Thursday, March 10, 2011

Human Happiness is Our Cause

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Judith Malina.


Today, New York is the hub of energy that will spark the next step in the international peace movement.  It is here where the proximity of the rich – those who have much more than they need, and the poor – who have much less than they need, grate against each other in an intolerable encounter.

It is here that the artists and the scholars mingle with the uneducated and marginalized…

If we can make the next step it will happen here - yet – it is in places remote from this great city that the fervent of revolution occurs.

10 years ago in 2001, The Living Theatre went from New York to Paris to Lebanon, where in the ruins of the bombings, and the foretaste of a terrible war, the young people gathered to do a street play; invented by themselves - and performed in their own Lebanese language – to plead for peaceful solutions to the warlike reality.

A dozen of the 35 participants left the play, regretfully and took with them all of the eloquent statements of their position.  They believed that armed struggle was necessary + inevitable.  And we parted as friends, with embraces – and they attended the final performance, for they too longed for the peaceful solution which they thought was unattainable.

Today we watch the moving results of the Egyptian Revolution + at the same time the terrifying struggle of the Libyan Revolution, and we know that there too the young people would welcome peaceful solutions –  and even as the bloodshed continues, we know that those peaceful solutions are a possibility + that we must never abandon hope…

So in New York, where we are still far from the bloodshed, we work to explore, to investigate, to invent new ways to make peace.

Let's not give up because the cause of human happiness is our cause though the despair of violence is still occurring.


Judith Malina's handwritten post
 

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