The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

by Dalai Lama XIV

IN 1992 a Croatian farmer named Adem told a horrific story. In an interview with American journalist and author Peter Maas, Adem sat hunched over, mumbling a narrative of events so devastating that they seemed to have drained the strength and spirit from his body. Even his voice couldn’t seem to register much more than a whisper. Over the previous year, he said, relations between local Serbs and Croats had deteriorated. In just a year they saw individual identities dissolve, absorbed into a greater undifferentiated mind-set: Us Against Them. And then one night, the hostilities suddenly became a nightmare from which Adem could not awaken. That night Serbs from a neighboring village rounded up thirty-five men from Adem’s village and slit their throats. .