Creativity

We love homemade!

Making your own poppies gives you the opportunity to use what might otherwise go to waste; that includes your creativity 🙂 !

Poppies in the photo include (top) – one made in Quebec and distributed through Échec à la guerre, going clockwise: one made by gluing white paper on boxboard and using a fabric tab and glue to attach a safety pin on the back, another made with “rice paper” with a peace symbol stitched in the centre to hold the 2 “flowers” together (the stitching providing a base for attaching a pin on the back), a poppy made of white and blue felt and another made using a make-up pad (shaped with stitches) and a bead.

If you have access to a printer, you can use the printable poppies (English & French versions) available at https://peacepoppies.ca/lapel-poppies/.

People in schools, retirement homes and other institutions often enjoy the shared poppy-making activity. This is how we end war – by coming together to build peace, piece by piece 🙂

If I Could I Would…

Former CC board member, Eric Unger, created images of 5 cards people can print off (like business cards). On the back of each card would be the text from the un-numbered card. (the one which begins “If I could I would… but peace is elusive…”)

You could leave cards in various places for people to find. Hopefully this would inspire people to join us in imagining and creating a more peaceful world.

Download all the cards.

Reflecting on Bertolt Brecht and Individual Conscience

Ursula Franklin ends her foreword to Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta’s “Refusing to be Enemies” (Ithaca Press, 2010) with these words:

“Bertolt Brecht was part of the struggle against the rise of fascism and the rising tide of violence in his time. He wrote in 1935, well before the birth of most of those whose voices this book has captured, on community responses and on the distinction between help and systemic change. [Here is the link to his poem, ‘To What End Goodness?’ ‘Was nützt die Güte?’ Translated by Scott Norton. https://harpers.org/2007/08/brechts-to-what-end-goodness/

“Were he with us today, Brecht would convey his friendship and respect to those whose actions and thoughts this book records. He would be grateful for their courage and creativity as they explore the resource base of nonviolence. He would see, as I do, the bridge across space and time built by all those who, in refusing [to] be enemies, try to build for all a livable world.”

The translator, Norton, makes an interesting comment on the poem, linking an evolution in Brecht’s thinking, to that of a character in the 2007 film, ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ ‘The Lives of Others’: https://harpers.org/2007/08/the-ambiguous-quality-of-brechts-goodness/. Brecht, a doctrinaire Marxist, was suspicious of those wishing only ‘to do the right thing’ but who failed to engage politically. With time, however, Brecht’s thinking evolved. Norton comments: “In the end it is indeed the quiet morality of the individual that matters; that is what must be repeated millions of times, through millions of individual self-realizations, to create a better world. That will never emerge from any state’s central plan.”

Tomorrow’s Child

Come child
let me teach you peace
for you know too much
of war and despair,
too much
of hunger and pain.

Let me teach you
how to love again,
that one day
you will have the strength
to shield your heart
from hate.

Let me teach you
how to trust again,
that one day
you will not place faith
in those who preach
with guns.

Come child
and embrace tomorrow,
for the dream of
peace
lives in you.

© Jeevan Bhagwat

Publication history:

“Tomorrow’s Child”
Artists for a Better World International, 2020
http://artistsforabetterworld.org/poetry-tomorrows-child/12423/

English original by Jeevan Bhagwat and Finnish translation “Huomisen Lapsi” by Anu Harju
Kaiku/Echo (Finnish/English print publication), Dec 2015
Finnish Organization of Canada

Finnish translation “Huomisen Lapsi” by Anu Harju (Anna Nieminen’s cousin in Finland)
Solidaarisuuskalenteri Solidarity Calendar, 2015
Finnish Peace Committee
https://rauhanpuolustajat.org/english/

Poets Against War, 2003
http://www.poetsagainstwar.ca/