spend a trillion dollars on a war that has resulted in the deaths of almost a million people while we spend in comparison a mere pittance on youth who are increasingly being left behind on the streets? Is it acceptable for us to let politicians say we must continue to fight to preserve our honor? What honor is there in being part of the death of so many people? I don’t get it?

The Ecology of Human Development in which every child needs “one person who is crazy about him or her” is out of whack at the macro level. The micro interactions of our work are occurring in a macro world of violence. And yet, we seem relatively quiet on this larger caring front. Perhaps we do not sense strongly enough how this larger world is connected with the moments of connection we strive for when we try to just be with youth?

Howard Zinn, the great peace activists, who also wrote The Peoples' History of the United States, recently said the leaders of the U.S. today are more alien to him than the aliens they are trying to protect us against. Why do we let these strangers run the nations in which we are trying to care for youth? Are we alien to our cause?

The other day, I spoke with a new group of Public Allies. These are young adults who recently became affiliated with our Youth Work Learning Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Like a modern day Peace Corps, Public Allies are part of a national initiative called Americorp that provides support for them to have a year of meaningful public service in local communities followed by scholarships to return to school. Many of the new Allies will work with youth in programs focused on the arts, health, child welfare, social service, and youth work. They will address issues related to poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, violence, gangs, etc. As I looked around the room, I saw several allies with fire in their bellies. I could tell they wanted to “Change the f- World,” as I remember my colleagues and I did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Books like the one advertised on this website by Doug Magnuson and Mike Baizerman with stories from workers who work with youth in contested societies also give me much hope. I use their stories in my classes with bright-eyed, fired up students who want to eliminate these societies.

Poetry also helps me find hope and understanding. I reread poets like George Oppen, who wrote during the Viet Nam war to begin in his famous poem, Of Being Numerous:

There are things
We live among, and to know them
Is to know ourselves
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series
A sad marvel;

Inspired by Of Being Numerous I also work on my own poems. Following are two that are related to peace. An earlier version of A Prayer for Monks Asleep in the Barracks was published in this column a few months ago. It is a reflection on my concerns about youth men and women who are being trained to fight wars. Even though it is based on my own experience in the military (I was a reservist) during the Viet Nam war, working and reworking it helps me make some sense of what is going on in Iraq.

The second poem Of All in a Dream is a reflection on the interconnectedness of relationships, history, the environment, and peace that was inspired by KD Lang’s version of songs of my youth by Canadians, which my friend Thom Garfat played at a party I attended that he held for number of peace loving youth workers from around the world:

A Prayer for Monks Asleep in the Barracks

low crawlers
in the Zen of war
hands bled on rungs
of overhead ladders

nothing left to give
the taking easy
script and discipline fed
in pills of deceit

under the covers
shrapnelled ejaculations
and shattered solitudes
wait for the quiet

men who share
the same sleeping quarters
develop a strange brotherhood
beyond ancient communities
of dreams and fatigue

writes Camus in The Guest

such injustice to steal
youth

on this damp cool night
into the longing
and the sea below

opposition kept afloat
in Oppen's Tao stone
through which
breath and water flow

Of – All in a Dream (Four Fragments)

High on all in a dream
all in a dream caffeine
I look out from the walls
of
fallen white pines
to cranes nesting
in the solitude
of
low ceilings
on the shore
of
wetlands and homes

where Aldo Leopold and Gary Snyder
and Potowatomi sat by rocks
as if deposited
through the ice by the hand
of
God

like plovers on fence posts
imagining the interconnectedness
of rain and sand
pterodactyl flights of fancy
all in dream all in dream
skimming over the oils
of
memory and modern civilization

above the clear waters
of
the abysss
of
deep fantasies
of
lust

Oh, I could drink a case of
you darling
of
restraints
of
wars
of
all that jazz

here in the downdraft
on the other side
of
the lake

peace at hand in my retreat
where KD Lang sings Neil Young
in Hymns of the 49th Parallel
yellow haze of the sun
and sliver space ships break the fog
of
weather discontent

”... It is true that the artist is not dependent on the subject in the sense that he (she) can be judged by its intrinsic interest, or the discussion of his (her) work can be the discussion of its subject. But the emotion that creates art is the emotion which seeks to know and disclose. The cocoon of “Beauty” as the word is often used, the beauty of the background music “”
George Oppen (2001) in The Mind's Own Place in George Oppen: Selected Poems.