Essay by Luke Foster
The Hon Dr Kevin Rudd AC is Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America, taking up his posting in Washington in March 2023.
“Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life’s just too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatreds and all that sort of stuff.”
Kevin Rudd
I had a dream/nightmare last night that Australia was attacked and at war and realised that no country in the world is completely safe or immune from war and we all need to maintain peace vigilantly for the safety of the world and that job weighs heavy on the diplomats and ambassadors of the world.
I feel that the best way diplomats can keep peace in the world is by remaining young at heart and maintaining a good sense of humour as these two attributes deflate all difficult situations and open the way for lateral thinking to open the way for peace and healing of animosity between nations.
“Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.”
Edward de Bono
I like this quote by the intellectual Edward De Bono and it shows how the best skilled lateral thinking people operate. I wonder if I too have an average IQ as I am terrible at spelling but good at solving complex problems. Once again, the main problem in the world today is deflating my enormous ego.
“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.”
Dalai Lama
Now that I’ve used three male intellectual and spiritual people examples, I need to do the same with three strong women.
My mother’s one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.”
Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy did amazing things for the arts and her fortune funded the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilboa Spain. I am pretty sure one of my installations is in the New York Guggenheim collection so I am deeply happy to have an installation in the world’s most prestigious art museum and I donated it to them.
I love the following quote by Winona Ryder and she was my favourite actress when I was growing up in movies like Reality Bites and Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael.
“I am not a person who can really sit around and think about regrets because with every bad experience that you have, there is weirdly something good that comes from it.”
I also love the female author Harper Lee and the best book I read at school was To Kill a Mockingbird and it taught me about empathy and compassion. The black and white movie based on the book was interesting too.
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Harper Lee
It might seem that the arts and the most prominent people from the arts are not important for world peace but it’s the arts that has as much impact in the world to make world peace: for example, Pablo Picassos anti-war painting Guernica did a great deal to make peace in the world.
In conclusion the arts and diplomats do a great deal for making sure that the whole world doesn’t fall into chaos and war.
