The
notion that there must be a better way has always lived for me. When
I was young, I found that the strong had to be monitored and the weak
had to be defended. The bullies had to be slowed down a little, and
wimps had to be bolstered. But I guess the need for equalization really
came home to me when I became a warrior in 1968, in the United States
Marine Corps in a little southeast Asian country called Vietnam. We
understood that we were defending democracy and freedom against the
encroaching Red Menace. About ninety days into my tour of duty, we surrounded
a little hamlet that military intelligence had warned was an enemy-sympathetic
village, a place where the enemy would go at night to get fed and to
get their wounds tended, where they would rest in the protection of
the village to resume the war against us the next days. We had walked
all night to surround this village and at 3:30 in the morning we opened
fire on it. When day dawned--it was a rainy morning--myself and thirty-one
other men went down to the village to see what remained. All we found
were old people and kids; of course they were dead. Door after door,
house after house it was the same story. As we reached the other side
of the village, I rested my back against a tree and slid down the trunk
and I said out loud, “There has got to be a better way.”
And then again, “There has got to be a better way.” Obviously
my country wasn’t in the right, killing old people and children,
so then and there I said to myself, “From now on no one dies that
doesn’t have to--on either team. If there is any way around it,
no one dies. And we’ll find that way.” That became my mission
at that time, the nineteen-year old Bruce’s mission statement.
Well,
it seemed no matter what I did there were still losses. Yet I knew there
had to be a better way. I’d look up and realize that the governments
didn’t know what they were doing, and the Marine Corps didn’t
know what they were doing. Sometimes I made decisions contrary to their
decisions and still it cost lives. In a context of war, lose/lose always
results. I knew there had to be a better way, but I didn’t find
it over there. I didn’t find a way to stop the losses. I didn’t
find a way to stop the killing. I didn’t find a way to stop the
dying, and we Americans lost our first war. It seems ironic that we
lost the war that I fought in, when what a wanted was to be a champion,
a hero. So I came home and I decided, “No more leadership.”
I had lost faith in my ability to find a better way, and I didn’t
want to take responsibility for the results of a way that wasn’t
working. So I chose out.
Then
I did my training. In the last day of my Crossroads, I said, “This
is a better way. This is what I will be about.”
In
that training I had heard the story of The Hundredth Monkey about monkeys
raised for medical research on some tiny islands in Japan because their
social and biological systems approximate those of humans. The government
air-dropped sweet potatoes to them, and one day this male monkey takes
a bite out of a potato, and of course he has more on his plate than
he can handle. Its kind of typical. So he sees this female monkey and
throws it at her. We men are always throwing what we don’t want
at the women and they clean it up. The potato rolled past her into the
surf, and she looks at it, thinking, I was on my way to get a potato,
I’ll just eat this one so she picks it up and takes a bite. The
first thing she notices is the absence of sand. She also notices a hint
of salt. Hum, not bad. From that moment on she washes her potatoes in
the surf, and the male monkey watches. He sneaks ups behind her and
snatches one of these washed potatoes, takes a bite and says, hmm, not
bad. So he starts washing his potatoes, too. Monkey see, monkey do.
Pretty soon the other monkeys are washing their potatoes. The government
notices this new behavior, and they start dropping the potatoes close
to the shore. As time goes on, the pilots who drop the potatoes notice
that monkeys on a nearby island are walking down to the sea and washing
their potatoes. There are no telephones or radios or humans to communicate
this new behavior. The monkeys didn’t swim over and tell their
neighbors, Hey, wash your potatoes, because these monkeys swim like
rocks. Pretty soon all the monkeys on all the islands are washing their
potatoes. So the question comes up, how did this behavior get communicated?
So the story comes down. It suggests that the scientific notion of critical
mass applies to psychological and social issues, as well as to chemistry
and biology. When knowledge and behavior reaches a certain saturation
point, then most of the people, or monkeys, begin to recognize and practice
it, too.
In
Big Sur California, Carl Rogers used his Center for the Studies of the
Person to check out human behavior with respect to critical mass. He
discovered that critical mass for a population of human beings is seventeen
percent. That’s the point at which a significant number of people
adopt a new way of being. So, Bruce out there after Crossroads looks
up and says, “Huh, I live in Utah” (which had a population
of one million at the time). “If we could start a human development
training in Salt Lake City, and we touched 170,000 lives, we could vote
a ‘4' anywhere--in a mall, in front of the Salt Palace or in a
redneck cafe-- and get a ‘4' back. Pretty soon everybody in Utah
would realize that a ‘4' --four fingers, a hug, works better than
a ‘1'--one finger, that finger. And then people would practice
that. So all we’ve gotta do is get 170,000 people through the
hug line and we will have a million people loving each other. And if
we can do it in Utah, maybe they will go out and touch people in other
places, and pretty soon we can walk in any dangerous urban area in the
country, come up against the character in the black coat with the hat
turned around the bulge under the arm and when he steps out of the shadows
and blocks our path, we give him a goofy grin and hold up four fingers.
Well, immediately, he looks at us like, what??? And he says, “Oh.”
He shuffles and touches the bulge under his arm again and we know what’s
there. And then he looks up and opens his arms and we creep inside,
and we trade those four fingers, a ‘4' for the one finger that
pulls the trigger.
So
that’s what has powered me. Now will I see it in my lifetime?
I doubt it.
But
you know I’ve touched my people. I’ve touched some people
and you’ve touched some people, and the people you touch, you
empower them, you inspire them, you dig in with them, so that they get
that it’s worth the effort, that a ‘4' works better than
a ‘1' and then they touch people and those people touch people.
Now maybe I’ll never see it happen in my life, and maybe you’ll
never see it in yours. But if we are really, really good and really
committed, and willing to do the work, maybe our grandchildren will
live in a world of win/win, a world without war.
