BARING WITNESS - Our Vision

Baring Witness - The Vision
By Donna Sheehan
It is no accident that Baring Witness began with women. From Nigeria to Nepal to the United States, women are impatient with the endless cycle of violence and war between people, between nations, between human beings and the earth itself.

It is no accident either that women would choose to get naked for the sake of peace and justice. For Baring Witness is about using the greatest weapon women have, the power of the feminine, the power of our beauty and nakedness to awaken our male leaders and stop them in their tracks. In this way Baring Witness is about heightening the awareness of human vulnerability.

By risking with our nakedness - our charm and beauty and vulnerability - in service of peace we are exposing the flesh all humans share. We are casting off the old dominant paradigm of aggression and restoring the power of the feminine to its rightful place as the protector of life. It is time for women to deter the men in their lives from violent acts, as nurturers, as guardians of our families and as voices of reason.

War seems to be a masculine invention. For thousands of years men have been conditioned to respond to threat and confrontation with violence first. Whereas the feminine way is to resolve difficulty and conflict through dialogue and negotiation, through compromise and kindness, not acts of violence.

Of course the feminine principle is not exclusive to women and I am delighted to see so many men joining in the Baring Witness movement and asserting their own feminine power. There have always been evolved, sensitive and intelligent men who are revolted by violence. Men like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the millions of men today who are for the peace process. Conversely, there are women who have become intoxicated by the same craving for power that afflicts most of our male leaders. Rather than using their own power, the power of the feminine, they resort to the strategies that men use.

But in our greater society, largely dominated by male leaders, war has become a habit and habits can be broken. That is where the feminine responsibility lies: breaking the war habit and revealing the truth; our human vulnerability. As women, when we see the bloodlust rising, we must sit down with our men and say, "Honey, we need to talk."

Important as this is, Baring Witness is not just a means to protest against war. It is giving women permission to initiate change. It is encouraging them to step into equal partnership with men and to take equal responsibility for what happens in our lives and in our world. What if the American cultural norm of men initiating everything from courtship to war were replaced with awareness of the frailty of humans and the planet? My vision is a partnership society instead of the existing patriarchal society of aggression.

The Baring Witness actions have the potential to make a long-term difference in the way we relate to each other, women to men, nation to nation and to the rest of life - the Earth and all its creatures. By restoring the feminine principles of beauty, kindness and nurturing we are bringing the world back into balance. Truly, life depends upon it.

Baring Witness is a force in favor of change in the world. As more peace photographs are created and publicized, the power of the images grows and it might just cause the critical shift of consciousness that will save us all.