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Nonviolence
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.
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
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
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 2000Foot Soldier
The Long Walk For Justice And Peace — A Conversation With Satish Kumar
The central realization that pulled me away from monkhood was that there is no escaping from life; the spirit has to be practiced in the everyday world, and not outside of it. The world is beautiful — the earth, the land, the people — and you have to accept even pain and suffering as part of that beauty. That realization threw me into the social, political, economic, cultural arena. It convinced me that wholeness of life is paramount.
August 1999Finding Peace After A Lifetime of War
From the day I was born, I was trained to be a soldier, encouraged in the way I was brought up to hunt, kill, dominate, rule, and control my environment. My family life was a form of war, filled with anger and violence, which made it no different from that in most of the houses around mine.
March 1997On Racism And Nonviolence
An Interview With Arun Gandhi
Peace without nonviolence is impractical. Some people think, if there is no war, we have peace. But, in effect, no society is at peace at the moment. In the United States, there is street violence. This is not peace at all. No country has ever made an attempt to achieve a thoroughly peaceful society.
June 1995Odyssey Of Resistance
An Interview With Daniel Berrigan
Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.
April 1993Sunbeams
March 1993There is a bird in a poem by T.S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
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