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The cost of standing for ceasefire

In 1983 I traveled for the first time, to the USA. On my first day, wandering a shopping mall in Orange County, I had the deepest feeling that I was witnessing the modern-day equivalent of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Waste, greed, ill health, and huge urban sprawls were hard to stomach. A tone of superiority, founded in ignorance of other nations, permeated the culture, easily represented in something as seemingly innocuous as World Series baseball. (Only teams from the United States play in the World Series.) Indeed, in the late nineties, when the International Coach Federation (ICF) was an infant, I told the then-president of the ICF that they should be ashamed of themselves for only having Americans on the ICF Board. (That was how I found myself as the first non-USA board member.)

Over the course of my life, I have travelled to the USA over fifty times. I have wonderful friends and family there. It is a beautiful country.

Today, scrolling the news feed, my unease from forty years ago seems to be quickening into reality.

I watch the juxtaposition of women professors on college campuses violently arrested by police for protesting the horrible death of so many people in Palestine while also watching the Supreme Court of the land listen to and consider a debate about whether the president of the USA can be immune to any act while president.

All of this against a background where gun death is off the charts, and women are losing their rights to abortion and health care.

I watch an idiot criminal who once held the highest office in the land, lurch from lie to lie, hoping that for the first time in his life, he might be called to account.

One of the greatest actions we must take as humans if we want to become kinder, caring, considerate, and integrous people is to look in the mirror. Or to invite people we trust to reflect back to us our blind spots, our failings, and where we are broken. Only through reflection can we see. This is why we can more clearly see the blind spots in our friends than we can see in ourselves.

Nations need to do this as well. They might pay attention to how the rest of the world is observing them and what they are seeing. This is as true for my country as any. It is true for me.

I am not sure it would make a difference because to see how the other is experiencing you, you must be open to listening and taking it as a possible truth. However, I would love it if the USA could have an experience of how the rest of the world is seeing the USA today. We watch, aghast. It is almost incomprehensible.

I hope the rest of the world is learning to not do what the USA is demonstrating. And I applaud the students and their professors for standing for a ceasefire, a Palestinian State and the end to atrocities. History shows time and again that when the students protest, they are on the right side of justice.

Photo Taken April 27th 2024

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