D-Day: The Best from the Worst

The moving images of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day made me recall how much the war affected my own life. This collage of the bombing blitz of Liverpool could well have been a picture of Redcar St. where I was born and the two children as my sister, Jean, and I.

When I was old enough to understand and ask my relatives how they survived I was so surprised that the raids--far from causing them to despair or go crazy--drew the best out of them. Every day, through more than six months of constant bombing, they faced the possibility of death or major injury. They, matter-of-factly, risked life and limb to help those in houses receiving direct hits. The blitz achieved the opposite of what the Nazis intended: it drew out more resolve and courage than demoralization.

I realize now that those raids were also a major source of influence on my sister and me--encouraging us to devote our lives to making the world a better place in any way we could. Jean took up social work and I took up International Development. The culmination of this motivation occurred for me some 50 years afterward in September 1993. My partner, Turid Sato, and I (with sponsorship from the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of Japan) organized a workshop for ten countries in order to create a new paradigm for tackling the problems of International Development. There was broad agreement that the current system, having accumulated $1.5 trillion in debt, was not producing commensurate results. (The New Development Paradigm)

We used the approach we had been developing for more than a decade to place human purpose--rather than economic resources--at the center of the process of development. As illustrated in the New Paradigm Chart, we used the constructive tension between spiritual and scientific, social and political, ecological and economic ideals to create the power needed for development.

We had learned how the worst of times could draw out the best in people. The problems we face today are no less complex than those we faced at D-Day or in addressing crises of global development. There are ways in which we can produce the energy necessary to resolve them.