Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 21:38:39 -0500 

From: "Mohammed Ahsan" <mohammed.ahsan@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxxx 

Subject: How do We Contain Intolerance and Find Common Grounds through Conflict Resolution - II 

Dear Shetubondhon Friends: 

In part I of this posting under the current thread, we talked about the root causes that gave rise to our senses of intolerance, hatred, and conflict. In part II, we will first look at the cultural transformation that had taken place in our society since our independence and then look at the solutions to reversing the tide of the sense of negativity through Cultural Retransformation. In Part III, we will look at the resolutions to the remaining factors of "Swaying Minds" and "Individualism". Owing to the size of the posting Part III will be posted later. 

1. The Cultural Transformation of Our Society to Intolerance and Hatred: 

Conflicts in general, are very deep rooted and over time becomes part of our culture. What made us succeed in the liberation war became the nightmare of the post-independence era. During and before our independence, we had a common enemy and most of our anger and hatred was directed to our enemy and our conflict with the outside common enemy kept our internal differences in the backseat. In post-independence era however, we lost our common enemy as the common sink of our anger and therefore, tried to find an alternative. With the absence of such a common sink, we redirected our attention to our internal differences and targeted individuals and groups within our own borders. 

Our mindset, owing to the brutality of the liberation war, after the liberation, took a radical turn whereby, the voice of reason and rationale gave way to the battle hardened rigid minds that controlled the streets, the community, and eventually the hierarchies of the government. As we lost our common enemy, our minds and hearts became overloaded with grief inside for the loved ones that we lost during the war and tried to release those internal pressures by finding alternative enemies within our own borders. 

As a result, people coalesced around geography and regions, on religion, on political beliefs, on philosophical orientations, on social statuses, on gender, on professions and on and on and on. The new tracts that we had learned over the period of our struggle became the dominating factor of establishing our personal and group relationships amongst ourselves. 

The dominant ones established themselves in the helm of affairs of these groups and subgroups based on their personal relationships and their strength of influence. Love and Compassion gave way to intimidation and strong-arm tactics in managing these internal and inter-group relationships that formed the base of our future. Our political, religious, and social leaderships failed miserably in containing these cultural transformations in the early days of our independence and they became victims of their own mistakes. What followed is no ones guess. Mr. Murshed’s article on Democracy and Autocracy kind of explains the scenario of the current state of affairs. 

Intolerance and hatred now has been a part of our culture and is institutionalized in all forms of organizations and social circles. We do not feel any pinch of conscience nowadays when we backbite, nor do we feel anything in our heart when we pull someone down to bring him/her at par with our own status. We have become indifferent to the call of conscience. We love to create shells of people around us who are mere "Yes-Persons" or "chamchas" and have no respect for quality. If quality is a threat to the status-quo then we do not wait to take him or her down for good to get out of any threat. 

How do we change all this? This is definitely a very time consuming process because it needs a genuine, positive cultural transformation or reformation. The seed of that positive transformation needs to be sown now so that at least our children can reap the fruits during their lifetime. I had mentioned of three major factors that have been contributing to our growing intolerance and hatred for each other both at personal, group, and at national levels. There are both internal and external factors that we need to deal with in battling these growing social concerns of Intolerance that is giving rise to the conflicts. 

2. Dealing with the Sense of Negativity 

Sense of negativity has been created over a very long period of time based on our early education, upbringing style, influence of social circles, peer pressures, and the environment that we live in. The seeds of negativity are basically sown during the very early years of our lives either at home through our dealings with parents, our brothers and sisters, or at our schools through the reach of our formal education systems. I had indicated some concrete examples that breed negativism in our mind and our hearts. The following are the most critical factors that need to be instituted immediately to be able to negate the early institution of Negativity. 

1. Creating conducive home-environment so that our children can develop positive attitudes towards life in general. 

The critical factor in this component is first the mother and to a lesser degree the father. All parents should attend community classes regarding positive attitude building techniques. Local religious institutions or community groups, who then will keep on monitoring the individual progresses can organize these classes. Mothers should be taught not to use the "white lie" tactic for feeding their children or inducing them to study. These do achieve short-term successes in being able to feeding the reluctant child or inducing them to study but no one consciously realizes the long term damage this does to the negative senses that it creates. When we grow up we do the same things with our children because it then becomes part of our culture. 

As an example, most Bengali mothers would say, "look, look, the eagle is coming to eat your food", and as the child looks to find the eagle, the mother forces a chunk of the food in his mouth and the child being busy with finding the eagle, gulps the chunk down. When he/she grows up, they tend to use the same techniques in getting something done from others that one consciously would not do. These are the items that needs to be taught in our community classes. We should also teach the items that provoke positive thinking. Childhood is the time when one picks up the cultural trends and the mothers are the most important factors in that building up process. We have to teach the mothers adequately so that they can transfer positive attitudes in our early childhood. 

2. Reform Primary and Secondary Education Syllabus and Take out any Negative Teachings and Replace them with Positive Mind Building Items: 

Our ill-fated education system is the major breeding ground for developing negative attitudes amongst our children. We need to have a closer look once again at our curriculum and take out the items that were incorporated by our colonial fathers to create clerks without use of innovative senses. I had already cited some examples in Part I of this article. Our education system must be turned into a more objective weapon of building future conscious citizens with conscience rather than readying individuals for the available jobs. Talking about my generation, we always had taken our education as a pill or quinine. We had never looked forward to attending our classes to learn things that aid us as a human being. 

The general senses that we are given both by our teachers and parents rhymes with the famous piece "Lekha Pora Korey Jey Gari Ghora Chorey Shey". We never look at our education as the preparing grounds for a complete human being. The very culture of reading books to pass the exams has to change so that we can look at education as a career building effort rather than an instrument to finding future jobs. The teachers have a tremendous role to play in building positive attitudes in the classroom. Teachers can take out the element of fear from the minds and hearts of our children. This element gives rise to negative thinking when we grow up. 

3. Role of Religion in Building Positive Attitudes 

Religion is a major tool for building conscience and positive attitude provided they are given in the right doses and in right format. The current state of religious teachings is also characterized by negative overtones. We look at the differences among various religions and highlight the inter-religious tensions building items. We never emphasize on the bridge building efforts of religion. No matter what religion one follows, if they were followed properly then this world would have been a lot better place to live. We should highlight the events of religion that shows the human bonding and the endurance of the hardships without retaliations and the sense of kindness and forgiveness. Most religion has specific events that breeds tolerance and the power of endurance amongst its followers. In our religion Ramadan is the best example of such a practice. We should encourage our young generation to follow these events and be part of the cultural transformation of our society.

End of Part II