What Would Lysistrata Do?
By Susanne Goldstein on May 14, 2007 in Susanne's Favs, Global Community, The Social Age
Sometimes the nightly news is hard to take. I feel the same about the RSS headlines on my daily startpage. On any given day, there’s bad news from some combination of Iraq, Darfur, Gaza, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. But amongst the bad, there are stories of hope. Just today, the US and Iran agreed to hold talks in Bagdad about improving Iraq’s security. I can’t say I’m particularly hopeful about the outcome of these talks, but it did get me thinking.
From 431-404 BCE, Athens and Sparta raged the bloody Peloponnesian War. A combination civil war and land crusade, the long and violent war was fodder for many Greek poets (aka playwrights) of the era, including Aristophanes. In 411 BCE, he wrote The Lysistrata, and I think it presents some interesting ideas. It goes something like this:
- The war has been raging for 20 years
- The women of Athens are sick of it
- Lysistrata (loosely translated to “she who disbands armies”) decides to do something about it
- She gathers female delegates from the other Hellenic states and they determine to take matters into their own hands and force the men to stop the war
- Lysistrata convinces the women — wives, mistresses and whores — to withhold sex from the men until they find a way to peace
- Men can’t live without sex
- They figure out a peaceful solution
- The war ends
- Everyone has a great party (and lots of sex)
Ah, if only if were true.
So what can we learn from Lysistrata? Is there a modern-day equivalent to withholding sex that could bring peace to some of our most frightening power conflicts (isn’t that what all these wars and genocides and nuclear races are about anyway)?
I don’t have an answer. Do we boycott oil? Stop eating grapes? Should we practice civil disobedience or march on Washington? Where is our Ghandi? Our Martin Luther King Jr.? Our Lysistrata?
There are so many issues of unrest in the world today. And I maintain that ALL of them sit at the intersection of fear, power and dominance. We have tried everything. Economic sanctions, occupation, regime change. We act in those parts of the world where our interests are at stake. Sadly, we tend to ignore those parts of the world where they aren’t. So people keep dying. In Iraq. In Sudan. In the Palestinian territories. In Israel. It’s crazy. There’s got to be a better way.
In The Social Age, we no longer think as individual nations who need to expand our borders but as global neighbors who share the same air, sun, earth and rain. We no longer think as solo consumers, but as participants in flourishing economies and societies. We no longer act alone, but as part of a congregation for the global good.
And so, here is the question. What is it we can do together that would generate this type of forced response? What can we do to effect colossal change? What would Lysistrata do?
I welcome your suggestions.
Lysistrata illustration by Aubrey Beardsley care of Wikipedia.org
Susanne– this is a very wise question, and you have chosen, by design, I think, the peaceful warriors: Ghandi, MLK, Lysistrata. In politics, in war, and in love where is a lot at stake, we go for the big dreams, the untainable, the Prometheus types of tasks, that remind us that we are gods and mortals at the same time. Working to help others is admirable and necessary, and while it stretches our inner vision and generosity, it also gives us the pleasure of forgetting ourselves, forgetting that the world gets better one person at a time. The work begins with us.
I propose that we start with small, mundane steps– the most difficult ones. Lets do for ourselves what we ask of our leaders. We learn control over ourselves, we stand up for ourselves at home and at the office, we ponder the right action in the family and in the world (and sometimes we do the right thing) we recycle, we speak to our Congress representative, we vote, we withold sex (:-)) when appropiate, we give to others when appropriate. Choosing the right action in one’s life, as humble an action as it may seem gives one the inner discipline to also choose right in international matters that are highly charged emotionally and that have separated peoples and people since the beginning of time. What is the right action as citizen of the US nation, as citizen of the world, as citizen of my own abode? They may be just one and the same. I have a dream that the world could peacefully change from the inside out.
Comment by Ligia -- May 14, 2007 @ 11:11 am