Reading (For Dummies)

Ghandi Speaks Out

I saw Arun Ghandi last night (the 75th anniversity of the first day of Mohandas' Salt March), speaking at a "Peace Gathering" in Bath.

The PeaceWeavers are a "hippie" commune located on Thunder Mountain just outside of Bath. As if needing to be taken seriously, they are a drug-free, alchohol free, mostly vegan group that practice green construction, advocate off-grid living, and run their gardens from "human" fertilizer. I'm now helping their graden grow. You can probably figure out how that works.

Prior to heading out to the gathering, Laura and I went to Letchworth, a sort of castrated state park (at least, compared to the 'dacks), which featured mowed lawns, a gift shop, and coin-drop binoculars.

We wandered around on one of the trails, which disappeared to nothing (no trail maintenance...nobody that visit there seems to want to get out of their car to go for a walk, not that I mind). I half-considered acting like an ignoramous and complaining to the rangers about how we almost died, but we thought we should just get on to the night's festivities to the East.

I wasn't expecting much from Mr. Ghandi's presentation. I don't know much about the Mahatma, even less about his children and grandchildren. So the conference was a bit of a mystery. I went along partly from knowing Laura and mostly from intense curiosity about the Weaver extended family and their seminars and outings, which have some notoriety in Central New York.

Mr. Ghandi opened his lecture with an experiment: pair up, and have one person in the pair to make a tight fist. The other's job was to open the fist. Only one person in the audience of several hundred asked the fisted person to open theirs...the rest of us tried prying. In my defense, I tried tickling, although I won't claim that that was necessarily a less agressive move...

Arun Ghandi is an exceptionally charismatic man who shared with us his childhood memories of his grandfather. He preached understanding at the family level as his grandfather did, and a lot of those anecdotes will stick with me. He is all too human, though, and like the rest of us is puzzled about what it is that we as Americans should do to bring about peace. As for myself, those political ideals spring back to mind after recent civil service petrification. I wonder how to strike a balance...