Metta’s Opinion

The house at 1730 MLK in Berkeley that the Metta Center has been settling into and fixing up for almost one year now has a new addition! It’s our new sign, lovingly crafted by local artisan Bill Denham, who formerly resided in the cottage next to the Metta house. When we first moved to 1730, last October, Bill was an instant member of Metta’s extended family, inviting us to join in the monthly poetry readings he hosted in the garden between the two houses. Over the path leading into the garden was a hand-carved wooden sign reading “Take hope, all who enter here”—a nonviolent reversal of Dante’s famous warning. We instantly recognized a kindred spirit!

A woodworker and printer by trade, Bill hand-carved the intricate cedar sign over a period of months. It now hangs over our front porch, welcoming all who enter to join our growing nonviolence community.

Now that’s [[swadeshi]]!

Dear Metta Family,

Beloved Berkeley activist and dear member of the Metta family, Pancho Ramos-Stierle, has been arrested and jailed in Arizona in a direct action against Maricopa County sheriff Joseph Arpaio. Here is the text from a friend in AZ recounting what happened:

July 31, 2010

Berkeley, CA

“I hold no title worthy of your attention other than that of a simple nonviolent activist who, for many long years, has tried to preserve the legacy bequeathed to us by Gandhi. I have the deep conviction that the fragile flame lit at one time by this Indian sage is the only hope which might still illuminate our path in a world overshadowed by innumerable forms of violence…”

In the following “Urgent Letter to Obama” French nonviolent activist and philosopher Jean-Marie Muller addresses President Obama’s assessment of nonviolence in his Oslo Nobel Peace Prize Speech. He describes in detail the urgent need for the United States’ President to give nonviolence a deeper consideration, drawing from current issues in the United States impeding world-peace and a comprehensive nonviolent future.

This work was published in France with “Ilots de Resistance” and was translated into English by Metta co-Director Stephanie Van Hook to share with the English-speaking public.

Read: Urgent-Letter-to-Obama

To anyone who is available and interested: this morning a community picket line in combination with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union carried out an effective nonviolent action in support of the increasing movement to boycott Israeli goods after the recent flotilla attack . The Oakland dockworkers joined counterparts in South Africa, Norway, Sweden and Malaysia, who have declared they will refuse to unload Israeli ships in the coming weeks. It was a very important victory and a strategic nonviolent success.

The second round is ready to begin this afternoon at 4:30 pm, berth 58 at the Port of Oakland. Please join the activists and workers in this effort this afternoon if you can!

Check out a recent news report HERE. The dock workers, with the support of protesters, successfully negotiated to refuse to offload the Israeli ship. A second group of workers will arrive this afternoon, and with our support they can also make the decision not to work to unload the ship during this shift. The goal of this action is to resist the unloading for a minimum of 24 hours. This is a historic opportunity to support the shift toward a more nonviolent culture, by participating in an internationally-supported movement for Peace. Please attend if you can!

Original announcement follows:

6/20/2010 Oakland Labor Community Picket of an Israeli Zim Line ship

When Siddhartha Gautama was a young man, he was outside with his cousin Devadatta when the latter shot a beautiful swan.  When the bird fell to the ground young Siddhartha raced over and took it to be healed, much to the dismay of his cousin. They decided to bring in a third party and took the case to Siddhartha’s father, the King, to be decided to whom the bird actually belonged. Devadatta who shot the bird presented his case first: “I shot the swan. It is mine.” The King then listened to Siddhartha, who he knew was already very wise beyond his years. Siddhartha approached the King and quietly asked “To whom does the bird belong, Father, to the man who tried to kill it or to the man who has tried to save it?”

This short parable of the Buddha’s life demonstrates his compassion at a very early age for all of life, not only for human beings but toward all sentient creatures. It shows us that through his wisdom, he understood compassion as the very basis for the expression of love and friendship. In this story, Devadatta embodies attachment to the material world. That world has us to claim ownership of something, to call something our own, because we exercise power over it, even as far as the power to give or to take life from it, even to the extent that  killing another creature to prove that one is worthy of respect from others. The Buddha-to-be in this parable however demonstrates that this way of thinking is unworthy of us at a fundamental level. We become worthy of one another’s respect and trust by ending suffering and nourishing one another. While violence is the path of the former, nonviolence is that of the latter.

Nonviolence is the awareness of the reality that all of life is interconnected and that all of life is fundamentally one, which is borne not only from modern scientific discoveries but the ancient wisdom traditions. The underlying reality that makes up and holds all life together is love. Yet it is not the kind of passive or romantic love that takes over the senses and the mind, but a force of love that is both generative and positive. It is upheld by the awareness that there is a law of cause and effect surrounding all of our actions and interactions. This is true for violence as much as nonviolence. Whenever I choose violent means, I will, in effect, generate more violence. When it is nonviolence in question, in the words of St. Teresa of Avila, amor saca amor, love begets love.

Michael Nagler coined the term ‘collateral healing’ to describe the overall  effect of nonviolence at its best. Unlike ‘collateral damage’, the phenomenon of ‘collateral healing’ bears witness to the belief that nonviolence always injects a situation with positive energy and that the energy is subject to the scientific law of causality. Even if we can’t know exactly where or when the effect will manifest,“the result will always be constructive.“ The law is applied to the individual as well as much as the nation, for according to Gandhi, “It is a profound error to suppose that whilst the law is good enough for individuals it is not for masses of mankind.”

The point I want to make, however, leads us to a very serious question. What message is the United States sending to other nations, if through the law of cause and effect, we prepare them to fall into harm’s way? Though not through the way typically understood. It is not that we are failing to act or failing to protect, rather, we are by failing to use the right means in doing so. Through the law of cause and effect, we can understand that by supplying another country with arms and nuclear weapons to act out violence is never in that country’s best interest for self-defense (not to mention our own) in the bigger picture because that country is only building up a reaction, an effect, of greater violence to be reflected back at itself. It is, as the Buddha says, like looking up and throwing sand into the air. In order to “help” a country to make peace, we ask them in effect to create more enemies. The reasoning is not only logically flawed; but it is subtle. It strikes at the very root of our common security.

It also makes a greater statement in regard to the sincerity of our plea to friendship with another country. Who is the true friend, the one who has tried to heal the country, or the one who has perpetuated harm?  It is a scientific as well as a spiritual fact: violence begets violence.

Take Israel for example. Befriending our nation or our national corporate interests a country would only stand to make enemies. Would we not be better friends to Israel if we built up her self-confidence to help her make friends, to create better diplomatic ties from those strengths, and most importantly, while doing so, we emphasized nonviolent means, and promised collateral healing? That would entail Israel renouncing the weapons we are selling her, and to begin living the message of peace that she so desperately seeks. As a true friend to Israel, we would tell her that we have faith in her abilities and her promise. We would want to see her thriving and successful for now and for her future generations. We would want to see an end to the fighting and violence and give her wise advise on how to make that happen. That is friendship. That is the basis of strength and wisdom.

While the United States professes this friendly commitment in words toward Israel, it is still very far from our hearts. Because in our hearts we know that violence begets violence. We know that Israel can never be independent and thriving while she uses violence because violence does not create the conditions for peace to emerge. This may be hard for us to see because our country thrives (or does it?) on a war economy.

Indeed a renewed assessment of friendship building would not only be best for Israel, it would actually be best for ourselves. With more people enlisted in the military and prison-industrial complexes than in Ph.D. programs in the United States, we might even begin to suspect that we are a nation who is addicted to violence– at the very least, that we have a problem. We are also in need of a friend. We need Israel to help us end our violence by helping us to see our own hard truth in a way that only a friend can do effectively.

The time is now for Israel to decide and truly act on the future she wants: does she want continued violence or is she ready for peace?  If she wants to be healed and she wants peace, then in respect to cause and effect,  she will have to imagine whether she could find it nonviolently. She would have to realize within herself the courage and the love to quit United States and actively create a nonviolent future.

Tearing Down Walls and Building Bridges

By Jean-Marie Muller *

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a war pilot in May of 1940 when he wrote these lines: “The drama retreating is that it removes all meaning from one’s acts. Whoever tears down a bridge can only tear it down with disgust. This soldier is not slowing the enemy down: he is leaving a bridge in ruin. He destroys his country in order to fulfill the caricature of war!” It is always so. Always, war, whatever cause it claims to serve–and this can be just–, leaves bridges in ruin. War will forever leave houses, villages, and cities in ruin. And these ruins are the ruin of man’s humanity.

Violent means do not only pervert the most noble of causes, but it erases and substitutes that cause for itself. “It is this reversal of roles between means and ends, writes Simone Weil, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for everything foolish and bloody throughout history.” Violence is thus sought after for itself. It becomes a blind mechanism of destruction, demolition, devastation and death.

Each evening, we are tele-voyeurs who watch men play the mechanized game of war from the four corners of the earth. And one cannot but help to note that we are fascinated by these images of iron, fire, blood and death. However, in each one of these conflicts, violence is not the solution, it is the problem. The error lies in deeming that violence is human. Facing the tragedy of violence, facing its inhumanity, its absurdity, its ineffectiveness, has not the moment arrived, out of realism if not wisdom, to become aware of the need for nonviolence?

Violence can only destroy bridges and build walls. Nonviolence invites us to tear down walls and to build bridges. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to build bridges than walls. The architecture of walls demands nothing of the imagination: it has only to mind gravity. The architecture of bridges demands an infinite greater amount of intelligence: one must defeat gravity’s pull.

The most visible of walls separating men are the concrete walls that martyrize geography and divide the earth we should be sharing. As was the Berlin wall, so is the Wall of Jerusalem. For posterity’s sake, the Berlin wall was not destroyed by the massive arms of destruction from the West. Neither did it crumble by itself under its own weight. The Berlin Wall fell under the pressure of the non-violent resistance of women and men from civil societies from countries in the East who took the greatest risks in order to take back their dignity and freedom.

Yet there also exists walls in the hearts and minds of men. These are walls of ideologies, prejudices, insults, stigmatization, bitterness, resentment, fear. The most dramatic consequence of violence is that it constructs walls of hate. Only those who, on whichever side they find themselves, have the lucidity, intelligence and courage to tear down these walls and build bridges that allow individuals, communities, and people to meet one another, to know one another, to talk with and begin to understand one another, they alone keep the hope alive that gives meaning to the future of humanity.

The fatality of violence is built entirely by the hands of men. This means that men, with their own hands, can tear it down.

*Writer and Philosopher, Jean-Marie Muller is the national spokesman of “Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-violente” (MAN:www.nonviolence.fr).

translated from the French by Stephanie Nichole Van Hook

The ripples of nonviolence have made their way across the world this week:

IN ZIMBABWE:

Four women activists from the strategic non-violence organization ‘Women and Men of Zimbabwe Arise’ (WOZA) were finally released, after spending six days in a Zimbabwean prison for protesting outside of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA). Reporting on the struggle they endured inside of the prison-on behalf of all of the incarcerated- they described in detail the inhumane conditions to which they were subjected,  including: a lack of proper sanitary areas for the disposal of human waste for prisoners in their cells; a lack of water, dispersed on an irregular basis; verbal abuse, harassment, drug-selling and bribery by prison police. They continue to experience on-going physical pain from the floor of their concrete cells as well as diseases contracted within the six day period. Nonetheless, the women activists have expressed concern for the dehumanized mentality of the police maintaining the prison, and will continue to raise their voices as a call to the indomitable human spirit to effect  nonviolent change inside and outside of the cages of our prisons.

IN THE UNITED NATIONS– Click here to read about the exciting news about how the Nonviolent Peaceforce has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the United Nations’ Institute for Training and Research.

AND IN IRAQ:

These inspiring words were sent by a nonviolent activist in Iraq to a member of our Metta community this morning after she reached out in support of their efforts and in solidarity with their struggle for a nonviolent world:

“I am so glad to read your lines, really we feel that we are not alone against the violence, in the same time that we face the terror everyday as Iraqi people, we also feel sorry about the American soldiers and civilian who came from the other side of the earth to implement a political agenda, we feel sorry about their families who count the days and the nights for getting their sons back. We feel that we could together prove for all the world that nonviolence is the only choice that everybody should believe in.”

Stay tuned for where they may be next Friday…maybe in your own backyard!