“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Many former Farc members have since become politicians.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Organized into a political force, they played a key role in shaping the deal and softening the stances of the two sides. During talks that cemented a 2016 pact with a larger guerrilla group known as Farc, tens of thousands of victims of that war were at the table. The guerrillas might end their violent tactics if the deal begins to fulfill the social and economic goals that inspired them to take up arms in the 1960s.Ĭolombia already has experience in bringing civilians into a negotiated peace agreement. “Let this be the people’s agreement,” said ELN chief negotiator Pablo Beltrán during the signing ceremony in Cuba.Īllowing civilians to monitor the cease-fire would set the stage for them to participate in the details of a final peace agreement, which Colombian President Gustavo Petro expects by 2025. Last Friday, the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas signed procedural agreements that not only plan for a 180-day cease-fire but also open a way for civil society to track and verify the deal. One of the world’s oldest violent conflicts could be near an end because of a novel idea in peacemaking: Let civilians participate. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process.
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