Mobilize the Community

That's a picture of people in Pittsburgh participating in The Global Night Commute. The picture was taken by Peter Okema Otika (I reduced the file size).

On Saturday night people in many cities across the globe walked into their towns to spend the night in order to draw attention to the children who commute into Gulu and other towns to seek protection from abductions. On Sunday there was a large rally in Washington DC to urge International attention and action in Darfur.

I'm a bit ashamed to say I didn't attend either event. But I'm quite heartened by them both because it signals that many Americans are beginning to pay attention to African issues. There is of course a difference between the attention of national governments and the attentions of ordinary people. It's the second kind I'm most encouraged by, but the first that might seem to matter the most.

The USA is a place where there are many people of different heritages. Some American families are here because of awful wars and persecution. That doesn't mean there are no tensions between people of different ethnic backgrounds, indeed there are. Still, most Americans have some sense that we are a country of many peoples and traditons. One of the classic pieces of writing from 1930's America is Seventy Thousand Assyrians by William Saroyan. There is a line in it I always remember:

I think now that I have affection for all people, even for the enemies of Armenia, whom I have so tactfully not named. Everyone knows who they are. I have nothing against any of them because I think of them as one man living one life at a time, and I know, I am positive, that one man at a time is incapable of the monstrosities performed by mobs. My objection is to mobs only.

Paul Rusesabagina insists:

[H]uman beings were designed to live sanely, and sanity always returns.

There's something of that in Saroyan's contention of what an ordinary man is incapable of. People throughout time have committed the most heinous acts, and yet we are, our ordinary state as human beings is not to behave so badly.

The important thing is to find ways for people to do good. These recent rallies are a way for people to register their intention to pay attention. Certainly a part of that is to influence politics, but another part is simply to say to one another, and to people in Northern Uganda and Darfur that we are paying attention.

I'm not sure many people are interested in hearing what I have to say here in this blog. Mostly I hope to read what members of the BSLA have to say. The point is for this blog to become a way for ordinary people to communicate across the distances.

I was moved to read a statement on one of the pages of the Japanese drumming group Kodo. It seems appropirate to the work of the BSLA:

In ancient Japan the taiko was a symbol of the rural community and it is said that the limits of the village were defined not by geography but by the furthest distance at which the taiko could be heard. It is Kodo's hope with the One Earth Tour to bring the sound of the taiko to people around the globe, so that we may all be reminded of our membership in that much larger community: the world.

With Kodo the sound of the drum is literal, in a figurative sense the boundaries of our villages are stretched by the sounds of a world of drumming. It becomes a matter of finding artful ways to harmonize the sounds of our drums and to create a drumming heart beat for our joined-together world.

One of the greatest tasks for the BSLA is to create fellowship within the local communities where you operate. From that fellowship the objectives to increase education, to promote health, to nurture livelihood and to foster stewardship of the environment will follow. Promoting fellowship with concerend people everywhere will help us all.