Metta’s Opinion

The Next Salt March

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Turning Our Backs on Consumerism
By Eknath Easwaran


As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the “atomic age”—as in being able to remake ourselves.
—Mahatma Gandhi

In one of my favorite Sanskrit stories from ancient India, an ambitious rat goes to the Lord and asks to become a human being. The Lord grants his wish, and the rat is born into the world of people. He spends several lifetimes as a human being; finally, after quite a bit of experimentation and a great deal of grief, he goes back to the Lord and implores, “Please make me a rat again. Being a human is too hard—I’m just not cut out for it.”

I often think of this story when people tell me I am being idealistic about human nature. “It would be nice,” they say, “if we human beings could override impulses like fear, greed, and violence when we see that they threaten the welfare of the whole. But that’s just not realistic. Whenever there is a conflict between reason and biology, biology is bound to win.”

Arguing like this, some observers feel that we have passed the point of no return. Like lemmings, they seem to say, we must race to a destruction we ourselves shall have caused. I differ categorically—and for proof I have the living example of Mahatma Gandhi, who not only transformed fear, greed, and violence in himself but inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, women, and even children in India to do the same.

When I was a student in my twenties India had been under British domination for two hundred years. It’s difficult to imagine what that means if you haven’t lived through it. It’s not just economic exploitation; generations grow up with a foreign culture superimposed on their own. When I went to college, I never questioned the axiom that everything worthwhile, everything that could fulfill my dreams, came from the West. The science, the wealth, the military power, all demonstrated unequivocally the superiority of Western civilization. It never occurred to most of us to look anywhere else for answers.

But then along came Gandhi, who was shaking India from the Himalayas in the north to Cape Kanniyakumari in the south. Everyone in the country was talking about Gandhi the statesman, Gandhi the politician, Gandhi the economist, Gandhi the educator. But I wanted to know about Gandhi the man. I wanted to know the secret of his power.

In his youth, I knew, Gandhi had been a timid, ineffectual lawyer whose only extraordinary characteristic was his big ears. By the time he came back to India from South Africa in 1915, he had transformed himself into such a mighty force for love and non-violence that he would become a lighthouse to the whole world. And I had just one driving question: What was the secret of his transformation?

My university was in Nagpur, a strategic location at the geographic center of India where all the major railways connecting north and south, east and west, came together like spokes in a wheel. Nearby lay the town of Wardha, a dot on the map thrown into international recognition as the last railway junction before Gandhi’s ashram. The rest of the way one had to travel on one’s own. I walked the few miles down the hot, dusty road to the little settlement that Gandhi called Sevagram, “the village of service.”

At Sevagram I found myself among young people from around the world—Americans, Japanese, Africans, Europeans, even Britons—who had come to see Gandhi and to help in his work. Whether a person’s skin was white, brown, or black, whether he or she supported or opposed him, seemed to make no difference to Gandhi: he related to all with ease and respect. Almost immediately, he made us feel we were part of his own family.

Indeed, I think that, in a private corner of our hearts, we all saw ourselves in him. I did. It was as if a precious element common to all of us had been extracted and purified to shine forth brightly as the Mahatma, the Great Soul. That very commonness was what moved us most—the feeling that in spite of all our fears and resentments and petty faults we too were made of such stuff. The Great Soul was our soul.

At that time, of course, there were many observers who said Gandhi was extraordinary, an exception to the limitations that hold back the rest of the human race. Others dismissed him—some with great respect, others with less—as just another great man who was leaving his mark on history. Yet, according to him, there was no one more ordinary. “I claim to be an average man of less than average ability,” he often repeated. “I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”

The fact is, while most people think of ordinariness as a fault or limitation, Gandhi had discovered in it the very meaning of life—and of history. For him, it was not the famous or the rich or the powerful who would change the course of history. If the future is to differ from the past, he taught, if we are to leave a peaceful and healthy earth for our children, it will be the ordinary man and woman who do it: not by becoming extraordinary, but by discovering that our greatest strength lies not in how much we differ from each other but in how much—how very much—we are the same.

This faith in the power of the individual formed the foundation for Gandhi’s extremely compassionate view of the industrial era’s large-scale problems, as well as of the smaller but no less urgent troubles we found in our own lives. Our problems, he would say, are not inevitable; they are not, as some historians and biologists have suggested, a necessary side effect of civilization.

On the contrary, war, economic injustice, and pollution arise because we have not yet learned to make use of our most civilizing capacities: the creativity and wisdom we all have as our birthright. When even one person comes into full possession of these capacities, our problems are shown in their true light: they are simply the results of avoidable—though deadly—errors of judgment.

Gandhi formulated a series of diagnoses of the modern world’s seemingly perpetual state of crisis, which he called “the seven social sins.” I prefer to think of them as seven social ailments, since the problems they address are not crimes calling for punishment but crippling diseases that are punishment enough in themselves. The first—and the one we will focus on here—is knowledge without character. It traces all our difficulties to a simple lack of connection between what we know is good for us and our ability to act on that knowledge.

Knowledge Without Character


To me, the central paradox of our time is that despite our powerful intellectual skills and our ingenious engineering and medical achievements, we still lack the ability to live wisely. We send sophisticated satellites into space that beam us startling information about the destruction of the environment, yet we do little, if anything, to stop that destruction.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, we live in a world of “guided missiles and misguided men,” where few technical problems are too complex to solve but we find it impossible to cope with the most basic of life’s challenges: how to live together in peace and health. In our lucid moments we see that we are doing great harm to ourselves and our planet, but somehow, for all our intellectual understanding, we cannot seem to change the way we think and live.

This is not to say we are bad people. The problem is simply that we have not yet completed our education. When Gandhi speaks of knowledge without character, he is not implying that we know too much for our own good. He is saying that because we do not understand what our real needs are, we are unable to use our tremendous technical expertise in a way that might make our lives more secure and fulfilling. Instead, we treat every problem as if it were a matter for technology, or chemistry, or economics, even when it has nothing to do with these things.

Every day, for example, dozens of new products appear, promising to satisfy our deepest desires. We are barraged with messages—subliminal and otherwise—on billboards and in magazines, on television and in the movies, telling us that everything we are looking for in life can be found in a car or a bowl of ice cream or a cigarette.

The hidden message is that what we own or eat or smoke has the power to endow us with self-respect. Actually, I would say it is the other way around. Your car may be useful and comfortable, it may have a wet bar and a cellular phone, but that is not why it is dignified. You, a human being, are the one who gives dignity to your car by driving it. If it were not for you, that car would be only a hunk of metal.

Over the past fifty years, the automobile, like so many of our appliances and machines, has sped down the now-familiar psychological highway from desirable luxury to basic necessity to tyrannical master. We no longer choose to drive a car—we have to: there are so many things to do, so little time to do them, and so far to travel in between. We rush about from place to place, caught in a perilous game of catch-up, and the price is high: nearly fifty thousand Americans lose their lives in traffic accidents every year. The irony is, we are often in such a hurry that we can’t get anywhere. I have read that commute time in Tokyo and London now is often less by bicycle than by car; and to judge by rush hour on our freeways, our situation is not much different.

Worse than the loss of time, of course, is the threat to our health. In each of those cars, according to recent research conducted in Los Angeles, commuters are exposed to two to four times the levels of cancer-causing toxic chemicals found outdoors. And as it idles there on the freeway, the average American car makes a significant contribution to the greenhouse effect, pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each year.

These things are not secrets. We have all heard them many times before, but we find it hard to do anything about them. Our cities and towns have grown in such a way that we feel helpless without a car. And as our cities expand ever farther into the surrounding countryside, the situation promises to get even worse.

The problem is that the roots of our dependence on the auto go deeper than the desire for a convenient mode of transportation. There is a much more powerful force at work here—a force that characterizes almost every activity in industrial society: profit. Under the relentless domination of the profit motive, we have remade our country in the image of the automobile. As the political historian Richard Barnet writes, describing America in the middle decades of this century,

Buying highways meant buying motels, quick food eateries,…and the culture of suburbia….The highway system was the nation’s only physical plan, and more than anything else it determined the appearance of cities and the stretches in between. In choosing the automobile as the engine of growth, the highway and automotive planners scrapped mass transit.

Oil shortages and higher gasoline prices have led us to regret turning a blind eye toward such practices, yet we go on driving more and more, drilling new oil wells, making and buying more and bigger cars. In just one hundred years, urged on by the profit motive and the media conditioning that driving is entertainment and our car is an extension of our personality, we have used up nearly half of the world’s known petroleum reserves, fouled our air, and put our oceans and beaches at continual risk from oil spills.

Now, I have nothing against automobiles. I have a car, and I appreciate its utility. All I would say is, it is important to remember who is serving whom. If we were the masters of our machines—and our lives—we would have good, well-made cars and good roads on which to drive, but wouldn’t we also use them sparingly, so our children and our children’s children would have enough oil left to heat their homes?

Nor am I suggesting that there is anything wrong in a businessperson making enough profit to support his or her family in comfort—everyone should have this opportunity. But we have exaggerated the importance of profit out of all proportion to its natural place in business. We have become addicted to it, and that is a very dangerous situation.

Most addictions begin innocently enough. “Just one more helping, one more bowl of ice cream, one more cigarette, one more drink for the road.” That is how it starts—just one more: “Let’s sell just one more new car, make one more dollar, pump one more gallon of gas.”

When we give in to that desire repeatedly, with a second helping, a second smoke, a second drink, or a second sniff, it becomes a habit—not just one more but one every day: “The stockholders want to see this quarter’s profits rising above last quarter’s. Get the general manager on the phone and tell him to increase production, bolster demand, and heat up consumption. And do it yesterday.”

With a habit we still have a choice whether to give in or not, but when a habit continues long enough, we lose our power to choose. Our feeling of security becomes so closely attached to the thing we crave that we must have it, whatever the cost. The habit has become a compulsion, and we have become its servant. We will do anything for a profit, even if it means sacrificing our children’s precious seas, air, and earth. This is what Gandhi means by knowledge without character—a lack of connection between what we know to be in everyone’s long-range best interest and our ability to act on that knowledge. It has become the cornerstone of much of our business and our lives.

 

Transforming Our Character


Anyone who has tried to overcome a powerful addiction like smoking or drinking or overeating knows there can be a broad, dangerous chasm between what we know is good for us and our ability to act on it. Once a habit has been conditioning the nervous system for many years, beating a path to the refrigerator or the cigarette machine or the lotto counter, it has also carved a track far below the conscious level of the mind, in the hidden world of the unconscious.

When an addiction has established itself like this in the unconscious, it can have a devastating effect on behavior. No matter how much we are told about the dangers, we often find ourselves falling helplessly back into old habits. Once, while waiting for a friend at the hospital, I saw a paralyzed man in a wheelchair struggle for some time with a package of cigarettes. Despite the fact that he could hardly move, a powerful compulsion was telling him to get out a cigarette, lift it to his lips, and light it. Laboriously and painfully, he complied. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour.

Now consider another patient—ourselves.

Few people realize that many of the food items now sold in a typical American supermarket—from potato chips to tomatoes to frozen pizzas—need an injection of petroleum at every step of their production and marketing. Herbicide, fertilizer, insecticide, tractor fuel, processing fuel, plastic packaging, transportation to the supermarket, refrigeration: all these require fossil fuels in some form—usually petroleum. Why use all this oil, when we have managed to do quite well for millennia with only sun, water, and soil? As I understand it, the answer begins with a seed: not just any seed, but a seed created after years of research and development.

Farmers and food processors have begun using seeds produced by sophisticated hybridization techniques and genetic engineering to grow fruit or vegetables to meet shipping and processing needs, like a potato that makes a perfect potato chip or french fry, or a tomato with the best shape, skin, and consistency for canning. The only financial drawback to such seeds is that they require a host of petroleum and chemical products to achieve the high yields they promise. Ingeniously, many firms have overcome that drawback by acquiring their own chemical, petroleum, and farm equipment companies. Some have gone so far as to acquire a genetic engineering firm that can design seeds to require just the products their companies manufacture. In this way, they can almost give away the seeds and still make a handsome profit.

From the consumer’s point of view, I am afraid there are other drawbacks. Most of the tomatoes grown today are bred for profit, not nutrition; these are not the juicy, delicious tomatoes, ripened on the vine, you might once have tasted in your mother’s kitchen garden. They are hard, almost square hybrids, ripened on a truck and often covered with dangerous chemical residues. They are genetically engineered for high yield, attractive color, disease resistance, and ease of canning or shipping. Only after these things has taste been considered, and nutrition hardly at all.

Then why do we buy them? Why not demand something better? I would suggest that the answer is to be found not in our economics but in our mental state. We have been conditioned to look to food for our inner fulfillment. Food can entertain us, we are told. It is exciting; it is romantic; it is adventurous; it is dignified. Vast sums of money are spent trying to get us to buy a certain brand of potato chip or to prefer one brand of frozen pizza over another. In the midst of this carnival atmosphere, it is easy to forget that the real purpose of food is to nourish our bodies.

Doctors remind us frequently of the consequences—junk food and heart disease, pesticides and cancer—but health is not just a matter between us and our physician. The health effects of industrial agriculture go far beyond what happens to us when we eat its products. They pose an even greater risk to the food supply our children will depend on in coming decades.

Consider the many different ways petrochemical products are used in producing a bag of agribusiness corn chips. First, because agribusiness farms are usually very large, a vast amount of petroleum is needed to run all the machines that plow and fertilize the field, that plant, spray, and harvest the corn, and then process, package, and ship it.

But that is only the machinery. Contemporary hybrid seeds are designed to produce greater yields than ordinary seeds, but they work best only when used with high-nutrient artificial fertilizers, manufactured in a chemical factory, using petroleum as an ingredient and as a processing fuel. Then, to control insects, large quantities of powerful insecticides are used—introducing hundreds of toxic chemicals never before found in nature.

Now, high-nutrient chemical fertilizers nourish not only the corn but all sorts of other plants and weeds that compete with it. At the same time, insecticides harm the birds and insects that feed on those weeds. The sensible response might be to use less chemical fertilizer and insecticide and to apply them only when needed, if at all. But this kind of care is impossible on a huge farm, where the chemicals are applied with large machinery or by airplane, hundreds of acres per day. The profit-oriented solution is to come up with yet another product that can be sold to every farmer who uses chemical fertilizers: herbicides. With tremendous ingenuity, agribusiness engineers have even begun to match specific herbicides to the crop’s genetic pattern so the herbicide will kill everything but the corn.

There is a hitch, though. In all this innovation, a great deal of attention is paid to the ratio of gross income to net profit, to the glamorous appearance of an ear of corn, or to the ease with which it can become a corn chip. Yet little thought is given to the topsoil, that fragile layer of minerals, organic matter, and insect life on which almost our entire food supply depends.

Although chemical fertilizers contain many of the nutrients a crop needs, they lack the humus and organic matter needed to nourish what is, after all, a living ecosystem. The topsoil’s earthworms and microorganisms depend on that organic matter. So does the topsoil’s capacity to hold water and prevent erosion. When chemical fertilizers are used continuously, the soil literally begins to starve. It loses its ability to retain water, and it needs ever-increasing amounts of irrigation. Then, as herbicides and insecticides are applied every season, year after year—eventually poisoning the microscopic life of the topsoil—the most important element in world agriculture is reduced to lifeless dust.

It does not make sense. Perhaps it might if the foods we ended up with were better—better tasting or better for our health—but they are not. It might make sense if all these chemicals and oil helped the individual farmer, or made the earth healthier, or saved precious resources. But they do not. Or it might make sense if they really did ensure the safety and abundance of our food supply. They do just the opposite.

Petroleum-dependent agriculture may begin with a seed and the desire for profit, but it ends with us, when we reach for an item on the supermarket shelf. Without our cooperation and support, none of this would take place. We have helped in every stage, almost unconsciously believing that our dignity, fulfillment, and happiness are to be found in food or possessions or profits. We have become servants to our own unintended greed, and it is not a benevolent master.

In Gandhi’s perspective, it is up to individuals like you and me to reverse this situation. Environmental abuse and exploitation are not “necessary evils”—no evil is necessary. In fact, Gandhi went so far as to say that evil in itself is not even real; it exists only as long as we support it. The moment we withdraw our support—the moment we make the connection between what we know and how we behave—it begins to collapse. As the eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke put it, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Nevertheless, in our current situation, good men and women have little time to lose. At a breakneck pace, knowledge without character is making drastic changes in our atmosphere, our agricultural resources, our forests, and our seas. The cost in life is immeasurable.


The Power of Salt


On March 12, 1930, when the British still had a firm grip on India, Mahatma Gandhi and seventy-eight of his disciples strode out of Sabarmati ashram toward the sea. In the twenty-four days that followed, they walked two hundred miles, picking up more and more companions as village after village turned out to cheer the Mahatma and raise the new Indian flag. By the time they reached their destination, the seashore at Dandi, the group numbered several thousand.

Earlier in March, Gandhi had sent a letter to the British viceroy protesting the Salt Act, which forbade Indians to make their own salt and left them dependent on a British monopoly for what is, in a tropical country, a necessity of life. The viceroy did not reply. To Gandhi, this was the “opportunity of a lifetime.” On the morning of April 6, before a huge crowd including reporters from around the world, Gandhi walked to the edge of the sea, picked up a pinch of salt, and set India free.

It was Gandhi’s genius to recognize that although the British had the power to establish a monopoly on salt, they could maintain that monopoly only with the cooperation of the Indian people. With his inspiration and guidance, millions of ordinary individuals changed their lives in a small but powerful way: they stopped buying salt from the British and began making it themselves. Almost immediately, Indians along the coast and across the country were making, buying, and using homemade salt. A hundred thousand were jailed, and many more suffered great hardships, but throughout the campaign, millions of Indians refused steadfastly and without violence to depend on the British for salt. This brilliant campaign, which restored India’s confidence in herself, was the turning point in her long struggle for independence. Afterward India knew she was free, and nothing the British did could halt her march toward freedom.

Today, in a modern industrial society like the United States, our most pressing need is not for salt or clothing or shelter. For most of us, all our basic needs have been met. But there remains a hunger for something more. We want to be somebody. We want to feel secure. We want to love. Without any better way to satisfy these inner needs, we end up depending on possessions and profit—not just for our physical well-being but as a substitute for the dignity, fulfillment, and security we want so much. Because we still believe happiness lies in remaking the world around us, we look for inner fulfillment outside ourselves, and this makes us easy prey for manipulation.

How, then, shall we free ourselves?

Let’s start in little ways, by trying to make the connection between what we know to be healthy for our planet and what we do in our daily lives. As many environmentalists have suggested, we could walk instead of taking the car, or carpool or use mass transit instead of driving alone—that would be a small salt march in itself, with the added benefit that the commute would not be so lonely or expensive or long. We could start buying organic vegetables; if possible, we might even grow them in our own backyards, using no pesticides or other harmful chemicals. That would be the modern equivalent of making salt. We would be healthier, and so would the topsoil.

Yet, even small changes like these seem difficult. We all have so little time to spare; and we ask ourselves, what good would it do anyway? This is understandable. Without Gandhi’s example, I think few Indians could have been persuaded that the British would be ushered out of India peacefully and gently and that a new independent nation of India would be founded—all by the power of salt.

The tasks facing us today are enormous, but it is the glory of human nature that there will always be those rare individuals who say, “Let there be dangers, let there be difficulties, let there be the possibility of death itself—whatever it costs, I want to live in the full height of my being, with my feet still on the ground but my head crowned with stars.” According to Mahatma Gandhi, this can be done only by facing difficulties that appear almost impossible. If that is so, our times offer an unparalleled opportunity.

Our hope for the future lies with these rare evolutionaries who are not content to wait for others to change before they throw themselves into this unimaginably difficult task. “Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid,” said Gandhi. “The valiant in spirit glory in fighting alone.” What is the satisfaction in drifting along with the current? True satisfaction lies in swimming against the current of conditioned self-interest. It is dangerous, of course, but that is why it makes you glow with vitality. It is strenuous, but that is what makes your will and determination and dedication grow strong, your senses clear, your mind secure, and your heart overflowing with love and the desire to give and serve.

Gandhi is a supreme example. He wanted so deeply to help the world that he dedicated his life to siphoning every trace of self-interest out of his heart and mind, leaving them pure, radiantly healthy, and free to love. It took him nearly twenty years to gain such control of his thinking process, but with every day of demanding effort he discovered a little more of the deep resources that are within us all: unassuming leadership, eloquence, and an endless capacity for selfless service.

In me, in you—in every human being—burns a spark of pure compassion: not physical or even mental, but deeply spiritual. Our bodies may belong to the animal world, but we do not. The animal, to a great extent, lives subject to the force of conditioning, going after its own food and comfort. But we have the capacity to turn our back on profit or pleasure for the sake of others—to rebel deeply and broadly against our conditioning and build a new personality, a new world. It is our choice whether to exercise that capacity, but we do have the choice.

 



Spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in 1961. His books includePassage Meditation and translations of the Classics of Indian Spirituality.

From The Compassionate Universe by Eknath Easwaran, founder of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, copyright 1993; reprinted by permission of Nilgiri Press, P. O. Box 256, Tomales, CA  94971.

Building the World We Want

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By Michael Nagler

 

The spinning wheel, and the spinning wheel alone, will solve the problem of the deepening poverty of India.    —Mahatma Gandhi

 

 

 

Corporate domination of the world, or “globalization from above,” has done two things for us.  It raised consciousness of world unity; inadvertently awakening “globalization from below,” and by progressively releasing all constraints on greed it finally squeezed the economic middle class, taking out from under them the false comfort of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” and thus reawakening, but in a new environment, the class struggles of the 1930s.  Given enough rope, the 1% have begun to expose the inherent contradiction of an economy based on wants (was it E.F. Schumacher who said, “anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist”?).

 

These are examples of what Walter Wink calls “gifts of the enemy.”  And the recent evictions from New York’s Zuccotti Park, LA, Washington D.C., and other sites apparent setbacks, can also be turned to advantage.  There is no question of stopping the movement at this, or possibly any point if it can move forward with the same energy but some greater sophistication.   A New York participant has issued a “call to reoccupy;” but I am among those who think the movement should move beyond occupation of public sites.  With the disaster of Tien An Minh Square still in my memory, I see the evictions as — in addition to a wake-up call on the militarization of America, for some of them have been rather brutal  — a call rather to regroup, reframe, rethink what this movement is really about. When occupiers approached Trinity Wall Street church in New York for permission to use a vacant lot recently, spokesperson Lloyd Kaplan had to deny the protestors demand but then added that he “supports the vigorous engagement of the issues” that concern them.  Occupying public spaces is not really our goal; and city police departments are not our opponents.

 

In characterizing 21st Century civil society, often the first thing that comes to mind is its use of technology; but one of the most interesting innovations of the movement’s encampment culture has been its use of non-technology: the human microphone.  And one of the most dramatic cases of its use came after the movement spread to campuses.  At UC Davis, some time after the egregious pepper spray incident, a small number of police found themselves confronting a much larger crowd of students.  Men heavily armed and afraid are always an acute danger.  One of the students — “no designated leader” doesn’t always mean no leader will emerge — called out “mike check” and got the whole crowd telling the police in unison:

WE ARE GIVING YOU A MOMENT OF PEACE (we are giving you a moment of peace)…

TO WITHDRAW (to withdraw).

And after a tense moment, withdraw they did.

This episode illustrates not only that law enforcement is not the face of the enemy, necessarily; it also illustrates one of if not the most promising feature of the Occupy movement worldwide: its commitment to nonviolence.  Within that commitment — and here is where I think some sophistication could be immensely helpful — lies the germ of victory for this movement.

 

What would a thorough, mature, nonviolent movement look like?

 

For one thing, it would emphasize what Gandhi called “Constructive Programme,” which would allow us to build cohesion and strength for major resistance campaigns which are unavoidable but for which we are by no means ready, in my view.  It is good to have in mind how much weight Gandhi, with his astounding energy and creativity, put on constructive action.  A 1977 survey by the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi (Gandhi Memorial Fund) found 1,845 institutions in 22 states still functioning that were founded by Gandhi and his close associate, Vinoba Bhave.  It is not that we don’t have constructive projects underway: Yes! Magazine has been reporting on them for years.  But what we don’t have is a consciousness that these innumerable projects can be shaped into a coherent whole designed to create a world we want and put the most obnoxious features of the present one behind us.

 

 

In order to bring about this coherence, a model developed by Joanna Macy, which I will describe here in reverse order, is very useful.  Her last, and my first step is (3) change the culture, and do so both spiritually, i.e. by each of us getting some kind of spiritual practice if we do not already have one, and then cognitively, i.e. by sweeping the old culture out of our minds by not patronizing the commercial mass media. It’s not a coincidence that OWS was touched off by that quintessential counter-cultural organization AdBusters,  But when we do this we should bring into being a new culture by learning everything we can about nonviolence, a vastly richer field of study and practice than we’ve been lead to believe.  (Putting aside false modesty, I’d like to offer our website as a way into this fascinating culture).  Let us add something here that may seem like a luxury, an abstraction, but I believe is of paramount practical importance.  The dominant culture is based on an image of the human being.  We are separate bodies, gratified by consumption — that is the “subtext” of every commercial message and we are exposed to them several thousand times a day.  This image does great damage.  Metta, accordingly, has been promoting an alternative vision; if this, or something like it, were to be the underlying “story” we adopt, everything we promote would resonate with that new story and gain persuasive power:

 

  • Life is sacred — all of it, even after you’re born!
  • Life is an interconnected whole — including the nourishing planet
  • We can never be satisfied by consumption, but by relationships
  • We can never become secure by killing “enemies” or warehousing “criminals,” but by turning enemies into friends and restoring offenders to lives of dignity and meaning.

 

Next in Macy’s scheme is (2) creating new institutions. OWS was called into being to change economic institutions, so devastating to the inner and outer environment; but many of us realize that cannot be expected to last without also bringing in restorative justice to replace the cruel, broken system that’s disfiguring our society with its racial prejudice and sheer vindictiveness.  Similarly, the war system must be replaced by a range of alternatives stretching from world institutions like the International Criminal Court (ARE WE IN?) and the “Right to Protect” norm which opens the door for “outsiders” to intervene when a state fails to protect or even attacks its citizens to grass-roots organization like Peace Brigades International and Nonviolent Peaceforce that do that.  And finally,

 

(1) Stop the worst of the damage.  Without stifling the movement’s creativity, on the contrary as a way of enhancing it, the time has come to give it some strategic shape.  That shape would include — OK, not a list of demands, which presuppose that you’re dependent on your adversary — an inspiring picture of the world toward which we insist on moving and a set of steps by which we intend to get there.  At every step let us invite our adversaries, whoever they are, to join us; but let us put them on notice that we are prepared to launch telling civil disobedience if they try to obstruct (as of course some of them will) this precious progress.

In that strategic plan, à la Joanna Macy, let the most urgent things like global climate stress be listed first.  But you cannot build a movement, not to mention a world, on the contradictions of a wrong system.  That we must base on Truth, which seems to me to demand that we be constructive wherever possible and resistant when and where necessary.

We have knocked on the door of the financial citadel and have the ear of the public.  Let’s begin the conversation.

 

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Militarization in academe

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by  | Originally published at Waging Nonviolence, November 29, 2011

The day after Mothers’ Day, May 14, 1961, the front-page picture of a Greyhound bus engulfed in flames galvanized the American public. It was Anniston, Alabama, and Klansmen had fully intended to burn the freedom riders alive. For the first time many Americans realized the full depth of hatred faced by black southerners—and those who came to help them.

Right now two videos may be having a similar effect. They show shockingly savage attacks on students by the police; at Berkeley, we see protesting students with linked arms being jabbed and beaten by police “batons” (as poet laureate Robert Hass pointed out, this is not an orchestra and those are not batons—they’re clubs). At Davis it’s a line of seated, peaceful students being casually doused with pepper spray by an apparently impassive police officer.

If the salutary shock of this confrontation were to wake up the public as the photo of the burning bus succeeded in doing in 1961, what might they learn? I think, three things.

1. This is just the surface of a much bigger problem. As I write, the U.S. Senate is getting ready to debate, and hopefully reject, S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which would give all future Presidents the right to do what President Obama has already done: to assassinate American citizens without trial, anywhere—including on American soil. This bill, which was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing, is only the latest step in the noose of militarization that has been tightening around our freedoms (or our very lives) since 9/11. In an article entitled “SWAT Teams, Flash-Bang Grenades, Shooting the Family Pet: The Shocking Outcomes of Police Militarization in the War on Drugs” that appeared on Alternet recently it was pointed out that there are more than 50,000 police paramilitary raids in the US each year—more than 130 every day, mostly for prosecution of drug warrants. The first lesson an awakened public should draw from the scenes at Berkeley and Davis is really that there’s no such thing as “appropriate” violence that can be contained in a corner and not spill out where we don’t want it—or more accurately, where we are forced to recognize what it really is.

2. And the next lesson is similar to the first, for an illusion has been spun around the wonder-weapons of modern warfare: pilotless drones. In a highly significant disclosure by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, drones, designed to allow us to kill “others” without endangering ourselves, are already in use for border surveillance, and from there the next step has already been taken: a Texas Police Department recently acquired a drone with taser capability. Others have submitted their requests across the country. Violence that we hurl at others—and make no mistake, the cowardly aspect of drones means that they are a form of violence, possibly one of the worst, in Gandhi’s view—comes back. As the Buddha said, to hate another is to throw sand up in the air: it must come back upon the thrower.

But not all the lessons of the photos are negative. One is downright inspiring.

3. When I heard from Mica and Hayden, two of our Metta volunteers, how they and the other students stood up to shockingly brutal treatment without retaliating, I immediately thought of that highpoint of modern nonviolence, the “raid” on the Dharsana salt pans in Gujarat, India on May 21, 1930. That event, where Satyagrahis walked resolutely into certain beatings for hours together without retaliating, marked the end of British control in India—arguably the end of colonialism in its classic, overt form.

Since then an even more dramatic scene has unfolded at Davis, where a large group of students were on the verge of a violent confrontation with a smaller (doubtless frightened) line of police. The police were menacing the students with shotguns armed with another sub-lethal type of ammunition, when one of them shouted “mic check” and proceeded to have them all in unison say to the police that they were giving them “a moment of peace” in which to leave. And the police left!

So far, the students say they are using nonviolence (or at least that’s what’s reported in the press) because it gives them “the moral high ground.” In other words, it’s a winning strategy. If—no, when—they take the next step and realize that nonviolence is the only force that rehumanizes as it works, that can permanently reverse militarism and not just give it another form, I believe nothing will be able to stop them.

The freedom riders delegitimated racism; perhaps this generation, with their creativity and their courage, will delegitimate violence itself.

How would Gandhi lead the leaderless?

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by  | Edited and posted at Waging Nonviolence on November 23, 2011

In the spring of 2005 I stood on the roof of the Student Union building in Berkeley, overlooking Sproul Plaza, where I had lived through the exhilaration of the Free Speech Movement four-plus decades earlier. Milling about behind me were about thirty or so young adults, the youth contingent of the first Spiritual Activism Conference convened by Rabbi Michael Lerner and myself. It was impossible not to compare “then” with “now,” and I found the comparison instructive, even inspiring.

Listening to them, I ticked off the critical mistakes we had made in those heady days of protest, and it was immensely reassuring to note that the folks around me had made a lot of headway correcting them. Back then we were, of course, dead set against racism, or tried to be (the FSM was an aftershock of the Civil Rights movement) but these young people were totally color blind. I heard even more progress in an area we had barely touched on: fully integrating women as true equals. We famously “didn’t trust anyone over thirty” (that became a bit awkward for me in ’67 when I slipped over the line!), but the concept of “mentor” had subsequently come in to make it acceptable to benefit from an older person’s experience — absolutely critical for a movement facing, as we still do, sophisticated, if wrong-headed, opposition.

I had fond memories of cafes where we sat arguing about Camus and Marx (not that we read the latter), which was a really good thing, but none of us, as far as I remembered, was fully aware what was happening to the earth, not to mention getting our hands dirty in her by growing food, or building composting toilets; a few of these people, by contrast, had come fresh from their organic farms up in Oregon, still in coveralls. And then the most important change, in my view: we had been in a state of near-total ignorance about nonviolence. They were considerably more sophisticated of nonviolence, and happily that awareness has taken another leap in the last few years.

But one thing that had not sat well with me in 1964 was not much improved in 2005 and is still an issue today in the amazing #OWS movement: the issue of leadership.

Leaderless movements, to be sure, are not the aimless, decapitated things they are taken for by mainstream commentators, and OWS in particular has dealt with the issue good-humoredly. I believe it’s Occupy CO that anointed a border collie, Shelby, with her backpack, as their official spokescreature. “She is more like a person than any corporation,” they said.

More to the point, leader or no leader, it is succeeding to some degree in keeping order and charting a course for itself — backing away somewhat from contested sites and switching “from places to issues,” wisely. Yet for this and any future progressive movement I feel that a philosophy, a vision, and a strategy for realizing that vision will be essential, if for no other reason than the clear, consistent, and compellingly simplistic message of conservatives. And for all this, as well as sheer efficiency, leadership could be of enormous help.

Can we have a kind of leadership that could help us stay more focused, more efficient, than the “horizontal,” everything-by-consensus style that has been the political culture of progressive movements? Can we relax somewhat the ideological aversion to leadership that has come to dominate progressive thought — and, I think, slowed the movement down — and open ourselves, to some kind of discriminating leadership that will not inhibit individual responsibility — for many of us feel, myself included, that individual responsibility lies close to the core of the world we want?

I believe that we can; in fact, this kind of leadership was one of Gandhi’s most striking achievements. No one was able to evoke the self-leadership potential of his followers while still giving tight focus to huge campaigns — calling off whole Satyagrahas (campaigns) when even a few people were unable to contain their own violence, directing the switch to “constructive programme” when direct resistance became unworkable, etc. Some feel it was Gandhi’s greatest contribution to turn ordinary men and women into heroes. As many of us know, when he and virtually the whole leadership was arrested during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 leadership devolved, successfully, onto every individual.

Yet, while it may seem counterintuitive (most of my students were shocked to hear this), in the heat of struggle Gandhi said, “I am your general, and as long as you want me to lead you, you have to give me your implicit obedience.” How is this different, to take an extreme example, from Hitler telling his generals when he launched the disastrous campaign in Yugoslavia (a blunder that in fact cost him the war), “I do not expect my generals to understand me; I expect them to obey me”?

Well, in two ways. For one thing, there’s that qualification, “as long as you want me.” Gandhi said he would drop out the minute the people did not want him, and did exactly that when the congress Party couldn’t see their way clear to following his pacifism in WWII. Secondly, he did want his people to understand him. From the earliest days in South Africa he toiled day and night to bring them along, often insisting they understand in detail the full significance of anything to which they agreed. Moreover, his concept of “heart unity” — that if people want one another’s fulfillment they are one despite any differences of class, status, or whatever — applied to leadership. Never did he feel superior in anything but responsibility and the willingness to suffer to anyone following him. As he said, “Diversity there certainly is in the world, but it means neither inequality nor untouchability.”

Of course, Gandhi sets the bar pretty high! But a high bar makes the qualities we need at least visible, something to strive for. The opposite of bad leadership, then, may not be no leadership, but good leadership — and followers alert enough to tell the difference.

 

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Violence and Evolution: Where Do We Stand?

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How do we measure violence?

The question has come up because of recent studies by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, featured on TED among other venues, which seem to show that, contrary to common opinion, violence has been steadily decreasing by a number of measures for several millennia.  Some of these measures are at first sight impressive, like the decrease in genocides and combat deaths, and of course, this is something we would very much like to believe. The reality, however, is more complicated.

So to our question: how do we measure violence?  Prof. Pinker cites the fact that combat deaths are decreasing over a relatively recent time period.  There are several reasons not to take this statistic at face value.  First, as others have pointed out, it ignores the phenomenon of structural violence: inequalities built into the social system that cause death as surely as bullets.  Gandhi once said, “it little matters to me whether you shoot a man or starve him to death by inches.”  And as Johan Galtung, to whom we owe the term structural violence, has shown, this kind of violence is increasing severely (hence the rise of the 99%!).

But let’s go further.  In the American Civil War eight out of ten wounded soldiers died of their wounds (and they were primarily soldiers; now the main victims in war are increasingly civilians).  Today, with far more sophisticated medical technologies, that figure is probably more like one or two out of ten.  In other words, a decrease in combat deaths is not a decrease in violence, which has its primary dimension in the human heart.  If I shoot a man with the intention to kill him, I do not suffer less violence in my heart when he happens not to die of his wounds.  Indeed, this sanitization of violence has arguably enabled, rather than reduced violence.  And of that sanitization, there are now horrible examples in drone warfare and other technologies of remote killing that separate, or seem to separate, men and women from the effects and the meaning of their actions.

With regrets, we have to go further still.  Look, for example, at a study done in the UK to sort out the effects of violent television that looked not at the number but the kind of violent incidents depicted.  The researchers found that violence between persons who were closely related (and all domestic violence falls in this category) was more devastating to watch than violence among strangers.  In other words, it is the depth of the human bond that’s being rent asunder, not so much the frequency of the act, that scars.  And it would be hard to deny that the kinds of violence people are doing to one another today were unthinkable early on in my own lifetime (i.e. during and after WWII).  Not that horrors never occurred in the past, but they were virtually never made entertainment-stuff by the mass media, whether disguised as ‘news’ or in overt fiction and therefore they were both less acceptable and less frequent.  It pains me to mention in this category — but to understand what’s really going on we must — that torture was made acceptable to the American public right after 9/11, thus putting us squarely back in the camp of the Nazis whom people of my generation were taught to abhor.  In a word, the true measure of violence is not deaths or anything we can easily measure: it is dehumanization.

Fortunately, human consciousness is not static.  There are patterns of growing sensitivity clearly discernible in all human communities over the long span of time — growth in what we might call moral awareness, or the awareness of connectedness among fellow beings (and, ultimately, the planet that nurtures us).  Slavery was accepted from the time of the ancient Greeks, at least; then a group of Quakers stood up to it in England and it suddenly was not.  Its wrongness was exposed.  Tragically, as Melissa Anderson-Hinn points out, today there are “approximately  27 million slaves , more than twice the number involved in the entire 350-year history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”   As a practice, slavery has come back — a strong argument against Prof. Pinker’s general conclusion.  But its public legitimacy has not come back: the recidivism is a local downturn going against the trend of evolution, an artifact caused by the degradation of the human image in our bizarre industrial culture.

Because of this trend toward greater awareness, an act of violence can actually be more violent than it was a hundred years ago: its wrongness has become more evident — as St. Paul says, once the law has been announced violations of it are more damaging.  What else can account for the enormous rise of suicides among combat troops and veterans?  Did not Richard Barnett say two decades ago that America “perfected the art of war just when it was going out of style”?  By ‘out of style’ he did not mean that it was less frequently practiced, but that the practice of it was more spiritually, socially, and physically damaging; that, as suggested above, it was more obviously contrary to the drive of human evolution.

But now let’s turn the coin over.  While violence has been increasing, by what I consider the more meaningful measures listed above, so has its opposite.  Nonviolence has been increasing dramatically in the years since Gandhi and King, as anyone passing through Zuccotti Park can testify.  How do we measure nonviolence?  Again, as Gandhi incessantly pointed out, very much by the methods of science — provided we stop confining ‘science,’ as we have done for a long time now, to the study of the outside world, to what can be objectively measured.

The world is not a safer place in the sense that Prof. Pinker has been taken to mean, but it will be a safer place if we build on that alternative.

by Michael Nagler from December 20, 2011

 

Remembering the Palestinian Declaration of Independence

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by Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook | Originally posted on November 15, 2011, at Waging Nonviolence

 

The Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written by Mahmoud Darwish, 1988

 

“We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

Twenty-three years ago today, on November 15, 1988, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence was presented by Yasser Arafat in Algiers on behalf of the Palestinian people, and “in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” The document was written by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish one year into the nonviolent movement that would become known as the first Intifada, literally, “shaking off.”

Today is an opportunity to reflect on the progress, or at least the developments since then, not only in Israel and Palestine but around the world. For nonviolence is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon that may even—dare we say it—finally shake off the empire of globalization that is threatening to throttle human aspirations everywhere.

We would like to concentrate here not so much on the quantitative spread of nonviolence (Richard Deats and Walter Wink calculated that more than half the planet had seen a nonviolent campaign of major proportions back in 2000, and they are already out of date) as on lessons learned, new habits and institutions formed, networks built and best practices assimilated.

What is qualitatively new in the Palestinian struggle? Well, the obvious: that they have applied to the UN for recognition as a state. This moves toward fulfillment of the 1988 Declaration:

In the context of its struggle for peace in the land of Love and Peace, the State of Palestine calls upon the United Nations to bear special responsibility for the Palestinian Arab people and its homeland. It calls upon all peace-and freedom-loving peoples and states to assist it in the attainment of its objectives, to provide it with security, to alleviate the tragedy of its people, and to help it terminate Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

From the grassroots also, with the two recent waves of flotillas courageously attempting to relieve the siege of Gaza (and successfully drawing international attention to that violation of international law) we saw a kind of nonviolent “pincer movement” with international action mirroring a renewed struggle from the West Bank villages themselves. Among those villages a far greater sense of commonality arose—despite the extreme difficulty of communication imposed by the Occupation—under the auspices of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee and similar organizations.

International recognition and internal solidarity are potent factors in a nonviolent campaign; and we are reminded how in the First Intifada itself there arose a combination of “constructive program” projects and active resistance that had rarely if ever been seen since Gandhi’s great campaign. That it came about more or less of necessity is testimony to the creativity that nonviolent struggle tends to bring out in people and to the fact that most innovation in nonviolence has been stumbled on serendipitously—but that is changing.

One of the most significant signs of progress worldwide has been the beginning of systematic learning across movements, of which the input of American scholar Gene Sharp and Serbian youth activists from the successful Otpor movement of 2000 in Egypt was only one relatively well known example.

It is well known now that the important things we learn we learn most efficiently from story-telling. Here is one:

Shortly after the First Intifada a twelve-year-old boy came to our friend Mubarak Awad, one of the movement’s leading figures and a major proponent of its nonviolence, with a complaint. The boy had thrown a stone at an Israeli jeep and a soldier from the jeep had chased him down and beaten him badly. But that was not his complaint. In fact, with increasing difficulty, he had waited for the patrol the next two days and again thrown his defiant stone, only to be beaten once again. But on the third occasion when the soldier caught up with him, he gave him a hug and went back to the jeep. “Why did he hug me?!” he asked Mubarak. Who told him, “because he is human.”

If there is one thing characteristic of nonviolence, and a principle that we cannot forget, it is that the nonviolent vision, this form of struggle, awakens the humanity of oneself and one’s opponent. This renewed sense of connection is not merely a fruit of the tree of nonviolence, it is its very core and our highest victory, because from it will emerge new ideals, stronger communities and healthy children.

Given the spirit of this twelve-year-old that has now resonated throughout the Arab Spring, matched with the spread of learning about nonviolence, we dare hope that the inspiring words of the Declaration will come true in our lifetime:

The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights. . . Governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality and non-discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color or sex, under the aegis of a constitution which ensures the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Thus shall these principles allow no departure from Palestine’s age-old spiritual and civilisational heritage of tolerance and religious coexistence.

 

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Toolkit for Occupy Activists

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Dear Friend, 

As a volunteer for the Metta Center, I have found and inquired a vast array of knowledge and wisdom that has allowed my journey within nonviolence to progress at an exponential rate. It is truly is a gift to have this source of information at our hands in a time that needs it the most.  Just as I have found great use with the education provided by the Metta Center, you can too. Included here is a tool kit available to guide either beginners in the right direction or for those who would like to advance their knowledge of nonviolence even further.

 

Downloads available: On Metta’s website, there is an included nonviolence wallet card, a Study guide for Michael Nagler’s book titled, “Search for a nonviolent future”, and a Pamphlet titled “Hope or Terror? Gandhi and the other 9/11,” which is also written by Michael Nagler. Click on the following links, and print & distribute any material you find compelling:

 

Nonviolence wallet card

 

Study guide for Search

 

Hope and Terror Pamphlet

 

Study guide videos for Search

 

An Introduction and Glossary to Nonviolence:

 

Nonviolence introduction with five basic principles

 

Nonviolence Glossary

 

Available Videos and courses on Nonviolence:

 

A general message to Occupy Wallstreet

 

A second address to OWS: Where to?

 

The Promise and Challenge of Nonviolence video interview

 

Peace from Within: Finding and Accessing our Deepest Resources (Meditation instruction)

 

The Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) lectures taught at UC Berkeley by Michael Nagler: 164a and 164b

 

Get in touch with us!

 

To get a further idea of where we think the movement should be heading, please have a look at Michael Nagler’s recent op-ed titled “Is This the Movement that We’ve Been Waiting For.” If you have any questions regarding nonviolence, we have an Ask Metta section on our webpage, or you could follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

 

 

With love,

 

Nicholas Sismil

Volunteer

 

 

 

 

Is this the movement we’ve been waiting for?

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by  | On Waging Nonviolence, November 9, 2011, 12:57 pm

Ever since Paul Hawken published Blessed Unrest(2007), it has been clear to many that the progressive world is a million projects in search of a movement. A movement, Hawken reminded us, has “leaders and ideologies; … people join movements study [their] tracts, and identify themselves with a group,” while the Occupy movement today seems to be just a continuation of the style that is “dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent.  It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with.” Can #Occupy provide the framework that will pull these far-flung but inwardly resonant energies together—and in so doing become a force that could, in Gandhi’s terms, “o’ersweep the world”? I believe we can make that happen, and we should, because in any case, as Gandhi also said, a movement that is simply against something cannot sustain itself.

The 1,500-odd sites of #Occupy already have many hopeful things going for them. They are global, as Naomi Wolf has recently pointed out, which has not been seen since millions of people attempted to stop the war on Iraq in 2003, only to have President Bush dismiss them as a “focus group” (more on that later).  They are touching a nerve of widespread discontent: as one commentator said recently:

“Whether we agree with them or not, I’m sure most of us support their right to speak their mind, and to challenge a system that each and every one of us knows is corrupt.”

 

They have developed a kind of protest culture that is partly highly technological (as in the Occupy Café conferences in which the Metta Center recently participated) and partly very un-technological (as with the “human microphones” that propagate messages when loudspeakers are disallowed).  They are beginning for the first time since the gun-shy sixties to peek around the ideological stumbling block of leaderlessness to consider that some forms of authority might not be anti-democratic.  And most important of all, they are upholding a nearly constant refrain of nonviolence.

To capitalize on these advantages, several things need to happen:

  • We will have to realize—and many are beginning to—that our issue is not a particular piece of public real estate and our adversary is not the local police (nasty as they became in Oakland, Atlanta, and several non-U.S. cities, police have refused orders to arrest protestors in Albany, NY).  Right now the thing to do is not occupy physical space but form community among ourselves and come up with a long-term strategy; to focus our determination on a goal that goes far beyond symbolically “taking back” one place or another. At this stage it would be no weakness at all to withdraw from some contested sites to less confrontational spaces where we can build up our strength for the real confrontation that may well be coming.
  • While developing this long-term goal and strategy for reaching it—a strategy that includes the option of escalating to civil disobedience if our demands are brushed aside the way they were in 2003—we will surely do well to adopt Gandhi’s great model, which could be thought of as a bird with two wings and a brain: there was a wing called protest (or Satyagraha, or what I like to call “obstructive program”), and one that he called Constructive Program, or building what you want without waiting for others to give it to you (“Move Your Money” on Nov. 5th was a highly successful example), and some way to choose between them as one or the other becomes the best way forward—in other words, some kind of strategic direction or, dare I say it, leadership.
  • We will need an inspiring, positive message. The time has come to say that we believe life is not for endless consumption but for ever-expanding and deepening relationships, that life is sacred (even after you’re born!), that it is an interconnected whole such that exploiting another hurts oneself, and that security never comes from killing “enemies” or warehousing “criminals,” but turning former enemies into friends and rehabilitating offenders—not to mention learning to live in such a way that does not alienate and criminalize. In other words, the financial crisis is only a symptom of a deep flaw in our culture, for which we boldly assert a healthy alternative.  We may well lose some sympathizers, especially when we raise the specter of peace; but it is much better to have a solid community united behind a clear, bold message than a false consensus of the discontented majority.

Finally, back to the all-important refrain of nonviolence. As I write, the important Oakland site is being threatened by a minority—which is all it takes—who are advocating and committing property destruction and violence of spirit. A friend writes:

Given the open nature of Occupy Oakland (OO); its consensus decision structure; and the lack of endorsed “leaders,” it is unclear how OO will deal with an internal situation that is committed to an agenda … inherently contradictory to the aims of the #Occupy movement.  Unaddressed, this dilemma threatens the existence of at least Occupy Oakland itself.

Here again, as we search for a way to win over or, failing that, to isolate the disruptive element, two Gandhian parallels are available (there is little in the world of nonviolence that he did not deal with in his long career). When asked, could Communists be allowed to join the Congress Party, he replied that no one could be excluded from the Party on the basis of who they were; but the Party had a platform and a code of conduct and had every right to exclude those who did not accept those instruments. We badly need a code of conduct, and the confidence to enforce it. Remember—and here is the other parallel—on at least two occasions Gandhi actually called off a campaign at high tide when it could not exclude violence. When they could, he led them to final victory.