Metta’s Opinion

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

These words, uttered by Martin Luther King, Jr. 43 years ago today, are part of the first paragraph of his now famous speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” Perhaps his most controversial speech, this is the speech that he gave exactly one year before his death, wherein he came out definitively against the Vietnam war — pitting himself against not only government leaders and the war-supporting public, but some of his own supporters, as well.

In remembrance of the courage and conviction of MLK, a man who could not keep silent, on this 42nd anniversary of the day of his assassination we are sharing some links to new PBS-sponsored material about “Beyond Vietnam,” and the last year of MLK’s life.

• On March 31, PBS aired a newscast on MLK’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech. This program, an episode of Tavis Smiley Reports, reflects the deep courage and conviction behind the speech, and MLK’s sensitivity and strength during a very challenging time in his life. The program is available for online viewing here. (Full text and audio is available here.)
• Linked on the program page, you’ll find a companion article by Peace Action director Kevin Martin, “What Does Nonviolence Really Mean?” as well as Tamika Thompson’s interview with nonviolence activist and author Richard Deats, a blog entitled “What’s Suffering Got To Do With It?”
• The episode also links to a visual timeline of the last year of MLK’s life;
• And finally, it links to the article, “Nonviolent Peacekeeping: Pursuing King’s Dream,” which was co-authored by Nonviolent Peaceforce founder Mel Duncan, along with Metta Center president Michael Nagler.
• You’ll find it all and more on the PBS website!

And if after all of that, you have any doubt that “Beyond Vietnam” is relevant in today’s world, check out the following YouTube Video created for the 40th anniversary of the speech:

Final thoughts:

One way to practice nonviolence is through noncooperation with injust laws. This is IT: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8592365.stm

Dear Metta community,

The Metta Center is happy to announce the call for applications for the 2010 Metta Mentors Nonviolence Immersion Program. Yes, to all of you who have been asking: it’s time to apply!

If you’re interested, you can do two things that will help us get the word out effectively:

1) Learn more about the program by browsing and reading over the site (or consider applying). Contact us at mettamentors@mettacenter.org with any questions or suggestions for ways in which we can make the program information as clear and comprehensive as possible.

2) Share this message with everyone you know! We are looking for applicants from 18-35, and as in previous years we are hoping to invite both US and international students to our program. A call for applications follows this message, which you can forward easily, so please do so and help us get the word out!

If you were involved in any way with Metta Mentors last year, you will know that the 2009 program was an unqualified success. We hosted an amazing group of twelve mentees, and in the process our lives were transformed, even as we worked to transform the lives of those who came to participate. Many, many seeds were planted that we hope will blossom wildly this year as an even more transformative and unique program.

Note: though we have secured enough funding to run the 2010 program at a bare-bones level, we are still seeking funding; the number of mentees that we can accept this year has yet to be determined as a result. For more information about donating to the program, see the Metta Mentors post on our home page.

…and now for the announcement…

For more information, or to apply, please visit the Metta Mentors section of the Metta Center website, at:

https://archives.mettacenter.org/mc/projects/metta-mentors

For any of you who are looking for more inspiration from those who have walked the inner path of nonviolence ahead of us: if you have not heard of Peace Pilgrim, you would do well to learn of her life. She touched the heart of Naomi Shihab Nye, the author of the following poem (provided to us by our beloved poet-neighbor Bill Denham), and she has touched our hearts, as well. She is a true exemplar of peace experienced and lived with love.

Metta Center has gift copies of Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words available for anyone who would like one. Please drop by our office to pick up a copy if you are interested. And in the meantime, enjoy the poem!

Peace Pilgrim, You Are Still Walking

on the long roads, late at night. So many years

after you died, you’re not off the hook, you’re keeping

the pace, swinging your strong arms.

Who among us found a clearer way?

I shall not accept more than I need

while others in the world have less than they need.

We can work on inner peace and world peace

at the same time. Little people of the world,

may we never feel helpless again.

I marveled at your many-layered pinecone heart

and 3 possessions: toothbrush, postage stamps, comb.

Walk till given shelter, fast till given food.

Still, you’re starting before dawn,

pausing at a roped-off trail that says,

THIS IS NO LONGER A FOOTPATH,

shaking your head. I’m sorry you can’t rest yet.

One day I woke thinking, it’s good you’re dead.

We’re still fools in a world of war.

Then I recalled the navy canvas of your suit,

how it always felt fresh, not tired.

We listened as hard as we could. What can’t we learn?

I would establish a peace department in our government.

Under the swollen orange moon.

On the rim of the sad city, in a cardboard box under the overpass,

you held the calm and the strong conviction.

Oh Peace. Dear Peace.

Don’t give up on us. Don’t leave us stranded, please.

– Naomi Shihab Nye

Mildred Norman Ryder, the woman known as “Peace Pilgrim,” began walking in 1953 for the termination of the Korean War, a U.S. Department of Peace, and for nuclear disarmament. She counted the miles she had walked until she reached 25,000 in 1964, but she continued making pilgrimages across the country until the time of her death by car accident in 1981, according to the Friends of Peace Pilgrim Web site.

Peace Pilgrim spoke often of the “freedom of simplicity” and urged those who wished to contribute to world peace to first abandon material desires and achieve peace within themselves, says www.peacepilgrim.org. You can hear Peace Pilgrim’s voice and feel the power of her personality in this (1 hour) inspiring documentary.

Hey Metta Readers —

Check out this super post by Peace Academic-Activist Randall Amster that was just posted on Truthout, his article “What the Muslim World Can Teach Us About Nonviolence.” This is the kind of information and reminder we need to get out, again and again, in a world that often confuses nonviolence with pacifism, and more frighteningly, continues to confuse Islam with terrorism. Thank you, Randall, for your scholarship and your passion. Keep spreading the word!

In solidarity, The Metta Team

P.S. Randall will be giving a talk at Metta Center in the coming weeks. Watch our email list for an announcement soon. If you haven’t yet signed up for the email list, you can do so on our contact page. We would love to connect with you!

After I got an email, which was sent to a listserv, from a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley with the subject: Students as Spies: The Deep Politics of U.S.-Colombian Relations, I wrote this (edited)message, with the very valuable input from a few satyagrahis, and sent it to some students and workers of the movement involved in the transformation of public education:

Namaste dear beloved rebels!

May this email find you anchored in truth and courage.

We know that there are people who have joined us for different reasons. My intent in writing this email is:

• to acknowledge the tough reality (of brothers and sisters who haven’t “seen the light” yet and they work as spies to undermine the movement);
• to learn from past student/workers movements;
• to question why some of us are joining this movement;
• to honor the millions of lives sacrificed for our generation to be at this conjuncture;
• and to encourage our passionate, dedicated, resilient, loving, courageous people to stick around with love in the face of fear and to treat all people as human beings.

In the past and in the present, we have seen how our comrades in Mexico, Colombia, many other parts of the World and in San Francisco (a couple of weeks ago, at the arrestees benefit party), have been victims of infiltration. I certainly don’t intend of making this a thread and, for this reason, won’t respond to any follow-up emails here.

In some way this email is directed to all the persons who think that to lie is ok; that to create stress among each other is fine; that to sell our soul to the crumbling empire won’t hurt our family and interests; that this “spy job” won’t tax your spirit. For those of you who think as such, I encourage you to look at the examples of some former CIA/FBI agents, who served as tools for genocide and oppression when they were young, but that now they are choosing to redeem themselves.

There is a long list of agents who have resigned “after they saw the light”. People like John R. Stockwell (War on Humans) or Philip Agee (at age 25 doing CIA missions in Latin America, including the massacre of hundreds of students in Mexico in 1968 -you can read the context and how the whole community was involved on part 1-) or John Perkins or this sister, and the list goes on and on… [not to mention Daniel Ellsberg (The Most Dangerous Man in America and the Pentagon Papers) or Howard Zinn or Joanna Macy who had a short-lived stint with the CIA too. So there is hope!]

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You can’t be neutral in a moving train.

That’s the title of Howard Zinn’s autobiography (1994) and the title only says it all. If we are on board of the train of greed, privatization and ignorance, aren’t we part of the ride? The time to stop the totalitarian-corporate-capitalistic train has come, and if it is not stopping, we better get ready to jump. For some time I wanted to find a clear metaphor to remove apathy from people and I think this is it. This train of neoliberal governments, corporations and society based on fear, pollution, consumerism, violence and war is approaching a canyon and there is no bridge. To not be aware, to remain sat in the face of economic/environmental injustice and destruction, to leave our children in the hands of the blind machinist (“the system”) while we sit comfortably in the entertainment wagon, is not “neutral” but _suicidal_.

The good news is that many of us have spotted  a new rail road, with a slowly moving train, a silent solar powered train, a transitioner train, a victory-of-the-commons train, a Great Turning train, an inner (r)evolution train, that is waiting for us to smoothly transfer. If we pay attention and look at the poverty, the ignorance, the apathy and the violence all around us, including our minds, there is no choice but to do something about it.

That’s what Howard Zinn did after he removed the veil of war that was covering his eyes and that made him to drop the first napalm bombs. After serving as a shipyard worker and then an Air Force bombardier in World War II, Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and activist. He went to college under the GI Bill, received his PhD from Columbia. As a professor at Spelman College in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was an early faculty supporter of student civil rights agitation. Zinn wrote  SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee): The New Abolitionists (1964) one of the first books on the student organizing of the sixties. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past half-century. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women in Atlanta and was fired for “insubordination”: for standing up for the women. Zinn was fired from his — tenured — position for siding with student activists against the administration. Little did they know that they encouraged him more to stand up for freedom and justice (as this short video shows: Empire or Humanity? What the classroom didn’t teach me about the American Empire). It only strengthened his [[satyagraha]].

Satyagraha is the power unleashed from the depths of the human spirit. This is the force which is born of truth and love or [[nonviolence]]. It is far from passivity or submission to evil. Satyagraha implies a dynamic resistance to personal, social, economic and political exploitation. But we must use the weapon of love. We must expose the injustices to the apathetic population. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Structural violence (in the form of poverty and exploitation), physical violence (as police brutality) and psychological violence (i.e. consumerism) continue the fracture of community. So, yes, we stand up to the violation of community; yes, we stand up to the violation of personhood; but we don’t exacerbate the fracture of community with more violence. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Martin Luther King Jr.

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