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Jed
Diamond is the internationally best-selling author
of eight books including Male
Menopause, now translated into 17 foreign
languages and his latest book, The The
Irritable Male Syndrome:
Managing. The 4 Key Causes of Depression and
Aggression and Mr.
Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable
Male Syndrome He looks forward to your
feedback. E-Mail
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
Take The Irritable Male Syndrome quiz.
Falling in Love in the
Second Half of Life - Part 5 Caring for the One You
Love is the Gift of a Lifetime
One of the biggest fears that has dominated my
life for many years is that I would be a burden on
my loved ones when I got too old to take care of
myself. When I was young I imagined myself going
out in a blaze of glory, dying young fighting the
good fight for family, God, and country. I imagined
my surviving family would cherish my memory and my
family wouldn’t have to worry about taking
care of an old man.
I have been sharing my experiences giving care
to my wife, Carlin, since her unexpected slip on a
sidewalk and subsequent fall leading to partial
hip-replacement surgery. In
Part 1 I described the initial stages of the
partial hip-replacement surgery and the small
stroke that occurred during surgery that caused
some memory and speech problems. In
Part 2, I talked about the intimacy and
exhaustion that comes with 24/7 home health care.
Being a Caregiver was a new role for me and in
Part 3, I
described the deepening of our love that has occurs
once I wholeheartedly embraced the calling.
In Part 4 I described what I
learned about getting out of my fix-it mentality
and learning to listen more deeply. Here I want to
talk about the great gifts we receive when we
embrace caregiving.
When my own parents got older, I realized that I
didn’t want to lose them and did my best to do
some caretaking as they continued to age. But both
my parents grew up with an even stronger desire not
to be a burden, remained independent for much of
their lives, and died following a relative short
period where they needed caretaking. It wasn’t
until Carlin’s mother got cancer and we
brought her to live with us during the last months
of her life that I found out about the beauty of
being with a loved one until the very end of their
life on earth.
Although I don’t consider myself
“religious,” I was raised in the Jewish
tradition. I do feel a very spiritual connection
with life and believe that there is a spirit that
survives energetically after our physical body has
completed this life’s journey. I was surprised
and moved to tears during the last days leading up
to Carlin’s-mother’s passing. As I held
her hand, there were no words that passed between
us, but I felt overwhelmed with love, compassion,
and care. As I looked into her eyes, it was like
looking in the eyes of God. At the time, and even
now, I wasn’t even sure what those words
meant. Clearly, I was experiencing something in a
realm beyond words.
In this time of caregiving for Carlin, I am once
again experiencing the beauty, joy, and unspeakable
love that passes between us and connects us both
with the mystery we call God. Whatever your
spiritual or religious beliefs, we all will have
opportunities to become caregivers at some point in
our lives.
Men are often taught to care at a distance.
Early on, we are taught that being a real man
involves being a successful breadwinner. The old
rules told us that our work was out in the world
and women’s work was at home with the children
and later taking care of aging parents and often
aging spouses.
I first learned a more hands-on type of
caregiving when our first son, Jemal, was born on
November 21, 1969. Back then fathers were not
allowed in the delivery room at Kaiser hospital
where I was able to be with my wife up until the
last stage of the birth process. “Your job is
finished now, Mr. Diamond”, the nurse told me.
“You can leave now. We’ll find you in the
waiting room and let you know as soon as your baby
is born.”
I knew the rules and at that time of my life I
was inclined to follow them. I kissed my wife and
squeezed her hand as she was wheeled out the door
and down the hallway to the right, while I went to
the left to wait, feeling glad that I had completed
my caregiving and could await the birth of the new
member of our family. But something wouldn’t
allow me to go through the waiting room doors. I
felt a call from my unborn child saying, “I
don’t want a waiting-room father. Your place
is her with us.” I was startled by the words I
heard in my mind, but I didn’t hesitate a
moment.
I turned around and walked back the way I had
come. I found the delivery room and pushed my way
through the doors and took my place at the head of
the table. There was no question of leaving if
asked. I knew where I belonged regardless of what
the rules were. Shortly thereafter our son, Jemal,
was born.
As I held this tiny being in my arms for the
first time, I made a promise to him that I would be
a different kind of father than my father was able
to be for me and to do everything I could to care
for him and to care for the world he would grow up
in. Two years later we adopted a 2 ½ month old
African American daughter we named Angela.
Being a distant dad was never an option for me.
I quickly learned the joys and challenges of being
a hands-on father. I took time off from work when
Jemal was born and took a stint of full-time
caretaking when he was an infant and my wife wanted
to take a break and visit a friend. I was terrified
at first to have my wife away and have Jemal to
myself thinking that mothers had some inherent
knowledge about baby care that fathers lacked.
I still believe that is true, but fathers can
learn and sometimes being thrown into the deep end
of the caregiving pool requires that we learn fast.
That was true again when Angela needed an operation
when she was a year old and both my wife and I had
to become full-time caretakers for her during the
first two years of her life.
Caregiving is not easy. It requires us to become
warriors for life. In my book, The
Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing
the Planet, I shared what I learned from
meditation master Chögyam Trungpa. In his
book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the
Warrior, Trungpa says,
“Warriorship here does not
refer to making war on others. Aggression is the
source of our problems, not the solution. Here
the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the
Tibetan pawo, which literally mans ‘one who
is brave.’ Warriorship in this context is
the tradition of human brav
He concludes,
“The key to warriorship and the
first principle of Shambhala vision is not being
afraid of who you are.”
Taking care of my children was my introduction
to getting to know myself as never before and to a
kind of warriorship I never knew existed. Taking
care of aging parents was another lesson in
warriorship, as is taking care of my wife as she
approaches her 85th birthday and me my 80th. But we
are being called to an even greater calling of
caretaking—caring for Earth that is the parent
of us all.
In the last chapter of The Warrior’s
Journey Home, I quoted my colleague psychologist
and philosopher, Sam Keen, who offered a clear
statement of the challenge humanity is facing.
- “The radical vision of the future
rests on the belief that the logic that
determines either our survival or our
destruction is simple:
- The new human vocation is to heal the
earth.
- We can only heal what we love.
- We can only love what we know.
- We can only know what we
touch.”
I have been writing about this kind of
caregiving in two articles on the transformations
we are facing in our world today. Trungpa reminds
us that the
“Shambhala vision teaches that,
in the face of the world’s great problems,
we can be heroic and kind at the same time.
Shambhala vision is the opposite of selfishness.
When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of
the seeming threat the world presents, then we
become extremely selfish. We want to build our
own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we
can live by ourselves in a secure way.”
Trungpa goes on to say,
“But we can be much braver than
that. We must try to think beyond our homes,
beyond the fire burning in the fireplace, beyond
sending our children to school or getting to
work in the morning. We must try to think how we
can help this world. If we don’t help,
nobody will. It is our turn to help the world.
At the same time, helping others does not mean
abandoning our individual lives…In fact,
you can start with yourself. The important point
is to realize that you are never off duty. You
can never just relax, because the whole world
needs your help.”
Men have been engaged in violent conflicts for
too long now. As Trungpa reminds us,
“Aggression is the source of
our problems, not the solution.”
Men are being called to a new kind of
caregiving, a new kind of warriorship, at home and
in the world. Our time is now and we are needed as
never before.
If you like these articles, please share
them.
Learning to Listen More,
Trying to Fix It Less
Crises are opportunities to learn more about
love and life. Carlin and I have been dealing with
a crisis that began on March 20, 2023 when she
slipped on a wet sidewalk and called me. “I
fell. I need help. I’m near the corner of
Mendocino and Redwood.” Luckily she was
only a few blocks away and I got to her quickly and
with help of a neighbor who happened to be an EMT
we got her in the car and to the ER at Howard
Hospital, which was only five minutes away.
In Part 1
I described the initial stages of the partial
hip-replacement surgery and the small stroke that
occurred during surgery that caused some memory and
speech problems. In Part
2, I talked about the intimacy and exhaustion
that comes with 24/7 home health care. Being a
Caretaker was a new role for me and in Part
3, I described the deepening of our love that
has occurs once I wholeheartedly embraced the
calling.
Here, I want to talk about the challenges of
letting go of the “fixer” role that has
been so much a part of my identity for so long. As
a therapist and marriage and family counselor one
of the main complaints I hear from women is
that
“he doesn’t listen to me.
He always wants to fix me before I can even tell
him how I’m feeling. He makes it all about
him, when I need him to tune into me.”
Like most challenges as a therapist, I’ve
found it much easier to help other men become
better listeners than to make the changes in my own
relationship. I learned my “fixer” role
early. When I was five years old my father was
hospitalized with what was called “a nervous
breakdown,” which I didn’t understand. My
uncle Harry went to visit my father every Sunday
and my mother wanted me to go with him. It
didn’t occur to me to ask why my mother
didn’t go, but being the dutiful son I was at
the time, I accompanied him.
“Why do I have to go,” I asked, in a
shaky voice, holding back my tears.
“Your father needs you,” he told me.
His voice was serious and his eyes told me I had an
important job to do.
“What’s the matter with him?” I
wanted to know.
Silence. In our family we didn’t talk about
such things.
I went with my uncle for a full year trying my
best to fix whatever the problem was with my
father. Like most children, I felt somehow
responsible for my parent’s pain, that it was
my job to fix it. In my childhood fantasy, I feared
if I didn’t fix my father and be the
“good little man” my mother expected me
to be, I wouldn’t survive. If I could fix
things, everywhere would be happy and our lives
would return to normal and I could be a kid again.
Many of us are forced to give up our childhood at a
young age and become the “adult” to
parents who are dysfunctional in one way or
another.
It’s Not About the Nail: You Always Try
and Fix Things When I Really Want You to
Listen
There is a Youtube video that has always given
me a laugh, appreciation, and insight. It’s
Not About the Nail helps us better understand
communication, listening, and the ways men often
get so focused on fixing things, we don’t take
time to listen. What I’ve learned about
listening from this short video and how I can apply
it to being a better husband.
- When my wife is upset, in pain, or
unhappy, I immediately go into “fix
it” mode.
It hurts me to see someone I love in pain and I
feel I must make the problem go away. Whether I had
anything to do with the problem or not, I feel it
is my duty to fix it. Although the problem may be
minor or serious, if I don’t fix it quick I
think something terrible will happen. I act like it
is a life-or-death event that only I can fix. There
isn’t time to hear her feelings. I must act
now.
What I need to remember to do: Take a
deep breath…and then take another deep breath.
Take at least three, before I open my mouth. There
is a book I recent bought and am reading called
STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an
Endlessly Noisy World by Dan Lyons. In the
introduction, Dan speaks truth to my fix-it-mode
mind.
“I’m telling you this as a
friend, so please don’t take it the wrong
way. But I want you to shut the fuck up.
Learning to shut the fuck up will change your
life.”
It has certainly helped improve my relationship.
Sometimes I have to, literally, bite my tongue to
keep my immediate reaction to say something
helpful. But with practice, it gets easier.
- From my perspective, the problem seemed
obvious, and the solution self-evident.
Not only with clients I have seen over the
years, but with my most intimate relationships, the
problems the woman was dealing with seemed
obviously harmful to her. The solution to her
problem seemed obvious to me. I just had to give
her the solution or solve the problem for her and
everything would be fine. Often the solution I
offered had to do with treating me nicer or for her
to stop doing something which was obviously
wrong.
I was sure I knew best and if she would just
accept the logic of my solution, everything would
be fine and she would thank me for my wisdom. This
perspective never seemed to work. Too often I
assumed the reason it didn’t work was because
she was…pick a word, too– emotional,
stubborn, foolish, confused, resistant, etc.
What I need to remember to do: Let go of
my obsession to be right, so that I will be loved.
I need to let go of my inflated ego that tells me I
know best and if I tell her the right answer to her
problem she will thank me in the long run. That
approach rarely works for children and never for
adult women. Even if the problem is obvious and
removing the nail will help, my repeatedly telling
her will only bring the response, “It is NOT
about the nail.” And it really is not about
the nail, it is about listening and respecting the
one you love.
- Though I would deny it, there is big part
of me that believes that men know best.
Like everyone I grew up in a society that has a
bias in favor of one sex–during my formative
years it was usually men—and under stress I
usually default to my male biases. I still am
influenced by my childhood T.V. heroes who were
almost all males and shows like Father Knows Best.
Consciously, I know that is hog wash, but deep down
inside I carry the responsibilities of the world on
my shoulders and if I don’t know best I better
“fake it, ‘til I make it.”
What I need to remember to do: There are
certain things I am better at doing and certain
things Carlin is better at doing. But life is
complex, problems have multiple causes, and
solutions work best when we figure things out
ourselves or we ask for help and are willing to
listen to the person who gives us the advice we are
asking to receive. When I am convinced I know best,
I don’t wait to be asked, I just jump in and
give her the benefit of my manly life experience,
as though her womanly life experience didn’t
count. Learning to listen to my wife requires that
I quiet the voice in my mind and tell it to just,
please, S T F U.
The End of the U.S. and
the World as We Know It and The Truth About Our
Collective Future Part 2
In
part 1, I talked
about the reality that the U.S. and the rest of the
world is out of balance with the laws of nature and
we are headed for a crash. I also described the
vision I was given thirty years ago in a
sweat-lodge ceremony led by a Native American
elder, where I saw the sinking of the ship of
civilization and the people who got off the ship
into lifeboats. I introduced you to the work of my
colleague Margaret Wheatley and quoted from her new
book, Who
Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming
Leadership, Restoring Sanity. Here I want to
delve more deeply into Meg’s work that she has
developed since the 1970s. She is certainly one of
the experts in the field and a woman I trust and
respect.
One of the books I’ve written is called
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. One of
the themes of Meg Wheatley’s work might be
called “Looking for hope in all the wrong
places.” Wheatley says,
“The need to be hopeful rises
in direct proportion to our growing despair as
we recognize the destruction of planet, peoples,
species and the future. This relationship
between hope and despair is
guaranteed–they’re two sides of the
same coin. Buddhist wisdom has warned us for
millennia that hope and fear are one emotional
state: when what was hoped for fails to
materialize, we flip into fear or despair.
Motivated by hope, we end up in despair; the
greater the hope, the greater the despair. Those
who seek hope as their motivation for activism
are doomed to suffer this disabling
dynamic.”
Many people, me included, have been afraid to
lose hope, fearing that without hope, all is lost.
At age 80, I’ve come to peace with my own
mortality. I know I will die someday and clearly I
have more years behind me than ahead of me. But, my
wife, Carlin, and I have six grown children,
seventeen grandchildren, and two great
grandchildren. I’ve been clinging to hope that
somehow, someway, humans would get our acts
together and learn to clean up the mess we’ve
created before it’s too late. I want my
children and grandchildren to live in a world of
clean air and water, where there are wild animals
and wild places that have not been destroyed by
human greed, and one where conflicts can be solved
without the constant battles between us and them.
Humans have created these problems. Surely humans
can figure out how to fix them.
Healing Our Addiction to Hopium and Mourning
What’s Been Lost
Wheatley says we are addicted to hopium
(irrational or unwarranted optimism). Although
individual humans have contributed to our present
problems, individual humans cannot turn back the
clock and fix things. We have contributed to
systemic changes such as environmental damage that
now has a life of its own. We have passed a tipping
point and there is no turning back.
“Many tipping points have
‘tipped’ in Earth’s systems
because of human-induced climate
change,”
says Wheatley,
“a terrifying list of changes
that are irreversible and unstoppable. Even if
all human activity ceased right now, systems
have shifted into new regimes and consequences
of tipping will continue for decades, centuries,
millennia.”
Wheatley offers this stark, yet honest, truth,
that we must accept if we are going to move
ahead.
“If we think we can reverse the
trajectory of the changes now cascading through
the Anthropocene, we’re assuming that human
willpower takes precedence, and is far more
powerful, than the natural laws and dynamics
responsible for Earth’s current state…
Our strong will and our increased consciousness
will not suddenly shift eight billion people
from fear to trust, from threat to possibility,
from self-protection to service… There is
zero possibility that our awareness can change
the threat response that has now taken
hold.”
Wheatley says those who she calls, Warriors for
the Human Spirit, must join with others to create
“Islands of Sanity.” She says,
“The global context is that we
live in a life-destroying culture that cannot be
changed.”
This is a hard one for us change-makers to
accept, that on a global scale, we cannot change
the destructive patterns that have been set in
motion. They need to play themselves out and we
must accept our own limitations. It won’t be
enough to change individuals, we must create
communities of sanity in an insane world.
“Our task,” says Wheatley,
“is to create the conditions, both
internally and within our sphere of influence,
where sanity prevails, where people can recall
and practice the best human qualities of
generosity, caring, creativity, and
community… We know we are an island
surrounded by seas of increasing turbulence,
tsunamis that suddenly wipe out years of good
work and destroy possibility. We know that we
have no control over these forces, and so we
gather together and build an island. The
strongest protection is in our shared identity
and our commitment to norms and practices that
nourish the human spirit.”
It would be great if there were actual islands
we could go to get off the sinking ship of
civilization, but there is no place to hide. This
is what billionaires are trying to do when they buy
parts of the planet and hope to separate themselves
from the rest of us. Rather than building islands
of sanity, they simply bring their own insanity
with them.
Wheatley says,
“To build an island, the work
is twofold. We must stay alert to encroaching
destructive forces, such things as policies that
divert our attention or negatively impact how we
work together, crises badly handled in the
greater community, or overbearing bureaucratic
demands. And we must attend to strengthening our
community, noticing when internal frictions
develop or decisions create unintentional
negative consequences.”
She concludes saying,
“Creating and leading an Island
of Sanity is extremely hard work, and I do not
minimize its difficulty. I’ve watched
leaders make it work and also observed their
exhaustion. But they, like me, don’t feel
there’s any other alternative. We must do
what we can, where we are, with what we have. We
must commit to doing all that we can, using all
that we know, for as long as we can. Though
these are terrible times, we can do our best to
create work that invokes the human spirit, work
that is inherently meaningful, no matter
what.”
The Journey Home: Becoming a Warrior For the
Human Spirit
In 1994, my book The Warrior’s Journey
Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet was
published. I drew on the work of meditation master
Chögyam Trungpa and his book, Shambhala: The
Sacred Path of the Warrior. He said,
“Warriorship here does not
refer to making war on others. Aggression is the
source of our problems, not the solution. Here
the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the
Tibetan pawo, which literally mans ‘one who
is brave.’ Warriorship in this context is
the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition
of fearlessness. The North American Indians had
such a tradition, and it also existed in South
American Indian societies. The key to
warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala
vision is not being afraid of who you
are.”
Trungpa continues,
“Shambhala vision teaches that,
in the face of the world’s great problems,
we can be heroic and kind at the same time.
Shambhala vision is the opposite of selfishness.
When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of
the seeming threat the world presents, then we
become extremely selfish. We want to build our
own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we
can live by ourselves in a secure way.”
[That’s what many billionaires today
and many others with fewer resources are doing in
the face of the world’s problems].
Trungpa goes on to say,
“But we can be much braver than
that. We must try to think beyond our homes,
beyond the fire burning in the fireplace, beyond
sending our children to school or getting to
work in the morning. We must try to think how we
can help this world. If we don’t help,
nobody will. It is our turn to help the world.
At the same time, helping others does not mean
abandoning our individual lives…In fact,
you can start with yourself. The important point
is to realize that you are never off duty. You
can never just relax, because the whole world
needs your help.”
In the last chapter of The Warrior’s
Journey Home, “Warriors Without War,” I
quoted my colleague psychologist and philosopher,
Sam Keen, who offered a clear statement of the
challenge humanity was facing.
“The radical vision of the
future rests on the belief that the logic that
determines either our survival or our
destruction is simple:
- The new human vocation is to heal the
earth.
- We can only heal what we
love.
- We can only love what we
know.
- We can only know what we
touch.”
We may have had a chance to turn things around
thirty years ago. But climate scientists tell us we
have passed critical tipping points. Clearly,
humanity is even more out of touch with ourselves,
each other, and the Earth we all share. We have
turned our backs on the facts and personal beliefs
trump knowledge in our decision-making. We have
difficulty loving ourselves and find it impossible
to build bridges with those whose beliefs differ
from our own, and we continue to destroy our life
support system rather than healing it.
In exploring human history, Meg Wheatley
recognizes that at times of trouble, groups of
enlightened souls arise.
“Warriors appear at certain
historic moments when something valuable is
being threatened and needs protection,”
says Wheatley.
We are living in such times. Humans don’t
have the power to change what has been set in
motion. As I said in part 1, all complex
civilizations collapse, usually within ten
generations. We can’t stop the coming
collapse. What those who feel called can do is
become Warriors of the Human Spirit (or create your
own name for what you feel called to do.)
“We live in a natural world
with its own laws and dynamics,”
says Wheatley.
“What we set in motion by our
self-serving beliefs and behaviors cannot be
stopped by new levels of awareness or collective
mediators. Nature doesn’t lie. She observes
her own laws, and we failed to believe
her.”
For me, Meg Wheatley offers us guidance and
direction that fits with the vision I had in the
sweat lodge ceremony so many years ago.
“As Warriors for the Human
Spirit, our only weapons are compassion and
insight. We choose to stand apart from the
current destructive dynamics and create good
human societies wherever we can, Islands of
Sanity. We know we are only a small minority,
the few people who answer the call and prepare
themselves to preserve and protect what is most
valuable, what must not be lost.”
Learn more about our Moonshot
for Mankind. We’ve brought together a
group of colleagues who recognize the problems and
are coming together to serve.
What We Know About
Depression and Teen-age Boys
Teen-age boys are much more likely to express their
sadness through anger than are girls.
Traditional school counseling and therapy are
often not best suited for connecting with young
males. Finding something to “do” together
makes talking much easier.
Even though teen-agers, and boys in particular,
often act hostile or indifferent to our offers to
help, they are hungry to have someone who really
wants to understand them.
Remember that what seem like “small”
slights can seem “huge” when you’re
a teenager. Our self-esteem and connection to
others is very vulnerable. It doesn’t take
much—a negative word, an indifferent stare, a
lack of appreciation, a rebuff from a girl we
like—to throw us into a tailspin.
Being laughed at, teased, or humiliated is one
of the most crushing experiences young people go
through, particularly males. The resulting
experience of shame is at the core of much of the
violence we see in young males. “I have yet to
see a serious act of violence that was not provoked
by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated,
disrespected and ridiculed, “says James
Gilligan, M.D., author of Violence: Our Deadly
Epidemic and It’s Causes.[i]
Sex, success, and self-esteem are very much
intertwined for teen-age boys. We need to find ways
to reach out to them and discuss these often taboo
topics. One of the techniques I used with my
teenage son (on separate occasions with my teenage
daughter) was to get him in the car to take him
somewhere. I would always take the long way around
and use the time to talk to him about all the
things I wished my father had said to me when I was
his age. Usually he was silent or would make
disgusted or disgusting sounds. But he
couldn’t escape and later as an adult we joked
about it and he told me they were even helpful at
times.
While suggestions of suicide should always be
taken seriously, we need to be particularly
concerned about young males. They are much less
likely to let us know that they are becoming
increasingly depressed and much more likely to
complete a suicide attempt than are young
females.
There are a number of researchers and clinicians
who work with boys that recognize the different
ways boys express their unhappiness. “We see
boys who, frightened or saddened by family
discord,” say Dr. Dan Kindlon and Dr. Michael
Thompson in their book Raising Can: Protecting The
Emotional Life of Boys, “experience those
feelings only as mounting anger or an irritable
wish that everyone would ‘just leave me
alone.’ Shamed by school problems or stung by
criticism, they lash out or withdraw
emotionally.”[ii]
“In so many cases, what in the teenage
years may look like a bad boy is really a sad boy,
whose underground pain may lead him to become
extremely dangerous to others, or much more likely,
to himself,” says Dr. William S. Pollack,
author of Real Boys’ Voices. Tragically, boys
rarely ‘attempt’ suicide; when they reach
out for a knife, a rope, or a gun, generally they
are not crying for help. Rather, they are very much
trying to get the job done.”[iii]
[i] James Gilligan.
Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996, 119.
[ii] Dan Kindlon and
Michael Thompson. Raising Cain: Protecting The
Emotional Life of Boys. New York: Ballantine
Publishing Group, 1999, 3.
[iii] William S. Pollack
with Todd Shuster. Real Boys’ Voices. New
York: Random House, 2000, 148.
Where is the Most
Peaceful Place on the Planet?
A few years ago my wife and I spent three months in
New Zealand. We were struck by the beauty of the
country, the slow pace of life, and the
friendliness of the people. We had a wonderful
experience on December 21st, my birthday. My whole
life I’ve celebrated the shortest, darkest day
of the year. But in the Southern hemisphere, of
course, it’s the longest, brightest day of the
year.
We were walking downtown and had planned to have
dinner at a nice restaurant. It was late afternoon
and my wife said she wanted to do a little shopping
before the shops closed. I chuckled to myself and
thought, “It’s 4 days before Christmas.
The shops will be open late so they can collect the
last shopping dollar. She just needs some time away
from me.”
We agreed to meet at the restaurant and went our
separate ways. As it got close to 5:00 I was
surprised to see the shops closing. I couldn’t
believe it. This would never happen in the U.S.
When I asked a shopkeeper why they weren’t
staying open late to make more money, he looked at
me like I was a little daft. “We like spending
time with our families and friends,” he
informed me. “Have a nice day.”
Carlin and I had a wonderful dinner at a
beautiful restaurant in the South Island town of
Invercargill. We agreed that if there was anyplace
in the world we’d like to live, other than our
own little town of Willits, California, it would be
in New Zealand.
If you don’t live in Willits and are
looking for a beautiful and peaceful place to live,
you may want to consider New Zealand. It has been
rated as the most peaceful nation on Earth by
Vision of Humanity (www.VisionofHumanity.org), an
Australian-based research group that counts former
President Jimmy Carter, Ted Turner, and the Dalai
Lama among its endorsers.
After New Zealand, the top 10 most peaceful
nations are Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria,
Sweden, Japan, Canada, Finland and Slovenia.
Where does the U.S. rank as a peaceful country?
According to the Institute for Economics and Peace
that rated the relative tranquility of 144 nations
according to 23 "indicators" --including gun sales,
the number of homicides, the size of the military,
the potential for terrorism and the number of
people in jail—we rank 83rd.
To get a better sense of exactly where the U.S.
fits in the peaceful scheme of things, we are less
peaceful than Senegal, Bolivia, and Ukraine (ranked
80, 81, and 82 respectively). But more peaceful
than Kazakhstan, Brazil, and Rwanda (ranked 84, 85,
and 86).
But if you thought that living in a peaceful
country was just good for men, women, children, and
other living things, you’d be wrong. It’s
also good for business. "Because they can work
better with others, peaceful countries can
constructively work together on solving some of our
most pressing economic, social and environmental
problems. Indeed, peace is the prerequisite to
helping solve today's major challenges, such as
food and water scarcity, decreasing biodiversity or
climate change," said Clyde McConaghy, a former
advertising director and business executive who
developed the index with entrepreneur Steve
Killelea.
"Peace is a concrete aim that can be measured
and valued, not just in social terms but in
economic terms. There is a clear correlation
between the economic crisis and the decline in
peace," Mr. McConaghy continued, adding that peace
tends to promote productivity and trade.
Given our present economic crisis, perhaps one
of the best things we could do in the U.S. to
stimulate the economy is to become more like New
Zealand and less like Iraq (the least peaceful
country of the 144 surveyed). Let me see, when was
the last time New Zealand invaded another country
to secure access to cheap oil?
©2023 Jed Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
©2023 Jed Diamond
See Books,
Issues
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
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