Peace on Paper: Connecting with your inner hippie

Written by Dana Dahl

In John Lennon’s “Imagine,” the singer/songwriter asks us to envision a world without separated countries or religions, a world without the need for personal possessions, a world where we can all “live as one.” Division is a powerful tool that governments, religious leaders, and even close personal friends and acquaintances can use to keep us from acting on our most noble, compassionate, deeply innate human instincts. To create a sense of the “other” as less than human, unworthy, and non-valuable so that greed, ownership, power, and control can be sustained has been utilized for centuries. Our maps, cultures, and languages have been chopped up and divided with imaginary lines and imposed boundaries that are meant to keep the “other” out. But the fact is that we are all undeniably equal parts of the human family.

Human nature may appear to be selfishly motivated when we only look at the history of wars, oppression, and slavery and the many cruelties imposed by the kind of people who tend to assert power and control over a culture or group. The reflection of their motives is not a reflection of the majority of human beings who prefer to react to their very primal instinct of altruism and compassion when they see a fellow human being in need.

According to Dacher Keltner, when people feel compassion, the heart rate goes down and the fight or flight response is repressed. The inclination to be soothing or approachable is heightened.

“As it turns out, when young children and adults feel compassion for others, this emotion is reflected in very real physiological changes,” writes psychology professor at UC Berkeley Dacher Keltner. “Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee, but to approach and sooth.”

“This is a great developmental milestone—to take the perspective of another,” she says. “It is one of the most important aspects of our ability to make moral judgments and fulfill the social contract. When we take the other’s perspective, we feel an empathic state of concern and are motivated to address that person’s needs and enhance that person’s welfare, sometimes even at our own expense.”

At this time, we are at a complex crossroads in our communities, nations, and world. More and more we are pummeled with messages to slam the doors shut, to lock the gates, to build walls and close ourselves off from the “others.”

Indifference, exclusion, stereotyping, or blaming those who are being oppressed or shunned will only feed into the hands of that relatively small group of powermongers who gain more by dividing our species, nations, and families. By standing aside and watching as those are bullied and oppressed we end up supporting the “shabbiest of lies,” a phrase Mark Twain spoke regarding the indifference and justification of slavery in the 1860s.

It is time now. Indeed, it has always been “the right time” to decide as individuals, as communities and as a species that if we hear messages that promote division, contempt, exclusion, and indifference, we will finally be brave enough to stand up, speak up, and go with what our hearts are telling us to do.

For we have the power inside of each of us to reject the negative and cruel messages that would have us shut others out or impose arbitrary rules that exclude them and their children from being included as equals. A clear message from that original “long-haired hippy” of more than 2,000 years ago was one of inclusion that continues to resonate in the hearts of all of us and manifests when we choose unconditional love instead of fear.

Dana Dahl wears many hats, including residential draftswoman and designer at Dahlhaus Design. Owner and laborer of Red Hen Gardens in New Harmony where she and her husband Bill tend to their flock of cackling hens and growing and selling homegrown heirloom vegetables at the Zion Canyon Farmer’s Market in Springdale. In her spare time (if she has any), she makes hippie-inspired art and helps raise her step grandkids as well as offering a place to sleep and home-cooked meals to various vagrants and critters that show up at her door. No one has ever left her home feeling left out or with an empty belly.

The “Peace on Paper” column is managed and provided as a public service by Daniel L Pettegrew, founder of the former World Peace Gardens Foundation and creator of the “Doors of Hope” collection for the Erin Kimball Foundation.