The Struggle Sucks

I’ve been in Bogota now for a month with my own apartment, an office job, and beer. So granted, I feel very distanced from the peace community. Recently while walking along a Bogota street and talking with Liza, a fellow FOR worker, I realized one of the very important things my time in the peace community taught me. My time in the peace community was not easy. I always enjoyed it on a very deep level and many times on a surface, smiley level, but the last word I would apply to my time there is easy. The knowledge that multiple armed groups walk through the jungle around you, the constant possibility of nearby combat, and the ever present hostility of military on the road or path to the village, among other things, made it so that a part of me was happy to be leaving that zone and life. The community’s efforts to continue to live in the zone I have left and resist/survive the physical, economic and psychological pressures is the ‘struggle’ I speak of in my blog title.

On one hand, I was more vulnerable to the pressures of living in the peace community because I didn’t grow up building the defenses for that context. But overall, I think it was way easier for me because I always knew it was temporary. I had the powerful psychological tool of option, of being able to leave if I wanted. After being in the community for 10 months and experiencing my own times of depression, exhaustion and grief I can better understand, on an emotional level, that ‘the struggle’ of those that live in the peace community is, well…. a struggle. It’s hard, often painful, and necessitates an incredibly high level of commitment and personal attachment to carry it through.

A leader of the peace community would often say that those who struggle for a bit are good, and those who struggle for a long time are very good, but what is really necessary are people who struggle for their whole lives (which he has done). I feel like I barely made it through 10 months of being with a struggle, let alone in it. I cannot imagine a whole life of struggle.

When I first wrote the title to this blog I had no idea what a struggle meant. Before, to me, a struggle was an exciting story full of graffiti, marches, people power, powerful Spanish protest songs and was victorious. For this, struggling or being with a struggle seemed like an adventure to me. So often we hear of the successes, power and glory of peoples’ struggles that we are being distanced from how much struggling sucks. Now fully understanding the emotional and often physical cost of being in a struggle, I see it’s not something you do for fun. Deep commitment to a cause, often because the cause is your own well-being, is the only way someone, knowing what they’re in for, decides they want to fight, to resist, to struggle.

And for your viewing pleasure, a funny picture.