Language and War
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Asian and Pacific Islanders Leaders’ Workshop, on Zoom, in August 2020
All communication between humans is important, and every way of communicating is important. Language is one of our most sophisticated forms of communication. With it we can exchange detailed information about the world.
Every people developed their own language, and each language is a wonderful example of human intelligence. Each developed in a different circumstance and has special qualities from those circumstances. That set of special qualities enriches us all and should never be lost. It’s important that we never lose another language. We don’t want to lose anything that human intelligence has developed.
As we overcome distresses that have kept us separate from each other, we will gain more access to the richness of other languages. And our difficulties and confusion about language are a good indication of the distresses we need to overcome to connect deeply with each other.
Some of us have great difficulty with languages. That is related to distress. Some of the distress is simply our individual, personal distress. And some of it comes from racism, imperialism, and colonialism and is part of our big struggle to see each other as fully human and just like each other. Each of us—in every way, including in our language—is a unique and perfect example of the rest of the us.
WAR
Because we just looked at language, I think we should look at war. I don’t know of any people in the world that has not suffered the irrationalities of war.
A few times people have had to leave their lands not because of the irrational workings of power but because of changes in climate. But almost always, it’s been the irrational drive for power and resources that has pushed people to enter and take another people’s land. And, of course, the invaders bring their language with them, and their language becomes part of how they maintain power over the original inhabitants.
All humans have been vulnerable to being hurt and becoming irrational, so wars have been fought all over the world. We all carry the hurts from those violently irrational times. Our attitudes about languages are part of that. Our attitudes toward other people are part of that.
Everyone seems to wish that they were innocent of the patterns, that “my people never dominated anybody else.” That’s quite unlikely. (laughter) What our peoples did is not our fault. We are not to blame for the irrational actions of the people in power in our country, especially those that happened before we were born. But we are responsible for the distresses that have been handed down from those times by our families and cultures.
We are affected by that history. Most of us wish that we weren’t, and we try to act as if we weren’t. But although it’s correct to restrain our irrationalities, it’s not enough—it leaves part of us tied up in the distress.
Those of us who know RC well usually remember to resist acting out our distress. (laughter) It’s one way you can identify an experienced Co-Counselor. (laughter) That we resist acting it out is a good thing. One reason we like being together is that we try to keep distress out of the way when we are with each other. But the hurts from war and the restimulations we feel around other people—especially people from countries that our country has been at war with—need to be more than controlled; they need to be discharged.
We all have feelings from distress because we got hurt. We may not believe the feelings, but we do need to work on them. We need to work on them with someone who won’t be upset about them.
We often feel ashamed of the feelings, so we hide them from our Co-Counselors. We feel that our counselors will be confused about us if we work on them. We need to trust each other, and the discharge process. Nothing about us, or our Co-Counselor, is evil. We can recover from every hurt and confusion.
Societies are collapsing, and they are making desperate attempts to continue. A society acquires resources in any way it can. It also blames others for its difficulties. It tries to confuse and distract its own people by citing dangers from others as the cause of the society’s difficulties, by asserting that the difficulties are due to “something someone else is doing,” not the irrationality of the society. It attempts to create a sense of nationalism, as if the people of one country are somehow different from the people in other countries. A current version of this is being acted out in many parts of the world. We notice that it confuses people we know, and it’s important that we not be too scared to speak out against it. We need many rational voices presenting reality clearly enough that people’s restimulations are interrupted. We need many rational minds that can listen to distressed ideas without being scared—so that some re-evaluation can happen.
(Present Time 201, October 2020)