Metta’s Opinion

Where are the nonviolent alternatives to the 9 proposed bases in Afghanistan?

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Earlier this week, Hamid Karzai confirmed that the United States will build nine new military bases in Afghanistan, including a strategic base at the border with Iran, with White House spokesman Jay Carney assuring us that these nine new bases will not be permanent. Their role will mainly be to strengthen and train the Afghan military; our only question is whether they even entertained any non-military options? With our media, it’s hard to tell.

One of the disservices done to the American public by the corporate media is the framing of this recent decision. As in numerous other reports, we are fed a series of top-down decisions like this one with language suggesting that they are in the best interest of American families and the strength of the nation, and that they are not open to discussion. As usual, the implicit bias from the top is that we citizens are ignorant and powerless; if they do not provide a violent, armed, militarized solution, the US has nothing else to offer. But it is their ignorance and powerlessness that we are seeing, not our own.

 There is a Zen saying about a reed in the wind, how it bends while a ‘strong’ tree can break. This truth is echoed by the prolific folksinger, Ani Difranco when she notes in her inimitable way that “buildings and bridges are made to bend with the wind/ what doesn’t bend breaks.” It’s practical wisdom, and very pertinent. As more everyday citizens become interested in exploring nonviolent solutions worldwide, this short-sighted and deadly dichotomy between violence or passivity of the U.S. government exposes its fatal flaw—an inability or an unwillingness adapt and evolve with the growing consciousness of people around the world. Structures simply have to evolve as people grow in consciousness if they do not want to face obsolescence; we created them to serve us, after all, and we are an adaptive species. In other words, if our systems are rigid and violent, it is our responsibility to see that they adapt, or step aside. There is a growing consciousness of a co-creative, life sustaining spectrum that encourages empathy and solidarity and makes everyone safer. Our growing awareness of our interconnection, if only through technology and climate/ecological understanding, points a way out to us from destruction to restoration, from harming to healing, and from profiteering to peacebuilding.

Acting on this consciousness of nonviolence, and creating institutional structures to serve it will be a major step forward for everyone; and it is more than just a re-prioritization of our values: it’s a rediscovery of who we are.

Just as the consciousness of separation and force is embodied in military systems, with their ever more fantastic equipment and trained (that is, unfortunately, desensitized) men and women, the consciousness of peace and human solidarity is beginning to be embodied in cross-border ‘peace teams’, truth and reconciliation commissions, international courts, peace communities (like the few who are holding on right now in Colombia), peace research institutions, and more. If you haven’t heard about them, we are not surprised—they are not the stuff of today’s media. Or today’s policy.

But they are working. Behind the scenes, peace teams, for example, are bringing children abducted by paramilitary units back to their families, protecting the lives of threatened individuals or whole villages, monitoring historic peace agreements (as recently in Mindanao), and stanching rumors—those prolific causes of intercommunal violence. What if our government were instead to set up nine peace operation centers in Afghanistan, at a cost of just nine percent of the proposed bases, with training and jobs available for nonviolent conflict intervention? What if it were to create nine centers for women’s empowerment instead of forcing many Afghan women into prostitution, as inevitably happens around military bases? They could happily employ retrained military people who sense this far nobler use of their courage along with the veteran peacekeepers of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, and the other groups—all still at a small fraction of the cost of the proposed bases. What if, with the rest of those resources, we were to set up nine high-tech, free hospitals, nine Afghan-centered universities and libraries, and throw in nine hundred village schools into the bargain, still totaling less than nine military bases with US arms and trainers?

 

Economist Kenneth Boulding was one of the great pioneers of peace research, and he often communicated his important findings with a sense of humor. According to Boulding’s First Law, “if something exists, then it is possible.” Our privilege and responsibility as citizens is to uphold the possible and bring these alternatives to the attention of the media, of policymakers, and everyone we can get ahold of. It is our duty to our country—if not to the rest of humanity—to make it perfectly clear that if our key institutions do not bend in this direction they will surely break.

 

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Stephanie Van Hook is executive director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence (www.mettacenter.org), Michael N. Nagler is professor emeritus U.C. Berkeley and founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence; they are syndicated by PeaceVoice.

Commentary distributed by Tom H. Hastings, Ed.D. Director, PeaceVoice Program, Oregon Peace Institute http://www.peacevoice.info/

Reimagining the Boston lockdown: from SWAT team to peace teams

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By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook
Originally posted at Waging Nonviolence on May 11, 2013

The aftermath of the bombing of the Boston marathon last month. (Flickr/Rebecca Hildreth)

The aftermath of the bombing of the Boston marathon last month. (Flickr/Rebecca Hildreth)

In all the confusion and outrage about the bombings at the Boston Marathon there has been little comment about the lockdown that followed — what does it mean for us as a society? What might we have done instead?

In her compelling and rather disturbing book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein points out that disasters, large or small, are regularly exploited to tighten the grip of authoritarian control and economic exploitation. Homeland Security is probably the best known example. Since small and large disasters are in unending supply in our modern, exploitive materialistic life (and can be manufactured when needed, on the model of Hitler’s trumped up attack on the Gleiwitz radio station and the Tonkin Bay “incident”), we cannot hope to turn around the inexorable drift toward authoritarianism unless we break that pattern.

One way to break it is to imagine what could we have done instead, and what alternatives are perhaps already in the wings. For instance, we could have brought on a peace team.

Toward the end of his career Gandhi envisioned the creation of a widespread Shanti Sena, or “peace army,” with units in key villages throughout India; its volunteers would live with the people and gain their trust and be ready to address impending conflict — rumor abatement, mediation, and so forth. When things got out of hand, they would actually interpose themselves between conflicting parties.

The dream did not die with him — or with his brilliant Muslim associate Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who raised a weaponless “army” of over 80,000 brave Pashtuns that played a signal role in the freedom struggle against the British. Today, there are some 20 organizations carrying out cross-border interventions along these general lines. They are doing “protective accompaniment” in Latin America, Sri Lanka and elsewhere; returning children to their homes who were taken for soldiers; and brokering peace agreements. Nor are they doing this courageous work solely in other lands. A Shanti Sena Network in the United States is forming to coordinate and support peace teams that have a strong track record in, for example, Michigan, where they have regularly kept order, including instances beyond the control of the police at volatile rallies.

What if we could learn from these encouraging examples? After all, don’t we all do “interventions” of roughly this kind in our daily life — between our children, among friends — without giving it a special name? We would be building on an experience that’s accessible to all of us and amenable to tremendous expansion with some systematic way to train and support the pioneers. It would be a conspicuous part of what Gandhi called “constructive program” — projects in which a community can build what it needs alongside resisting what it detests. The success of these teams should not surprise us; they are drawing upon the increasingly well-understood cooperative capacities in human nature. They come at a time when the same old methods of command and control through abusive force are failing us. As in the Boston lockdown.

One thing that officials pointed out about the procedure was that the suspect was apprehended after — and because — the lockdown was lifted. It was actually hindering the police because it insulated them from the input of ordinary citizens.

If we had had peace teams ready to deploy in Boston we would not have had to subject the city to the inconvenience of a lockdown at all. Much more than that: We would have protected ourselves from another shock designed, or used, to tighten the constraints on our freedoms. And even more: It would have pointed a way to a nonviolent future worthy of a free people.

The history of nonviolence shows that positive means have great power to bring about positive effects, often beyond what the actors intend or can possibly have imagined, when they’re given a real chance to succeed; Leymah Gbowee, for instance, knew she wanted to get Charles Taylor out of power in Liberia, and she helped build a movement that did just that. She didn’t know they would also empower women to do things they never thought possible, inspire a whole generation of children to hope or get a woman elected president.

The time to put alternative methods in place is now, not after the next disaster happens. Imagine if the far-flung encampments of the Occupy movement were to reinvent themselves as peace teams. They already had “security” among them for the camps themselves; they would only be extending the principle (for it is a good one) to providing a security worthy of the name for the whole society.

What if some of us would get systematic training for positive peace and real security with the same dedication and enthusiasm as marathon runners? How could the response to the attack in Boston have been different then?

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The Philippine Peace Agreement: Let’s Maintain Diligence

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By S. Francesca Po, Metta Center Strategic Advisory Council member. She is currently a doctoral student of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, where she is teaching modules on Buddhism.

Edited and originally posted at Open Democracy on May 1, 2013.

Last year, the Philippine government struck a historic peace deal with the Islamist rebels. But the devil is in the details, which have yet to be agreed upon. Who will make sure they create a just and lasting peace, and how?

Protesters call for continued peace talks in Davao City, Southern Philippines.Demotix/Eli Ritchie Tongo. All rights reserved.

It has been about seven months since the signing of the peace agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF or ‘Islamic Front’), and while both sides continue to work through details, it is reassuring that peace has held. In the context of some personal insights on the People Power Revolution, and recent events in Malaysia, I hope to offer suggestions on how this peace agreement can reach its full potential.

Initial suspicion

When I first heard the news of the agreement, I naïvely rejoiced and immediately told my parents. My parents however, received the news with suspicion.

‘This is not news; this peace agreement is always on and off. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is broken yet again’, my father immediately replied. I am a second-generation Philippine-American, and my parents, having both lived most of their lives in the Philippines, knew the situation much better than I did. They have seen how peace between the Philippine government and various incarnations of the MILF has been attempted and lost numerous times. They have become desensitised by the seemingly hopeless project.

The MILF was formally established in 1984, but its primary motives – that is, greater autonomy for the Bangsamoro (‘Moro’) people of southern Philippines and parts of Sabah in Malaysia – began as early as the sixties. Then, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) formed as a response to a mass killing of Moro people, supposedly by the Philippine government. The details of the events of this mass killing, known as the Jabidah Massacre, continues to be widely debated, but nevertheless is a narrative that continues to be told to explain the violence in the geographical regions of the Moro people. Since the sixties, numerous agreements have been attempted by the Philippine government and various incarnations of Moro militia, including offers of autonomy, but none of them being completely successful or lasting.

Going back to my parents, it is good to note that they are not your ordinary citizens; they were a couple of the very first civilians who helped the rebel soldiers at Camp Aguinaldo during the People Power Revolution of 1986. To this day, my parents remain social and political activists in the Philippines as well as the United States. So to hear these two people – figures I look up to for their socio-political idealism – express suspicion towards the new peace agreement opened my eyes to the complexity of the current situation.

“This one is different”

Tim Wallis, Executive Director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, which has played a role in the agreement, is more hopeful. ‘This is different’, he says in his piece in October entitled ‘Philippines Peace Agreement—Why This One is Different’, because of the presence of the Nonviolent Peaceforce on Mindanao.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is a group of international unarmed civil society personnel trained in peacekeeping at a grassroots level. Wallis explains that leading up to the peace agreement,

“[NP] had been quietly working away on the island, building relationships with both sides of the conflict, establishing their credentials as a neutral, independent, impartial actor willing to help both parties to find solutions to practical problems they faced on the ground—like how to avoid unnecessary bloodshed without appearing to be weak or to be seen to be backing down; how to ensure safe passage for civilians caught in the crossfire without losing ground militarily; how to maintain contact with the “enemy” and avoid misunderstandings while at the same waging a war against them; how to put out feelers for a ceasefire without appearing to give in…”

Furthermore,

“[NP] helped both sides of this war to be more civilised and more respectful of civilians and as a result, when a ceasefire was finally agreed, both sides asked NP to play an official role in the ceasefire mechanism that would hold both sides to their commitments and obligations under the ceasefire. It is not that unusual for two sides to appoint an intermediary to monitor a ceasefire. Often the United Nations plays that role, other times another country or set of countries will be invited to do it. But never before in the history of war has a non-governmental organisation made up of unarmed civilians from civil society been asked to play a role quite like this. This was – and is – historic, and is why the peace agreement just signed in the Philippines is also historic.”

Wallis argues that this agreement is different not just for the Philippines, but for the world, because NP involves peacekeeping at a grassroots level, where all parties involved are willing participants. Historic and different it is indeed, but is it enough?

Peace movements in the Philippines

The People Power Revolution, though it may have been a completely different situation from that of the government and the MILF still provides insight into maintaining the success of the agreement in the latter context. Two things bear inspection: (1) what made it successful, and (2) what were its shortcomings.

Successes

From the perspective of my parents, what made the People Power Revolution ‘work’ was the religious nature of the Philippine culture. (Note that this is a culture where the Angelus is broadcasted and prayed collectively in public metropolitan spaces, like shopping centres.) Led by Jaime Cardinal Sin, the people were encouraged to engage in Christian altruism by supporting the military rebels—the focus was peace, not politics. What started off as just the few like my parents and their friends then multiplied into a mass movement all over EDSA and throughout the nation. The masses also prayed together. Additionally, my mother would often recall that the soldiers from Marcos’ military were so inspired by the religiosity of the masses that they could not find it in their hearts to shoot or trample or bulldoze their tanks over them, despite their orders.

Because religion is such an imperative aspect of at least one side of the current peace agreement, and because the Philippine culture in general is such a religious one, the spiritual component should be made more explicit for the maintenance of peace. Religious leaders on both sides, of all religions, should engage in leadership like that of Cardinal Sin’s, encouraging the people towards continuous collaboration toward the goal of peace. They could, for example, engage in interfaith dialogue among themselves, and lead their constituents by example.

Shortcomings

Critics of the People Power Revolution point out that although it was successful in overthrowing Marcos’ dictatorship, it was unsuccessful in overthrowing the corruption of the government in general, and the nation still struggles to establish a working democracy. The People Power Revolution was too fixated on overthrowing Marcos and thus failed to address the underlying problems: a culture that allowed corruption in the government. This is where I see a blind spot in my parents’ ideology: they, like many Philippine citizens, still see the People Power Revolution as a success story, and fail to see that there could have been an opportunity in the revolution to end government corruption.

Now because NP works at a grassroots level, it is better able to stave off the potential for a break of the agreement. Civilians, military leaders, and government leaders alike are all involved in the process of peacekeeping. Yet, at the end of the day, I hold a similar position to my parents on the current events. In the same way that the People Power Revolution was actually a limited success, I see a potential danger that the signing of the peace agreement might be perceived as an end-all task that will by itself solve all the political issues between the Philippine government and the MILF. I suggest that civilians, military leaders, and government leaders maintain diligence with the current collaborations for peace until both sides reach a level of unity—the day that both sides can almost forget there was even two sides to begin with is the day the peace agreement has fully found it success.

Last month, a standoff in Malaysia has shed light on an even more complex layer regarding the peace agreement. Up until this point, the peace discussions were only between the MILF and the Philippine government, but not the Malaysian. What the people behind the peace agreement failed to recognise were that the Moro people are not only inhabitants of southern Philippines, but also Malaysia, and that the peace agreement would also be beneficial for this extended population. Fortunately, these events have brought Malaysia into the discussions on peace. Unfortunately, the casualties that did happen during the standoff might have been prevented if these considerations were taken alongside the initial discussions last autumn. This event in Malaysia only shows to prove that though the peace agreement is a positive step forward for relationships with the MILF, there is still much work to do.

It is different, but it’s not over yet

The current peace agreement, as Wallis had pointed out, is an historic one for the Philippines as well as the world. It is also different, specifically in its application of methods like NP. However, seven months since the signing of the agreement is nowhere near time for celebration. Religious leaders, in addition to the already active and involved population of civilians, military leaders, and government leaders, should offer their explicit support and encouragement towards a lasting peace. Other extended relationships connected to the MILF should also be considered. People in general should remain diligent in seeking even more creative ways to make this peace agreement a lasting one.

Download the four sessions of the Roadmap Course

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We recently hosted a four-week telecourse on nonviolence, activism and the Roadmap. You can download the four sessions by topic below:

Screen shot 2012-09-06 at 3.42.10 PM

Women and Combat

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by Michael Nagler, originally posted on Feb. 4, in Tikkun Daily.

Alongside horrifying pictures from the New York Times showing very young boys being trained to fire assault rifles (“Selling a New Generation on Guns”) comes the news, welcome in some quarters, that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the military to admit women to full combat roles. I believe that this is not the way to equality.

Some years ago the philosopher Mary Midgley, unconsciously echoing a position Gandhi had articulated decades before, wrote that life “is the whole of which we are parts, and its other parts concern us for that reason. But the language of rights is rather ill-suited for expressing this.”

Over and over again, liberal-minded people have, I believe, been fooled by arguments about “rights” and equality into accepting things that will compromise both. Case in point: cigarette smoking was originally considered inappropriate for women, but in 1929, Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations” (aka advertising and propaganda—Goebbels imitated his work zealously) staged a public relations event in which women at a New York parade lit up their “torches of freedom” and made it just as OK for women to smoke. Yes, we’ve come a long way—but not always in the right direction.

When groups differ we should judge whether the difference is a kind of diversity and cherish it as such, or, if it’s a real disparity we can try to help the worse-off party move “up,” leaving us all better off. But with smoking, and now with militarism, we did the reverse and we will all suffer to that extent. Ironically, given the often-noted connection between violence and the oppression of women, to the extent that we have just added legitimacy to militarism we added to that oppression—in the name of equality. This is what happens when, in our zeal to benefit a given group, we sacrifice the well-being of humanity as a whole—in which that group is of course included.

We could so easily have gone the other way. For whatever reason, women have been by long tradition more associated with the power that comes from compassion than the power that comes from threat and violence; as Mme. Jehan Sadat, the first lady of a happier Egypt, said in 1978, “Women are war’s natural enemies.” Whether that difference came from nature or nurture (I happen to think it was both, but that’s beside the point of this argument), it was an opportunity to decrease, rather than increase the frightening militarization of our culture.

Famous women like Bertha von Suttner, Maria Montessori, Dorothy Day, Aung San Suu Kyi, Leemah Gbowee, and many more women unknown to history—the women who defied the Gestapo and saved their Jewish husbands at Rosenstraße, the Women of Soldiers who boldly took their sons right out of Russian military camps more recently—have shown what power women in particular can mobilize in the cause of life. It is not that this capacity is absent in men—why else would thousands of our combat troops be committing suicide today as the wrongness of our destructive wars comes home to them. But if we were to mine the inspiring examples of these women, tell their stories, celebrate their courage the way we do that of military personnel, and imitate them—finally, if we were to institutionalizethe nonviolence they exhibit the way we have institutionalized violence, we’d be heading in a direction that would uplift humanity.

Recently a female Marine officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan (and wrecked her body in the process) observed that “there are female servicemembers who have proven themselves to be physically, mentally, and morally capable of leading and executing combat-type operations.” I’m sorry, what does it mean to be morally capable of killing your fellow human beings in a manifestly unjust war?

In 1909, writing his famous tract Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, Gandhi found himself confronting a call to violence by some of his more hot-headed countrymen. If you throw off the British yoke by violence, he argued, you will have thrown off the essential character of India to do so. You will only create “Englistan” on Indian soil. I’m afraid we have done something very similar by giving women the “right” to kill directly in combat.

Women and children are terribly often the victims of modern conflict. Do we really think it will help to make them perpetrators?

 

Feminist Spiritual Politics: Getting Personal About Gun Control

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The personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Grasping onto a worldview of connection, of interbeing, we hear nature whisper that we are fundamentally spiritual beings, quanta of spirit, mind and body, integrated. We weave our lives as spiders do their webs, out from ourselves and binding us to one another. Our fulfillment is in making these connections, in participating in a whole. That is what I see as spiritual politics: being accountable to the inescapable whole of which my life is just one of many, a unity masquerading as a diversity. When the personal is more than the political, when it is the sacred, I become whole.

When I move from this sacred dwelling of the heart outward into the world with a sense of knowing — knowing my purpose, and who and what I am, that movement is ultimately on its way back inward, like a heartbeat. It’s the same heartbeat I have always had, it is me.

It happens that Charles Baudelaire is one of my favorite poets. I absorbed the passion of his words through a strong woman, a French teacher. He is, generally, misogynist in his writing, but we read him for other reasons — subversive spiritual searching.

My French teacher and I were two women surviving. She had just turned 50 and was beginning the process of divorce from her husband, the father of her two grown daughters because she needed more affection and partnership. I was turning 17, inwardly self loathing and suffering from bulimia and anorexia, not knowing that I was evolving into a feminist, spiritual seeker through our meetings, that as a way out of her suffering she was planting seeds of strength and shining a light toward a “way out” for me.

One of my favorites was his prose poem Windows he tells the story of a woman who he can see through her window from his apartment. He describes her as always bent over something. He has recreated the life story of this woman in his mind, and sometimes it brings him to tears. He adds with a certain irreverence, “perhaps you will ask me whether this story is true” with the words that remain ingrained in my soul, almost understanding them from the first day I read them, “What does it matter reality outside of myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to know that I am and what I am?”

I think that what drew me so intensely to this question, like a longing, was that I would later begin to seek to understand reality as it exists inside of me and how the mind can shape or distort who we are by painting the world with violence as though there were no alternative. That yes, “reality outside” has to matter, but, on the other hand there could be something else: a possibility, something longing to know myself, a desire to find my humanity and know it. This desire, with which we hold each other; it held me, and provides balance, perspective and moves wisely from the expression of the problem we see to something more hidden — what happens inwardly when violence erupts.

Today that violence is speaking through gun shots throughout the country. Think about the gun. A right, some say. Instantiating the threat of death and harm, with its symbolic phallus, the barrel. Power, fear, separation, othering. It is the instrument of patriarchy, the symbolic expression of rape and often its tool. An apparatus for murder, for “security.” I think of the sculpture of K.F. Reutersward outside of the UN in New York of the gun’s barrel, twisted into a knot, and I ponder the subtle violence of this image, the strange emasculation of the patriarchal guard. Too severe. . . I think of the protestors, inserting daisies into the barrels of soldiers. Too soft… and besides, both of these images seem to make the gun a natural appendage of our world order. Worse, perhaps, it portrays the act of not shooting a gun as “nonviolence,” as though violence were the ultimate reality and nonviolence nothing more than its negation. That is a dangerous reduction for feminists and seekers alike. Why? Hannah Arendt in her famous 1969 essay “On Violence” offers a bold, challenging response:

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor finally, and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

I’d rather not see a gun at all, but a statue of a man or a woman putting down the gun with one hand and reaching out with the other to something entirely different. That is nonviolence, that is feminism. It is not the negation of violence, it is not the negation of patriarchy, it is the affirmation of life, relationship and connection. It is a bell sounding the arrival of something else, no less real and in many ways, I would argue, more real because it is the more accurate enactment of our unity. There is so much to learn about these alternatives, from peace teams and shanti senas, to new economic models, to restorative justice, to new activisms, to new conceptions and practices of power, to new stories of belonging and cultural narratives yet to be imagined, integrated, history, science calling us to examine ourselves as Socrates asks us to do with our very short lives. Still, we have to hear that bell ringing ourselves, no one can force us to hear what cannot be heard with the ears. As children–those shapers of humanity– know, it is heard through the heart.

Gandhi maintained that we can, and should for that matter, only renounce violence once we have seen that we are capable of it. We need to rely on our spiritual worldview to interpret this. When one person shoots another, we are too often more willing to put ourselves on the side of the victim alone. How can I be safe from others? But we are not different fundamentally from the offender in so far as we are equally human beings surviving as best we can and know how in a culture that glorifies violence. How can others be safe from me? That is the only real security.

A nonspiritual politics controls women and renounces or ignores nonviolence as a serious option. A feminist spiritual politics holds sacred our lives and our relationships and therefore controls guns and renounces violence as the only option. The challenge is to allow ourselves to unfold, unknot, untwist our being so we can know where it resides, not outside of ourselves, but hidden by the untrained mind, which is, in the words of a friend and self-identified ‘eternal feminist,’ “the ultimate imperialist oppressor.”

When we recognize this oppressor in ourselves, we are called to act, to convert it into a more potent form of power that rests on a bedrock of radical, inward security in an insecure world. Guns can never make us secure, only we can. All of my life I have been learning, a truly secure person in an insecure world is a revolutionary.

Stephanie Van Hook is the Executive Director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence.

This piece was first posted at Tikkun Magazine online on January 25, 2013.

Memorial for a Martyr

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When I was studying ancient Greek history many (many) years ago, it dawned on me that a nation rises and falls on the way that it treats its outstanding people, who are often its most important critics.  By this standard, and by many others, the vital signs of America are not encouraging.  According to an extensive, and shocking study by a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, men under fifty in this richest country of the world have the lowest life expectancy by a wide margin of any comparable society.  Leaving aside the epidemic of gun violence, they lose more years of life to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries compared.

I put this decline alongside,  on the one hand,  the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and MLK, whose day we celebrate today – and the dark rumors surrounding the guilt for those heinous crimes – and with the response of many of my fellow citizens to the latest and most shocking gun massacre: to buy more guns.  In California alone, 4.6 million guns were bought in the last decade, with a sharp spike after every mass murder; which is to say, as every demonstration that guns cause horrendous damage to life and the living.

As Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and head of the panel issuing the report just mentioned, was forced to conclude, “Something fundamental is going wrong.”  He is right. There is a single cause, one image, that can explain these symptoms of dysfunction and it is that we are going through a period of acute demoralization.  And the reason for this, I propose, is that we are so tightly held in the grip of violence that we are taking ourselves and the world (to the extent we still influence the world) in exactly the wrong direction.  We are choosing death when all human yearning, individual and collective, is for higher life.

That is why the assassination of Dr. King, coming so early in his prophetic career, must rank as one of the most severe blows to the well-being of this country that we have experienced.  There was a revolutionary, redemptive potential in his vision that is sometimes lost sight of simply because it is so revolutionary.  Take this example:

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

This one statement sweeps away the competitive, separate vision of who we are that is the foundation, when you think about it, of all violence.

We have a saying (it’s engraved on the King memorial in Atlanta): “You can kill the dreamer, but you can’t kill the dream.”  But maybe we can even take it a step further.  Some years ago when I was concluding the study of the Civil Rights movement with my nonviolence class at Berkeley an older student took me aside after class and told me a story (which I was subsequently able to confirm).  His wife had been working closely with Coretta King, and on that fateful day in April,1968 they happened to be on a plane heading to San Francisco.  Suddenly the atmosphere in the plane changed; she felt weird, and couldn’t understand why no one else seemed to notice that anything was wrong.  Then she heard a voice: “Tell them that I’m all right.”  She was extremely puzzled, having never experienced anything like it before or since.  When they reached SFO and disembarked they got the news that Martin had been killed.

You can kill the dreamer’s body, it would seem, but you can’t kill the force that impelled him or her to become an instrument of that dream.  King, like Gandhi, was – and is – a towering example of a capacity that lies to some degree or other in every one of us.  If we want to honor his memory, the best – rather, the only way to do that, today or any day, is to carry on the work that he began, which was not only to secure justice for an oppressed race, where he and many brave souls who shared his inspiration made substantial headway, but to dispel from our hearts and minds the miasma of violence that underlay that oppression.  Learning more about his inspiring life is a good start, resisting wherever possible the drab, trivialized image of humanity we’re fed by the media: then getting engaged wherever we can be most effective in reducing violence.  We will not be alone if we take up, as we must, this tremendous challenge.

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Heeding the Warnings

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Eknath Easwaran, the wisest man I had the privilege of knowing in my life, once said, “There is no nation, no matter how powerful, that cannot be destroyed by hate.”

The latest tragedy – and I sincerely hope it will still be the latest when you read this – has been unparalleled in its violence.  Because the true measure of violence is not in the body count but in the violation of the sacred life that we hold most dear, for example in our innocent children.  It has also been unusual in the confusion that still surrounds what exactly happened.  Like most of us, I at first found myself poring over the sketchy reports, trying to understand how it happened, to piece together the story.  But then I stopped.  These details are at best a distraction, at a time that we can ill afford one.  At worst they are more than a distraction; they are a seduction. They lure us into the narrative, tempting us to indulge in the vicarious violence, our private reality show.  The police will deal with details as best they can; we have a different job. We have to train our eyes on the underlying cause of not just this catastrophe but all of them (which the mainstream media will never probe), and firmly dedicate our minds and hearts to solving it.

Psychologist Mitchell Hall, echoing the wisdom I just referred to, writes, “my guess is that this young man hated his mother, himself, humanity, and life itself.”  Hate in the guise of political commentary is being fed to us 24/7 by a skein of radio and television talk show hosts, and certain “news” channels are not far behind: the man who tried to burn down the Toledo mosque in September explained to the judge, without a trace of remorse, that he was incited to do it by Fox news, which told him that “Muslims (are) killing us and are in control of the Department of Homeland Security and the White House.  And this is just one example.

Hate is a force.  Even Hitler could not control it, and it ended up destroying himself and everything he tried to build.  Playing games with a force like hate is riding a whirlwind.  Fortunately, hate has an antidote, which is love.  By “love” I mean, again, an underlying force and not merely an emotion.  It expresses itself on the political level as compassion, for the weak, the mentally ill, the homeless; right now it comes to the fore in those who have the courage to demand that we rid ourselves of weapons, andhave the wisdom to warn us about mindset that created those weapons in the first place and in some extreme cases, as we’ve just endured in Connecticut, drives individuals to use them to such deadly effect.  If we want these tragedies to stop we must open our eyes to the connection, not always obvious but not that obscure once you know what you’re looking for, between our cultural disposition to choose hate over love and the actions resulting from such an unwise choice.

You see it sometimes in strange juxtapositions where the press seems to hint at connections they dare not express.  On the front page of my local paper, alongside grieving parents and traumatized children, was the smiling picture of a local woman in full combat gear, going off to kill “enemies” in Afghanistan – knowing that the killing is often indiscriminate, and includes children.  There have been 333 drone strikes on Afghanistan in the past year.  Can we kill other people’s children and expect our own to be safe?

Recently it’s come to light that even drone operators, sitting in comfortable chairs twelve thousand miles away from their targets, are prone to PTSD, or what a psychologist colleague of mine, Rachel MacNair, calls PITS: Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress.  One such operator and sufferer reported after leaving the army that after killing a child, “I felt disconnected from humanity.” Sit with that phrase for a moment, because as psychiatrist James Gilligan reminds us, this disconnection, this “lack of remorse or empathy [is a] distinctive quality of the psychopath.”  Like poor Adam Lanza.

In other words, we are in various ways creating the psychological conditions for violence and providing the enabling conditions, namely the belief in and ready availability of weapons.  One day before the Newtown massacre a deranged Chinese man attacked a roomful of schoolchildren with a knife.  Many were injured (and all no doubt traumatized), but none died.  The example shows clearly what we must do: have strict gun control to limit the damage to life that can be caused by the most deranged among us.  That will buy us some time, as well as sending a message that we have in fact realized something fundamental about violence.  And with the time thus bought let us do something even more important: let us look for ways to neutralize hate and violence wherever they are to be found, and yes, some of it is to be found in us.

In a notorious interview on Sixty Minutes that took place in 1996, the then Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was confronted with the fact that half a million children – half a million – had died as a result of sanctions we had imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  She replied, as you no doubt recall, “We think it was worth the price.”  Maybe we’re starting to see now how steep that price really was.

For actions we can take to reduce violence see our earlier posts in this blog.