T H E   H U M A N I T Y   E S S A Y

Through the universal responsibility of embracing mankind, His Holiness The Dalai Lama advocates his philosophy of peace.

Winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth Dalai Lama. After the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet, he continues to live in exile in India.

" Why should we be warm-hearted towards other people? Because they are essentially just like us. Whether we are rich or poor, educated or uneducated, wherever we live and to whatever nation, religion, or culture we belong, we are all just human beings. We are like brothers and sisters, members of one great human family. Like others we desire happiness and so not want suffering. Moreover, we all have an equal right to avoid suffering and seek happiness. This is why when I meet another person I try to think, 'Here's another human being just like me, whose hopes and wishes are just like my own.' Then friendly kind-hearted feelings arise of their own accord."

We human beings are social creatures. We naturally seek friends and companionship and with few exceptions we dislike solitude....Anger is the greatest obstacle to friendship and to our own mental peace. Some people say that it cannot be avoided, and anger and violence are innate characteristics of human beings. I doubt that this is true, because if we take the example of such animals as lions and tigers, who are instinctively fierce and have to kill to survive we find they have the sharp teeth and claws they need. Human beings, however, have rounded teeth and soft sensitive hands with no claws. Although we can use our hands to push others away, doesn't it feel more comfortable if we use them to touch, hold and embrace our fellow creatures?"

page 7
"New World Order?"
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Both policy maker and psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk searches for solutions to the causes of human suffering.

Mr. van der Kolk, the Dutch-born director of the Trauma Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, has long been interested in solutions. He is president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, currently dividing his time between "ordinary people who have experienced terrible things," and policy makers who try to find solutions to the causes of systematic human suffering.

Here are excerpts from our conversation with him at his home in Boston:

Q: Doctors and social workers from Beirut, one of the world's most devastated cities, have told you, "At least we can mitigate our violence. At least we still have strong families and religious beliefs to hold us together. But the violence of Washington DC. or Detroit or Los Angeles, for example, is so much more worse than what we are dealing with. We have no idea of how you will solve it."

vdK: In the United States, we do not have state sponsored violence; we have left it to private enterprise. The two leading causes of death in the fifteen to thirty age bracket are suicide and murder. Many, many children here grow up in extreme fear and poverty, in extreme hatred, and many children grow up being exposed to violence.

Q: What do you think will happen this country struggles with fundamental social change?

vdK: We won the war in the Gulf but we are losing it every day in the inner city. Even the price of victory in the Middle East means that the Iraqi people are left to themselves and will grow up in total hatred and fear. the next generation will do anything to get a sense of empowerment. That's the seed for despair and revenge. Personally I'm trying to get some Iraqi psychiatrists over here to discuss how mental health professionals can contribute to positive channeling and energy.

Q: You've said that human creativity can be mobilized through stress, something you've seen among the Palestinians.

vdK: Yes. Everybody who has worked with liberation movements, from Eritrea to the West Bank, is struck by how well people can do under stress. They bond. They mobilize their resources. They are creative. they build clinics hewn out of rock so that Mengistu's jets can't strafe them. As long as there is hope for a better future, stress can help people to mobilize their inner strengths, put differences aside, allowing them to bond and work out their problems.

Q: It seems like we need enemies. Have we learned to look at the world only as "us versus them"? What about the family of man?

vdK: We need to affiliate and that leads people to say: "We are good and somebody else s not so good. We have the right values and another group does not." I think that's the human dilemma. The family of man is a very grand vision we need to have because only curiosity about differences can save people."

page 8
Afghanistan
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P H O T O  E S S A Y

Luke Powell traveled extensively through the Fertile Crescent between 1971 and 1978.

"In Afghanistan, I found a way of life that dominated much of the world for many centuries. If we do not know what a shepherd is, how can we understand The Torah, The New Testament, or The Koran? How can we realize the extent of our common heritage?"

Mr. Powell's photographs have been exhibited everywhere from Moscow to Montana.

page 11
"Human Rights, Human Wrongs"
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C U L T U R E

Shashi Tharoor considers the misleading universality of human rights avocation.

Dr. Tharoor wrote a highly acclaimed book on Indian foreign policy. Most recently, he has published The Great Indian Novel, an award-winning work of fiction. After twelve years in Geneva and Singapore with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, he is currently dealing with peace-keeping matters at the United Nations headquarters in New York. From Calcutta, he is married with twin sons and is an avid cricket fan.

"When you stop a man in traditional dress beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his? Wouldn't a starving, sick, and ragged man gladly trade his right to oppose the government...for a full bowl of rice and roof over his head? Those of us concerned about the issue of human rights often confront the question of whether they apply across the world. Is anything in our Pluri-cultural...world truly universal? Don't human rights as laid out in international covenants ignore the tradition, the religions and the socio-cultural patterns of the Third World?..."

'There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions. But that does not mean that they are not worth asking, for they underpin much of the problem with the human rights debate today. The danger of assuming that there is nothing to prove, and that any opposition to human rights must be tendentious and cynical, is that the real progress being made in the arena of human rights can be undermined by motivated attacks on the validity of its basic assumptions."

page 13
"A Voice from Botswana"
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Through careful reflection, Bessie Head accounts her experiences at home in Africa.

In 1964, at age 27, Bessie Head moved to Botswana, where she eventually was awarded citizenship. She later became one of Africa's leading writers. She died in 1986 at age 49.

The Old Woman

"She was so frail that her whole body swayed this way and that like a thin stalk of corn in the wind. Her arms were as flat as boards. The flesh hung loosely, and her hands which clutched the walking stick were turned outwards and knobbed with age. Under her long dress also swayed the tattered edges if several petticoats. The ends of two bony stick legs peeped out. She had on a pair of sandshoes, The toes were all sticking out so that the feet flapped about in them. She wore each shoe on the wrong foot, so that it made the heart turn over with amusement. Yet she seemed so strong that it was a shock when she suddenly bent double, retched and coughed emptily, and crumbled to the ground like a quiet sigh. 'What is it, Mmmm? What is the matter?' I asked. "Water, water,' she said faintly. "Wait a minute shall ask at this hut if there if there is any water.' When I came back with the water, a small crowd had gathered. 'What is the matter?' they asked. "The old lady is ill.' I said. 'No', she said curtly,' I am not ill. I am hungry.' The crowd laughed in embarrassment that she should display her need so nakedly. They turned away; but old ladies have no more shame left. They are like children. They give way to weakness and cry openly when they are hungry, 'Never mind,' I said, 'hunger is a terrible thing. My ht is not far away. This small child will take you. wait till I come back, then I shall prepare food for you.

Then, it was late afternoon. The old lady had long passed from my mind when a strange young woman, unknown to me, walked into the yard with a pail of water on her head. She set it down outside the door and squatted low. 'Good-day. How are you?' I said. She returned the greeting, keeping her face empty and carefully averted. It is impossible top say: what do you want? Whom are you looking for? It is impossible to say this to a carefully averted face and a body that squats quietly, patiently. I looked at the sky, helplessly. I looked at the trees. I looked at the ground, but the young woman said nothing. I did not know her, inside or out. Many people I do not know who know me, inside and out, and always it is in this way, this silence. A curious neighbor looked over the hedge. "What's the matter?' she asked. I turned my eyes to the sky again, shrugging helplessly. 'Please ask the young woman what she wants, whom she is looking for.' The young woman turned her face to the neighbor, still keeping it averted, and said quietly: "No, tell her she helped our relative who collapsed this morning. Tell her the relatives discussed the matter. Tell her we had nothing to give in return only that one relative said that she passed by every day on her way to the water tap. then we decided to give a pail of water. It is all we have. tell them too. Tell them how natural, sensible, normal, is human kindness, Tell them, those who judge my country, Africa, by gain and greed, that the gods walk about her barefoot with no ermine and gold-studded cloaks."

Village People

"Poverty has a home in Africa -- like a quiet second skin. It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity. People do not look down at your shoes which are caked with years of mud and split so that the toes stick out. They look straight and deeply into your eyes to see if you are a friend or a foe. That is all that matters. To some extent I think that this eye-looking, this intense human awareness, is a reflection of what earth is all about. There is no end to African sky and to African land. One might say that in its vastness is a certain kind of watchfulness that strips man down to his simplest form. If that is not so, then there must be some other, unfathomable reason for the immense humanity and the extreme gentleness of the people of my village. Poverty here has majority backing. Our lives are completely adapted to it. Each day we eat a porridge of millet in the morning; a thicker millet porridge with a piece of boiled meat at midday; and at evening we repeat breakfast. We use our heads to transport almost everything: water from miles and miles, bags of corn and maize, and fire wood. This adaptation to difficult conditions in a permanently drought-stricken country is full of calamity. Babies die most easily of starvation and malnutrition; and yet, within this pattern of adaptation people crowd in about the mother and sit, sit in heavy silence absorbing the pain, till, to the mother, it is only a dim, dull ache folded into the stream of life. It is not right. There is a terrible mindlessness about it. But what alternative? To step out of this mindless safety, and face the pain of life alone when the balance is heavily weighted don on one side, is foe certain to face a fate far worse. Those few who have are insane in a strange, quiet, harmless way, walking all about the village freely. Only by their ceaseless muttering and half-clothed bodies are they distinguishable from the others. It is not right, as an alternative, to strive merely for existence. There must be other ingredients boiling in the pot. Yet how? We are in the middle of nowhere. Most communication is by oxcart or sledge. Poverty also creates strong currents of fear and anxiety. We are not outgoing. We tend to push aside all new intrusions, We live and survive by making as few demands as possible. Yet, under the deceptive peace around us we are more easily confused and torn apart than those with the capacity to take in their stride the width and the reach of new horizons. Do we really retain the right to develop slowly, admitting change only in so far as it keeps pace with our limitations or does change descend upon us as a calamity? I merely ask this because, anonymous as we are, in our favor is a great credit balance of love and warmth that the Gods somewhere should count up. It may be that they overlook desert and semi-desert places. I should like to remind them that there are people here too who need taking care of."