Browse Topics
Nonviolence
The Boy Who Kissed The Soldier
In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers have flattened houses, burying people alive. She describes the scene to me: Blackened, maggot-ridden corpses are displayed to anguished relatives for identification.
August 2003
Sunbeams
July 2003The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.
Acts Of Faith
Philip Berrigan On The Necessity Of Nonviolent Resistance
Faith is a major component of Plowshares: You have to believe that hellish weapons are not the will of God. You have to believe that, with God’s help, you can get to these weapons. And, finally, you have to believe that you can do both symbolic and real damage to them. “Hellish weapons” means battleships that deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles; it means Aegis destroyers, B-52 bombers, and B-1 bombers; it means the whole array of nuclear first-strike weapons.
July 2003
Dispatches From The Lamb’s War
Vietnam, we discovered, was not only a war on people. It was a war on the very meaning of human communication. Manipulating language was just one more means to achieve their nefarious end. Words were merely rhetorical devices, as expendable as eighteen-year-old American boys, as destructible as the Vietnamese people.
July 2003
Webs Of Power
Notes From The Global Uprising
We have been blockading all day in a giant spider web: an intersection entirely surrounded by webs of yarn that effectively prevent movement into the street. The intersection is held by a cluster from Asheville, North Carolina, that includes many labor-union members. We are blockading arm in arm with the ecofeminist Teamsters. In front of the police barricade, a group of protesters are “locked down”: sitting in a line with their arms chained together.
March 2003
Louder Than Words
Starhawk On Street Activism And Global Justice
It’s always a good time to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. There is a future clearly laid out for us in which decision-making power belongs to those who have the money, and their decisions will support short-term profit value, making every other human and natural value subordinate to it. We will have less and less freedom, less and less of the services we need to sustain life and community, less and less of all the things people really care about and love.
March 2003
Sunbeams
March 2003When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy — which could happen to any one of us — we can react in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, and unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.
Beyond Good And Evil
Marshall Rosenberg On Creating A Nonviolent World
Nonviolent Communication focuses on what’s alive in us and what would make life more wonderful. What’s alive in us are our needs, and I’m talking about the universal needs, the ones all living creatures have. Our feelings are simply a manifestation of what is happening with our needs. If our needs are being fulfilled, we feel pleasure. If our needs are not being fulfilled, we feel pain.
February 2003
Skeleton Woman In Seattle
When I was able to open my eyes, I saw lying next to me a young man, nineteen, maybe twenty at the oldest. He was in shock, twitching and shivering uncontrollably from being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed at close range. His burned eyes were tightly closed, and he was panting irregularly. Then he passed out. The sidewalk was wet from the water that a medic had poured over him to flush his eyes.
April 2000
