April 29

“Non-co-operation is an attempt to awaken the masses to a sense of their dignity and power.”

–Gandhi (Young India, 2-1-1920, p. 3)

When we hear calls to be “peaceful and non-violent” from government officials during moments of riots and tension, we owe it to ourselves to question their understanding of what nonviolence means. Do they think that nonviolence means passivity? Do they really think it means going indoors and turning on the corporate media to tell us what is happening in our democracy? Do they think it means forgiving without processes of accountability? That’s not nonviolence, that’s nonsense. Not to mention the fact — but let’s mention it loud and clear — that calls for nonviolence from those who have, through neglect or worse, permitted violence on their side (right now, for instance, the Baltimore police) is, as my mentor would call it, “rank hypocrisy.”   No. Nonviolent non-cooperation means that we are willing to show up in the streets when officials tell us not to. It means that we refuse to believe propaganda suggesting that people have no right to express anger, frustration and pain caused by a violent system by putting our bodies in the way of business as usual. And for the truly daring, it means that we non-cooperate with the mindset and practices that made violence possible in the first place.

At the same time that we question “official” definitions of nonviolence, we have to also ask ourselves what our movement believes nonviolence means. Does the random destruction of property show our values? Help our cause? Does it increase the participation of those who would otherwise hold back and stay indoors?  Remember that non-cooperation isn’t the only dimension of nonviolence, either, and we limit our options to think it is. While it can awaken our power and dignity, we should not let it go back to sleep until the next problem arises “out of nowhere” (of course it didn’t just arise out of thin air…don’t be fooled.) Our next, if not simultaneous steps, should always be to work toward the fulfillment of nonviolent cooperation, to enact the long-term transformation of the systems that caused these problems in the first place with our fiercely nonviolent practices and strategies.

Experiment in Nonviolence: 

Find acts of nonviolence happening that the media is not reporting, and share them!