Read These War Stories.

Thanks to my healer-friend Ed Tick for his link to a site that is chronicling the true stories of veterans (and others caught up in the ravages of war) and their experiences with warring and its aftermath.
The site, “Eleventh-hour Stories” explains:
When we sent the first two letters out to the global community asking for these stories of the last 100 years, we were primarily concerned with stopping the war planned against Iraq and also possibly against North Korea. Now we are concerned with the ongoing activity of peacemaking. We have found that time does not heal the kind of traumas that people have been suffering but consciousness can heal. So we will gather and tell theses stories so that we develop a culture of awareness that has the capacity to ethically modify our behavior in the directions of compassion and empathy.
It is our hope to bring some healing to the unprecedented traumatic experience of the last decades and to insure that such torture not be inflicted further. When such wars and violence repeat themselves they inevitably create new armies of torturers and countries of the tormented. The telling and the receiving of these stories are activities that say: This must stop here and now.
These stories contain the essential information and understanding needed by everyone in the world in order to know how to move forward at this time. These stories when we listen to them will provide the wisdom of healing and will inform us to take proper action.
We are asking you to tell the stories, to gather the stories, to bear witness to the stories, to send them here and to send them out yourselves widely. We are asking that these stories be gathered and told at public gatherings and peace actions, be read from podiums as well as shared in small groups and councils. Through these activities the truth of this century can become the compassionate ground from which wisdom emerges and an informed global society begins to act on behalf of life, peace and heart.

Read the stories here. And share them.
If you have a story to share, send it in.

Gender wars redux.

I’m annoying some of my dearest Blog Sisters by asserting that men are more violent than women and it’s the leadership of males that almost always is behind our marches into war and the destruction of cultures.
I really do believe that, until we confront the power that our hormonal chemistries have over our natures, we’re not going to be able to evolve much futher as human beings. That doesn’t mean we should be using other chemistries to neutralize that power; but it does mean that we have to become aware of our behavior patterns and work on some “personality” changes to diminish the insidious way that those chemistries effect our behaviors.
I posted the something close to the following in a comment in response to a comment, but I’m repeating it here for broader consumption:
Been there, done that. The “change” has taken all my hormones away, so I can’t fault them for my point of view.
Of course human beings are complex. But look at history as it documents the actions of males and the actions of females as they reflect manifestations of physical violence against others, aggression, extreme competitiveness. I think the males win in that category.
History, literature, mythology etc. also document problem tendencies in females (need to please others, emotional outbursts, over-protectedness, vanity, self-mutilation etc. etc.), but these are not actions that tend to initiate wars and mass murder. Extreme manifestations of our biological natures pose problems for all humans, but the male version is a killer.
Fifty years from now, look back and see if things are any better — if men are still in charge and charging at others aggressively, if women are still defering to what men seem to want them to be or emulating men’s aggression because they’ve allowed themselves to be convinced that that’s the way to succeed. (Notice: I didn’t say ALL men and ALL women.)
How much better the world — how much better relationships — would be if each gender worked at eliminating those extreme tendencies that we’ve carried along in our genes and hormones from our more primitive ancestors?
But, like the process of any evolutionary-therapeutic journey, first one must admit that there’s a problem. That’s the hardest part, and it’s even harder if what is our “problem” is also our source of power.