Heroes and Peace, Rotary Luncheon April 19, 2017

When United Flight 175 and American Airlines flight 111 crashed into the World Trade Center Towers, and American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the side of the Pentagon on a sunny September morning in 2001, Scott Martin, living in Italy at the time, was asked to speak on the tragedy that had just befallen his country. While much of the world felt anger, fear and a lust for revenge, Martin found he was feeling compassion.

 

“As an American, I was asked to speak in front of a crowd about my feelings. When I told them I felt compassion, it was not well-received. But that was the point when I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to peace.”  

 

“(The hijackers) did not ‘kind of’ believe in what they were doing. They could not all have been just ‘crazy’,” Rotary Peace Scholar Martin explained, “They believed one-thousand percent in what they were doing.”

 

Martin is a licensed landscape architect, who specializes in sustainable landscaping. He was behind a venture to rent living Christmas trees. Instead of growing a two-story tree to be cut down and tossed in the trash, Martin’s venture rents living trees, which are delivered and picked up after the holidays to be used year after year. Martin presented this idea on “Shark Tank” and had received the backing of billionaire investor Mark Cuban. Another important component to Martin’s living Christmas tree rental venture is providing employment opportunities to long-term unemployed or other individuals, who have difficulty finding jobs.

 

Martin, however, after receiving a Rotary Peace Scholarship, has put all other ventures aside and is now dedicating himself 100% to promoting peace. For this scholarship, Martin attended the Chulongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand for a three-month program in peace and conflict resolution. He was one of 23 Rotary peace scholars from 17 countries.

 

“In that room, I think we counted 93 languages that were spoken,” Martin recalled.

 

Through Rotary International, the peace scholars met with generals, politicians and important figures in business and society. Within that environment, Martin came away with valuable insights.

 

“We always talk about global conflicts. But there are no global conflicts,” Martin explained, “Our conflicts are all local, hyper-local.”

 

“There are ‘cultural estuaries’, like tidelands, where there are flora and fauna that can exist only there. And that is where there is conflict in who and what survives. In these cultural estuaries, people define themselves by their differences, when in fact their differences may only be 10%. Instead of valuing the 90%, they define themselves only by that 10% and are willing to kill for that last 10%. With the Internet, these hyper-local conflicts assume a global context.”

 

The challenge and the work of a Rotary peace scholar is to learn how to have a conversation amid conflict, to achieve familiarity to change the relationship.

 

“How can we have a safe conversation about topics which feel unsafe?” Martin asked. “How do we disagree productively? The instinct is to isolate, but communicating is the only way to achieve familiarity.”

 

More than food and shelter, Martin argues, individuals need identity and purpose. Vital to peace is finding ways to honor and offer dignity to those with whom we disagree. “Fear manifests itself in many ways,” Martin followed up, “We are all afraid. So how do we discuss this together?”