I was immediately excited about the idea of nonviolence for sustainability when I first heard about the November 30th “Day of Action”. I have come to believe that environmental sustainability will be the issue of justice that defines our generation. Nonviolence offers a path by which to dramatize the issue, and to demand major rapid changes in mainstream systems.

From the Beyond Talk website, I found my local New York City event for November 30. There will be a rally at the Bank of America followed by a march to the offices of the National Resources Defense Council.

And so I am faced with a decision: shall I risk arrest for this particular action of civil disobedience? It’s one day before the event, and my heart’s not in it.

Am I choosing a romantic relationship over a better world? My girlfriend and I are planning to move into a new apartment on Monday: if I risk arrest, we may not be able to continue living together. And I risk losing the closeness that supports my work, and the person who will support me now and in future actions. “You should go to the rally, and join if you are moved to join,” she tells me.

Am I choosing myself over a better world? I have never risked arrest before. Nonviolence sounds smart, feels right, but when it comes to an actual opportunity that risks arrest, am I too afraid? I have no doubt that I can overcome that fear.

Or do I hesitate now because of particular details of this particular upcoming action? The event’s website declares: “Join us in a carnival procession as we chase politicians, corporate environmentalists, and grim reapers, down Fifth Avenue and expose their true alliances!”

This event does not feel like I will be protesting the darkness within myself–my own self-doubt, inactions, ambivalence, inconsistencies, fears, and selfishness.

It is a protest against the corporation, and against the corporation-friendly charity, and not a protest against the damage I do myself as a user of fossil fuels. It is a protest against them, the corporate people–someone else–and not a protest against us, all the people–ourselves. I have tried before to change them, and have not gotten far, now I feel strongly that it is time to change us.

I seek the protest against unjust practices in everyday lives. Block my roads, my bridges, my gas stations, my ATMs, my shopping malls, my produce markets. Make me ask myself whether these institutions are just. When truth stares me in the eye, my own darkness exposed, shared, support offered to defeat it, I will join you.

As for this particular rally, I will watch, and if I am moved, I will join.

I became a pedicab driver to change myself, and the world. I wanted to become more comfortable talking with people on the street, and I wanted to transport people by an earth-friendly means.

As a pedicab driver, I rent a pedicab for $150 per week, and I can drive as much as I want. Evening rush hours and weekends are the busiest times. I pick up my pedicab from the lot on W 31 St. On the job, I coast around Midtown Manhattan looking for passengers. I watch the sidewalk for anyone calling for a cab or about to call, or anyone who seems unsure of what to do next. I ask the person’s destination and try to negotiate a price. Once passengers are on board, I chat with them at every red light and every opportunity. I have carried marathon runners, couples on dates, election voters, tourists, and costumed demons.

The hardest part of my job is the “no”s. For every passenger, there are 10 to 100 potential others who say no. Many have good reasons–there are too many people (more than 3), they are going to another borough or the airport (too far), or they have only a credit card. I once got turned down because cocaine would blow away in the back of a pedicab. From many others however who are calling for taxis, I get refused out of hand, or else totally ignored. “Absolutely not!” “No way I’m riding that thing.” “Get out of my way!” I try to wish everyone a good night no matter what they say. Read the rest of this article »

In the October-November issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, Tom Cornell has a nice review of a new biography by Richard Deats on Hildegard Goss-Mayr, and her late husband Jean. While not known to the wider public, Hildegard and Jean are perhaps two of the most influential peacemakers of the last century. As leaders of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, they travelled around the world for decades teaching and training people in nonviolence.

Cornell’s reflection on Hildegard is great, and – although I haven’t read it yet – I imagine the book would be a fascinating read for anyone interested in nonviolence, especially from a faith perspective. Here are few nice stories from the review:

Richard Deats recounts the story that Hildegard told that morning to a religion class at that New Jersey high school. The students were all male, working class, polite but skeptical as Hildegard described the nonviolence of the gentle Jesus and his call to nonviolent discipleship. During the question and answer period, a burly student raised his hand. “That’s all fine and good,” he said, “but what do you do when the Russians come marching down your main street? What do you do then?” It was the time of the Red Scare when the government, with media complicity, terrified the American citizenry with this image even though anyone who gave it a moment’s thought would realize that the Soviets could never manage the US Postal Service.

I paraphrase from memory now forty-six years old. “We were deeply afraid as the Red Army approached Vienna, in April 1945,” she said. “The Nazi army in retreat from Russia had burned everything in its path to the ground, everything that they couldn’t eat. It was a path of murder and rape! We had good reason to fear retaliation.” She described the scene as her father described it to her later. She wasn’t there but in another family home in Bavaria. A soldier slammed a rifle butt against their front door several times. Her father, Kaspar Mayr, opened the door and invited the Russians in. The dining room table was set. He invited them to sit and eat. Perplexed, the Russian soldier sat down and ate. Kaspar Mayr surmised from their gestures that they did not expect this reception and wondered what was going on. Then one of the soldiers pointed to a crucifix on the wall and said, “Ah, Christos!” Ah, Christos, that was it! The Russians had their fill and left the house undisturbed and maybe with the inkling of an idea, an idea that Jean and Hildegard spent their lives developing and putting into practice, the radical Christian notion of love of enemies. They introduced nonviolence to Latin America when they brought the late Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife-Olinda in the impoverished northeast of Brazil the works of Martin Luther King translated into Spanish. Later, with Adolfo Perez Esquivel, they helped establish Servicio Paz y Justicia in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[…]

Richard Deats describes Jean and Hildegard’s part in the preparation for the events that drove the Marcos family from the Philippines and the installation of a democratic government. The Goss-Mayrs had gained the confidence of Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila. His support cooperation were crucial. The bishops together called for support of the freedom movement and opposition to the Marcos government. Richard Deats, having been a member of the faculty of the Protestant seminary there, had an intimate knowledge of the country. He joined Jean and Hildegard to establish dozens of nonviolent training programs across the country to give the people, whose frustrations had heated to the boiling point, the knowledge and the means to achieve change through nonviolent direct action.

• American Indian activists marked Thanksgiving by holding a “Day of Mourning” in Plymouth, calling Plymouth Rock a monument to racism and genocide. Members of the United American Indians of New England have been holding the annual protest since 1970.

• 12 Greenpeace activitsts were arrested on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra yesterday after shutting down four cranes at a port run by one of Asia’s biggest pulp and paper groups.

• A dozen Chinese women related to some of the 104 miners killed in a recent blast protested outside the mine’s entrance on Monday in an effort to demand answers.

• 16 protesters who staged a sit-in at Canadian Labour Minister Rona Ambrose’s office in Edmonton to demand action from the federal government against climate change.

• More than 250,000 public sector workers went on strike to protest government plans to cut their pay, resulting in the closure of schools and limited hospital access.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce has just put out this great video introduction to their work of nonviolent civilian peacekeeping. It is in two parts, so make sure to watch the whole thing.

As Jean Lound Schaller explains in a recent op-ed for the Midland Daily News:

The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), convened in India in 2002, is a global effort that offers us something to say yes to when we say no to war. The first unarmed, paid, professionally trained, civilian, international “army” offers a concrete, on-the-ground, two-year experience to help build a more peaceful world through peaceful means.

NP, with its international office in Brussels, and its executive office formerly in Minneapolis, has teams in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and is currently developing a project in South Sudan. It serves at the invitation of local civil society organizations. Due to its strict non-partisan stance, it is gaining the trust of governments, armed groups and individuals living in conflict zones. Civilian peacekeepers live among the people, thus building cultural sensitivity and gaining the trust of all stakeholders in a conflict. NP also supports families seeking the return of their children who have been abducted or forcibly recruited into an armed group. International protective presence and accompaniment offer hope and build people’s confidence to claim their human rights and to build peace in their communities.

To learn more about the organization, visit their website: www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org.

Rhetorically, an old question in the theory and practice of nonviolence: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” (63) It is with that question that I come to Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, a short book published last year by the trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (forgive my leaving out the diacritical marks). But I say “rhetorically” above because that is not, principally, his question, and he won’t properly answer it. He doesn’t propose, as we do here, to build a movement devoted to the purgation of violence; he calls, rather, for a subtler analysis of it and, possibly, scandalously, a withdraw—“doing nothing.” Or, in the very preceding sentence, he suggests that the “historical monsters” (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) “were not violent enough” to enact meaningful social change.

Bearing through such apparent self-contradiction is to be expected when wading through Zizek’s books. His “parallax” mode of analysis, combined with a mind and body so frenetic as to seem closer to the pace of a hummingbird than a person, ensures that there will be some coincidence of opposites. Nevertheless there is at least a gist to it all, and, in the thick of it, a great many surprising insights. When reading a Zizek text, one does better not to cling too steadfastly to one’s own starting questions. Follow the odd ways the reasoning goes, or risk missing out on a clever tangent or a good Soviet joke. Unfortunately for me, attempting to summarize it all can’t help rendering one squarer than he.

Read the rest of this article »

As the President mulls over how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, in a recent article for Truthout, Jeff Leys wrote that the antiwar movement seems to have gone missing over these past several months. Apart from the action on October 5, in Washington and other antiwar events around the country on October 17, he unfortunately seems to be right.

Nevertheless, we can and must step up the pressure. For those interested in taking action, Leys suggests joining the Peaceable Assembly Campaign (PAC) – the latest effort by our good friends at Voices for Creative Nonviolence to challenge the militarism that is so pervasive in our country.

From January 19 through February 2, the PAC will maintain a two-week vigil at the White House and engage in regular acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, starting on the day President Obama enters his second year in office, continuing through his anticipated State of the Union address to Congress, and concluding on the day he is to submit his budget for 2011 to Congress.

Then after February 2, the Peaceable Assembly Campaign will focus its work upon Congress. Similar to the Occupation Project effort of 2007, the PAC will organize lobbying – both legal and extralegal (i.e., civil disobedience) – in the home offices of representatives and senators who do not commit themselves publicly to oppose additional funding for the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

You can become involved with the Peaceable Assembly Campaign at www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org.

In China, more than 1,000 people took to the streets in a district of Guangzhou to protest against the building of a waste incinerator near their homes.

• Over 250,000 public sector workers in Ireland, including teachers, nurses and civil servants, went on strike on Tuesday in protest against government plans to cut pay and prevent the national debt from spiraling out of control.

• In Turkey, public employees across the country are set to take part in a nationwide strike today to protest the government for failing to meet their demands on collective bargaining and strike rights.

• The first education sector strike in France since the beginning of the academic year got underway Tuesday. The educational professionals were joined by striking postal workers, who are protesting the privatisation of postal services.

• Workers at Repsol’s La Pampilla oil refinery in Peru said on Tuesday they had started a two-day strike to pressure the company for better benefits and to end forced overtime.

• Players from a lower-league Portuguese football club have vowed to continue with a hunger strike, which began on Friday, in protest at the fact they have not been paid for six months.

• The Pompidou Centre was forced to shut down on Monday after staff went on strike to protest planned job cuts at the Parisian mecca of modern and contemporary art.

• In Nepal, thirteen student unions on Monday announced a five-day long agitation protesting Tribhuvan University’s recent decision to hike tuition fees ten fold in all its constituent and affiliated colleges.

• A hunger strike by opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has grown, with 24 university students vowing not to eat until the Organization of American States sends a delegation to Venezuela to review allegations of human rights abuses.

• In South Africa, Musina municipal workers staged a sit-in on Tuesday in protest against alleged corruption and financial mismanagement by officials.

Earlier this month, I had an article on Yes! Magazine’s website, which was really just a longer version of a post for this site, about how many nonviolent movements that have successfully earned political rights and freedoms fail to address issues of poverty and economic inequality.

Writing that piece led me to reflect on what examples we do have of nonviolence seriously changing economic relationships. While I could think of a few important victories – like how the Bolivian people were able to kick Bechtel out of their country in 2000 after their water was privatized – I realized that we really should develop a list of these stories to complement the many examples of nonviolent movements bringing down dictators or repressive regimes over the last several decades that are well-known.

With that thought in mind, I was happy to find one great example that we can add to this collection on the front page of the New York Times last week.

The often raucous [anti-sweatshop] student movement announced on Tuesday that it had achieved its biggest victory by far. Its pressure tactics persuaded one of the nation’s leading sportswear companies, Russell Athletic, to agree to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when Russell closed their factory soon after the workers had unionized.

From the time Russell shut the factory last January, the anti-sweatshop coalition orchestrated a nationwide campaign against the company. Most important, the coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, persuaded the administrations of Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina and 89 other colleges and universities to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell. The agreements — some yielding more than $1 million in sales — allowed Russell to put university logos on T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces.

Going beyond their campuses, student activists picketed the N.B.A. finals in Orlando and Los Angeles this year to protest the league’s licensing agreement with Russell. They distributed fliers inside Sports Authority sporting goods stores and sent Twitter messages to customers of Dick’s Sporting Goods to urge them to boycott Russell products.

The students even sent activists to knock on Warren Buffett’s door in Omaha because his company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns Fruit of the Loom, Russell’s parent company.

The rest of the article is worth a read, so check it out. And please tell us about any stories of nonviolent movements winning tangible concessions from corporations or achieving a greater degree of economic justice that you know of in the comment section.

Dr. Timothy George, one of the document's authors, at the National Press Club.

We’ve been following here with interest the growth of protest activism on the part of the American Right since Obama came into office. They’ve been adapting the methods and language that have traditionally been the purview of the Left and, in the process, getting far more mainstream media attention.

The latest example of this trend comes in a statement released on November 20th, the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.” Chuck Colson was one of the drafters, and signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Thus begins Laurie Goodstein’s report in the New York Times:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

The document’s preamble goes further, citing past Christian opposition to slavery, Roman infanticide, women’s suffrage, human trafficking, and sexual slavery. At the conclusion, after rehearsing their convictions about abortion, euthanasia, and marriage, the authors and signers commit themselves to act:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.  We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

For many people, this promise of nonviolent resistance really amounts to violence: restricting women’s access to abortions, barring same-sex couples from marriage (or even blessing), and threatening the progress of medical research. But one might say the same thing about a boycott that threatens workers’ jobs. Yes, active nonviolence is a weapon, and it forcibly shapes society. (Be sure to catch Sarah Posner’s excellent analysis, for instance, of the political machinations at work in this declaration.) If these people are truly intending to take the suffering that they see in the world onto themselves as a statement against it, I cannot but accept the testimony of their consciences. I’m certainly far more willing to listen to an action like this than to the murder of an abortion provider.

Active, creative democracy is messy, and it forces us to listen to and hear out the voices of those we might deeply disagree with. Those of us who don’t like it are perfectly welcome to take up acts of conscience of our own.