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True happiness - end of war
Simone de Beauvoir - in relation to the masses - said to the intellectuals, that they should not deny the masses when they pour out into the streets out of happiness that the war is over. That was the experience after May 8th 1945. She chided them for staying always aloof, equally cynical. How can they understand people if they do not share with them as much low as high points in their lives?
"The war is over", Poiein kai Prattein, Athens 2005
Certainly such true happiness is linked to the news that 'the war is over'. It does not escape even children who have never experienced directly war. When the seven to nine year olds painted a mural in Athens, they express joy by painting their own bodies as dance figures until they were shocked by a sixteen year old painting in the left corner of the mural a very sad figure. The children started to discuss what to do. Their solution was to send a figure which floats down and holds in the hand a letter containing the news: "the war is over". They want to hold onto that belief and refused to be frightened by the cynics who would claim there has always been war and war can never be abolished completely. What is possible, what is impossible in this case? The children decide for the impossible to make peace possible.
True happiness or the truth of happiness can entail many kinds of experiences, from birth of a child to a child learning to walk. Happiness is linked to the ability to trust. When a child finds its first balance by beginning to walk on its own feet, then it has to trust the parents and it can be understood from then on as key concept of human practice
Why is this so important in conjunction to the ethics and philosophy behind Kids' Guernica? Happiness in relation to children implies many things but fore mostly spontaneity and honesty is needed when seeking solutions to such problems as war and injustices inflicted upon society.
We need as much those friends Aristotle talks about and if children learn that value from an early age on, then we are all better off if these friends help us avoid such actions that would lead to all kinds of negative consequences, including loss of friendship and then on to war.
If we need the imagination to perceive goals, and if adults tend to loose the quality of anticipation by lacking the free imagination, all the more adults have a reason to stay in touch with children. They are the ones who can free them in their imagination to become again creative and able to question those in power because by becoming real they do not fear reality. But to be in touch with children’s imagination, adults have to become like Janusz Korszak wrote, respectful of the child in order to be able to recognize its Rights and therefore not to harm it by abusing that child.
Now the reality for children is still an unknown world containing many possibilities but equally very present to them. Even if they do not know as of yet many things, they sense, feel and intuitively know what is right, what is wrong. Hence children want to live in the present to confront this reality. They want to touch life and come to terms with what the adult world presents to them. Insofar as they take on readily every task, they risk to over-demand themselves. Indeed it is the trait of children that they have not grown afraid as of yet to take on any responsibility regardless the burden.
Therefore, no wonder that many of the experiences made within Kids' Guernica relate to how children are ready to take on even or especially the problem of war, of violence, of injustice even though we adults have been beaten up so that we have ended up believing peace in this world is an impossible task, that is something which can never be realized.
We need to realize that difference to children for whom impossible demands are very much in the realm of the still possible.
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