Cooperation and conflict

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Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman & Apology

Amazingly gracious for a mother who lost her son.

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“If I had an opportunity to talk to George Zimmerman, I would probably give him the opportunity to apologize. I would probably ask him if there was another way he could have helped settle the confrontation that he had with Trayvon, other than the way it ended, with Trayvon being shot.” – Sybrina Fulton, Travyon Martin’s mother. 

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To me, it’s yet another example of the need for reconciliation, or at least understanding, under difficult circumstances. It reminds me of some of the many other instances of apology/forgiveness described on this blog:  Kim Phuc & John Plummer;  Pham Thanh Cong & William Calley; Jack Jacobs & Pham Phi Huang; Poles & Russians; Croatians, Serbs & Bosnians, El Salvador & El Mozote; etc. It can be done.

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Related Posts

Reconciliation, Biology, and the Second Indochina War 

Reconciliation and the Second Indochina War II

Further Strides Toward Reconciliation

Peace with the ‘Enemy’

Making Peace with the Past

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Reconciliation & the Second Indochina War, II

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” – Dalai Lama

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I wrote this post, titled Reconciliation, Biology, & the 2nd Indochina War, about a year ago, and I consider it one of the more meaningful things on this site. It addresses:

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(1) Examples of profound case studies in reconciliation and making peace with the past (Kim Phuc and John Plummer; the My Lai massacre, Pham Thanh Cong, and William Calley; various national-level apologies for past injustices).

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(2) The significance, evolution, and neurobiology of guilt and forgiveness.

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(3) Lingering injustices and problems caused by the war, as well as a few reasons for optimism. 

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Admittedly, it is a bit long, and if you don’t make it to the end, it concludes on a hopeful note:

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Further Strides toward Reconciliation

One of the major themes of this blog has been reconciliation and cooperation under difficult circumstances. Below are three pertinent, hopeful stories on reconciliation that I’ve collected over the last few months.

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1. Colombia to Spend $30 B to Compensate War Victims (AlertNet; Jan 24, 2012)

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Reparations to victims of Colombia’s long, bloody armed conflict will reach as much as $30 billion in the next 10 years, the government said on Tuesday… The reparation program will benefit more than 3 million victims of the war, which has dragged on for nearly five decades.”

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Empathy in Flux

“All is flux.” – Heraclitus

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“Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you are a mile away… and you have their shoes.”      –Jack Handey

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Stop motion photo of a girl jumping rope. A few moments of an individual life. (Photo by Harold Edgerton).

My advisor in graduate school, Mike Little, once shared with the class that he fantasized about a machine that would provide instantaneous biological data just by having a person walk through it. As he described it, the machine would work something like an airport metal detector, only instead of revealing any concealed objects, it would assess the types of variables that biological anthropologists salivate over – anthropometrics, body composition, blood pressure, hormonal profiles, presence of infections, etc. If only…

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War and Opportunity Costs

In doing research on the opportunity costs of military spending for “Growing up in the Two Koreas,” I was reminded of the quote below by Dwight Eisenhower. Though I linked to it in that post, I thought it deserved more than that, so I’m highlighting it here. The back story to the speech is that it was written soon after the death of Stalin. Eisenhower thought that presented an opportunity to shift away from wasteful military spending, which could then be applied to other avenues more conducive to peace, better economic conditions, and a healthier population.

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The Christmas Truce, Revisited

I wrote this piece on the Christmas Truce during WWI about a year ago now, and it is far and away the most visited post on this site. Some of that comes from people looking for information on trench warfare, but the post is really about some basic tools we have as a species that facilitate cooperation, even in times that are enormously challenging and emphasize aggression.

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The latest example of this comes from the Bronx and the uplifting NPR story of Julio Diaz, who confronted his mugger with compassion, and had inspirational results. Highly recommended.

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Something similar to the story of Mr. Diaz actually happened to me when I was a teenager. Each summer from the ages of 16 to 21, I worked six days a week on a ferry boat in order to save enough money for college. It was a great job at that age, but the 12-hour days were long and monotonous, and left little time for much else.

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Anthropology & the Art of War

“When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” 

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Last week, the American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting, this year in the beautiful city of Montreal (for a couple of summaries of the conference, see here and here). Rahul Oka, from the University of Notre Dame, asked if I would like to be one of two discussants for his session (co-chaired with Nerina Weiss) “Traces of Violence and Legacies of Conflict,” and I agreed. The session was full of very erudite presenters who spoke on a range of topics related to the anthropology of conflict and violence.

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But in preparation for the session, I have to admit to some trepidation because nearly all of the presenters were  ethnographers or archaeologists. And as a biological anthropologist, I felt out of my element.  The presentations were also quite diverse in geography, time period, theoretical perspective, and outcome variable, ranging from structural violence and undocumented border crossings from Mexico into the United States, to skeletal trauma in Neolithic Europe, to Kurdish survivors of torture. I found it hard to discuss the various papers with much sophistication and detail while also finding commonalities among them (and all in fifteen minutes, no less). I tried, but finally concluded that it probably wasn’t going to happen. Therefore, I decided to do a rather broad analysis of the papers, which I read ahead of time. But there was always the risk of zooming out too far, thereby making any analysis overly simplistic and virtually meaningless.

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Peace with the ‘Enemy’

NBC News has been running a compelling series on the return of American Col. Jack Jacobs to Vietnam, where he was wounded forty years ago. I recommend this insightful essay by Col. Jacobs, a Medal of Honor recipient and former West Point faculty. It describes his meeting with the former commander that ambushed his battalion, as well as his general reflections on the ‘enemy.’

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But the enemy is an amoebic mass, a single-minded monolithic inhuman force. Killed in action, they are only a logistical problem, and you get a feeling of them as individuals only when you capture them, scared, wounded and shivering. They are no longer part of the enemy organism, and it is only then they come to life as people.”

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Peace with the Past: The Arrest of Mladic

Thursday’s arrest of Ratko Mladic, who had avoided capture for 15 years, acts as a reminder that the need for justice has a long reach. The Serbian General is believed to be responsible for being the architect of, among other things, the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica. Tellingly, Mladic will be handed over for trial for war crimes to The Hague by the Serbian government, a sign that times can change and that nationalism does not always precede doing the right thing. President Boris Tadic stated: “I think today we finished a difficult period in our recent history.” 

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A woman visits the grave of her son, killed in Srebrenica (NY Times)

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Conduct Your Triumph as a Funeral

With the news of Osama bin Laden fresh, I’m reminded of a passage (#31) from the Tao Te Ching on humility and military victory:

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