Normally, when I debate representatives from the National Rifle Association (NRA), hostile questions from the audience come from those with a decidedly Libertarian bent to their politics.  Typically, these individuals advocate for broader latitude on the part of Americans to respond to criminals with loaded firearms and lethal force.

I was therefore taken aback—and pleasantly surprised—to have my credentials as a practitioner of non-violence called into question during a debate with the NRA’s Outreach Director in late February of this year.

The audience was not our typical group of American college students.  This time, our debate was occurring in front of a group of British high school students visiting Washington.  Specifically, these were 16-19 year-olds from Shrewsbury Sixth Form College and Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Darlington.

When the Q&A eventually began, their professor/chaperone stated outright that my opponent would likely be getting most of the questions, and encouraged the students to save some for me.  Still, I was caught quite off-guard when a young man stood up and asked me if I thought it was appropriate to shoot an intruder in my home.  It was clear from his tone that he did not think it was appropriate.

I told him that I’d likely never find out, because I do not keep a firearm in my home and would never consider doing so—particularly given the fact that my wife and I now have children.  That said, I added, I have no problem with another American citizen keeping a firearm in his/her home for self-defense and using it if absolutely necessary.  The NRA’s outreach director then chimed in and said he was happy to hear me say that.  He, of course, had zero problems with blowing a home intruder away.

Another young Brit who was sitting in the audience that day later summed up the students’ reaction in a blog:

We were surprised to hear that Ladd Everitt of [the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence] saw shooting intruders in his home as an acceptable option … I’m not unrealistic, and I know that people’s instincts are to protect themselves and their loved ones.  But when a weapon is introduced, the situation is more likely to become fatal—something [he] told us in [his] talk.  I think the worry for me personally was that people would become judge, jury and executioner in these situations.  While I agree that it is fair to protect yourself, I don’t agree that you can unnecessarily injure or kill someone.  This becomes a whole lot easier when guns are involved, and that is why we see groups like [his] as so important.

As I headed home after the debate that day, I felt a strange combination of emotions:  Disappointment in myself that I had somehow let these students down, and excitement (and even inspiration) regarding their attitudes toward nonviolence.  Being an American, I was stunned.  You see, here we embrace “justified violence” from sea to shining sea, whether it’s the guy in Georgia who wants to carry a loaded handgun into an airport or the Hollywood producer behind “Shoot ‘Em Up.”

I wondered why these British students embraced the principles of nonviolence so readily and confidently.  In all my years speaking to American students, I’d never seen anything like it.  Is it simply because—whatever their concerns about self-defense—they understand that the gun death rate is 30 times lower in their country than in the United States?  [I mean, let’s face it, if an armed society was a polite society, the U.S. wouldn’t have higher homicide and gun death rates than virtually every other industrialized democracy on the planet.]

Or is it something more?  Don’t these kids play the same video games, watch the same movies (think “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”) and listen to the same music that our kids do?

I can’t claim that I’ve quite sorted it all out yet, but I will say that the experience filled me with a profound sense of hope that is still resonating with me now, months later.

BP is responsible for one of the worst environmental calamaties in the history of mankind, but now it’s not even letting some 4,000 volunteers, including 300 boat captains, in the Florida Keys help clean up the mess. According to Time magazine:

BP (and the Deepwater Horizon’s Unified Command, which BP runs with the Coast Guard and other agencies) has so far insisted on complete control of the cleanup operations. A BP spokesman told TIME that the only appropriate way for interested boat captains to become involved would be to register with the Unified Command’s Vessels of Opportunity program. Never mind that according to BP’s numbers, only a third of the 7,200 boats “under contract” through the program are in active service.

To make matters worse BP and the Coast Guard haven’t let any of the local volunteers begin to organize a preemtive response. Not until oil is within 72 miles, they say. But that is hardly enough time to protect the 180 miles of coastline along the Keys. So, rather than wait for their homes and land to be destroyed, people are starting to take matters into their own hands.

A group called Adopt a Mangrove is assigning kayakers their own mangroves to clean if oil comes. Volunteers are monitoring shores throughout the islands for signs of oil. The Florida Keys Environmental Coalition formed to connect boat captains, scientists, environmental activists and various agencies. [Laura Fox, owner of Danger Charters in Key West] coordinated a cleanup of Man Key, a mangrove island west of Key West (oil is easier to clean off a beach that is in good condition). “It was all women, actually,” she says. “Thirteen women in kayaks, clenching knives in their teeth, cutting monofilament fishing line off the mangroves and clearing trash. We brought 35 bags of trash off the island.”

In addition, others set up a series of town halls, crashed closed-door meetings between city officials and BP representatives, as well as organized discount haz-mat and animal rescue training. This collective effort forced BP to promise it would fund $10,000 for more haz-mat training and hire a local towboat operator to keep an eye out for approaching oil.

Obviously these are small victories, but judging by the attitude inherent among Keys residents, they are ready to keep the pressure on BP.

“I just talked with BP yesterday,” says [Patrick Rice, dean of marine science and technology at Florida Keys Community College]. “I told them flat out, ‘If you come down here and start doing what you’ve done in Louisiana, you’re going to have a revolt. They’ll shut down U.S. 1. You won’t be able to bring any of your contractors in or out.’ “

We’ve made the point here before that wearing clown suits to a protest tends to undermine the legitimacy of a cause. The one exception to this informal rule would be if clown suits were somehow central to the cause. But how often does that even come up? Well, get ready to be surprised because it just did. According to the Associated Press:

About 100 professional clowns who make money by performing on public buses marched through the Salvadoran capital Thursday to protest the killing of a passenger by two impostor clowns.

On Monday, a man was shot five times in the face and stomach when he declined to give money to two assailants dressed as clowns who boarded a public bus. No one has been arrested.

The protesters — wearing oversized bow ties, tiny hats and big yellow pants — marched down San Salvador’s main street in an effort to both entertain and educate passersby. Several held signs insisting that real clowns are not criminals.

“We are protesting so that people know we are not killers,” said professional clown Ana Noelia Ramirez. “The people who did this are not clowns. They unfortunately used our costume and our makeup to commit a monstrous act.”

Clown-union leader Carlos Vasquez says he plans to issue IDs to all real clowns and urge police to detain those who do not have them.

As the World Cup began in South Africa on Friday, Palestinians from the town of Bil’in formed a “national football team” and marched, along with dozens of Israeli and international activists, to the separation wall.

Sporting Palestinian uniforms, the players erected a goal next to the wall and began playing. After kicking several soccer balls over the fence to land that was once owned by the village, Israeli soldiers responded as they have in the past, by fired tear gas at the participants. According to the Friends of Freedom and Justice – Bil’in:

They then came through the fence, and arrested 6 journalists, four of whom were soon released… The tear gas canisters fired also caused large fires on the dry ground around the olive trees. Soldiers fired more canisters, aiming for the groups of villagers attempting to put out the flames.

While Ahlul Bayt News Agency said that the nonviolent protesters “did nothing but kick footballs,” the video above clearly shows that several of the youth involved did unfortunately throw rocks as well.

• On Monday, dozens of Palestinians and international activists held a nonviolent protest in the town of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip against the Israeli-imposed buffer zone in Gaza following an Israeli incursion onto Palestinian-owned farm land earlier in the day.

• A strike over pay by the security stewards at World Cup stadiums spread to half the tournament’s 10 venues yesterday, forcing police to step in and assume their duties.

• Several hundred activists gathered in New York City’s Union Square on Monday at a rally to protect  homeless LGBT youth sponsored by the Ali Forney Center.

• Some 800 Burmese migrants have begun a hunger strike in a Malaysian immigration camp after the UN’s refugee agency stopped interviewing detainees about potential refugee status.

• On Tuesday, a dozen protesters gathered in front of NYPD headquarters to speak out against what they called the misuse of disorderly conduct charges against the homeless.

• In Sweden, around 30 Greenpeace activists broke into the Forsmark nuclear plant on Monday to demand that parliament vote against allowing new nuclear facilities to be built  in the country.

• On Monday, 250 rallied at a University of Illinois Board of Trustees meeting to protest tuition hikes and a concurrent salary raise of approximately $170,000 for University President Michael Hogan.

• More than 3,500 Romanians took to the streets outside the Parliament in Bucharest on Tuesday to protest proposed austerity measures Prime Minister Emil Bloc said must be made to meet the demands of a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

• Four people were arrested Tuesday at a Wake County, North Carolina school board meeting. The group of civil rights activists staged a nonviolent protest against measures they say will lead to re-segregation in county schools.

After September 11, 2001 our government played a dominant role in justifying retaliation. It exploited the tragedy of that day to further rationalize its political and military agendas. With the attacks still fresh in people’s minds, grief-stricken Americans turned toward fear driven interminable violence, thinking that would protect them. While many Americans still cling to this delusion, a group called Peaceful Tomorrows, is proving that not all surviving victims of 9/11 think vengeanace is the answer.

Peaceful Tomorrows, derived from the Martin Luther King statement “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows,” has 220 9/11 family members in the United States, including others in seven foreign countries. Their first gatherings were in response to the bombings of Afghanistan, when they began to notice their loved ones’ deaths were being used to stoke nationalism, support wars and normalize abusive behavior. They insisted that our government needed to act in accordance with the US and international law while promoting foreign-policies that seek peaceful alternatives. They have 7 main goals and say that:

“By developing and advocating nonviolent options and actions in the pursuit of justice, we hope to break the cycles of violence engendered by war and terrorism. Acknowledging our common experience with all people affected by violence throughout the world, we work to create a safer and more peaceful world for everyone”

In 2002, Peaceful Tomorrows attended a United Nations headquarters conference against the bombings of Afghanistan. Their responses increased with the Iraq war, Patriot Act, warrant-less wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the renditions to CIA “black sites” and many other injustices. They have organized with other antiwar groups like Voices for Creative Nonviolence and LaOnf (an Iraqi Nonviolence Group which means “No Violence” in Arabic).

This form of restorative nonviolence has taken those in Peaceful Tomorrows and many others past the false division of an us-verses-them type world propagated by the US government. Many of the members continue to visit and participate with others in Iraq and Afghanistan who have suffered under the US occupations. Early on, before the media even took notice, Peaceful Tomorrows’ testimonies gave a face and voice for the countless number of innocent civilians that were watching their family and friends being wiped out in US bombing campaigns and other military actions.

They’ve shown that Afghan and Iraqi civilians are not our enemies but our friends, having much in common with us. It is one of many steps they’ve taken to try and repair the damage our country has caused. But they cannot do it alone. We must all share the responsibility of the destruction and violence our government and military has inflicted on others.

The American conscience has been in a long decay, spiraling toward a nihilism exhibited through patterns of self-destructive behavior. With rare exception, those who once represented the moral force of society – politicians, religious leaders, academics, journalists, and even leaders of so-called progressive movements – can no longer combat the pervasive influence of a consumption based society propped up by imperial threat, violence, and rapacious greed. As “We, the People,” bear the financial burdens of pathological wars on terror and corporate irresponsibility, the poor of the earth cry out.

The environmental destruction – for nearly two months oil has gushed into the Gulf because of BP’s government-endorsed “error” – has reached epic proportions. And once again, it is the poor and the marginalized – those not welcome or unheard in the halls of power and privilege – who will suffer the most: people of color, the uneducated, the developing world, the winged and four-legged creatures, the hills, the water. The mountains of Appalachia are being blown up with amounts of TNT comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over 500 of the world’s oldest mountains in one of the most diverse bioregions have been blown up. They are gone forever. It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina and now the people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast residents are faced with devastated shorelines and economies. And yet where are the voices of outrage? Where are the people and the mass action? Who is denouncing our insatiable appetite for oil and coal that kills the very Earth that gives us our life?

We will not win the war we are waging against the Earth as we seek to conquer and control all of its resources. We can fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and de-stabilize countries like Iraq and Pakistan to secure access to oil-rich areas. Even as we outspend the all the combined military budgets of the world, we cannot outspend, overthrow, or even intimidate the Earth. We will lose. We may think we are winning, and in the short-term it might even appear that way. But there will come a time when the peoples of the Earth, probably from a country with nuclear weapons and a capitalist ethos, will make the world an inhabitable place. The Earth, over time, with the incredible resiliency of creation that can be observed by just watching the emergence of a Sequoia tree or a mustard plant from the tiniest of seeds, will go on. Its people may not.

What is needed is a revolution. This is not a call to arms. It is a call to the heart. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and communities known for its hospitality to the poor and its pacifism, proclaimed that “what is needed is a revolution of the heart.” It is a revolution that begins with each one of us, but not in isolation. The revolution of the heart takes place in community. And it is only through being in community that the revolutionary vision that Dr. King called for – the radical transformation of values as he denounced the giant triplets of “racism, militarism, and consumerism” – can be embraced and waged. And this revolution is already underway. It is happening on the margins, in oppressed communities, in the abandoned places of Empire like Detroit and Philadelphia, on the borders, the inner cities and the rural farming towns. All over this country, people are coming together to build community. The state has abandoned them. The promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are virtues extended to the proud and the rich, not the humble and the poor. But it is in the humble and simple work of local family farmers committed to organic production practices and land stewardship that true life, liberty and happiness is found.

The Land Stewardship Project (LSP) in Minnesota is a widening community of small-scale, organic farmers committed to building an educated and capable network of regional farmers and resisting policy that promotes an industrial, oil-based agribusiness model. Communities are emerging that are transforming the way people see the world. It is giving birth to imagination and a moral formation in a lifestyle that considers the land ethic, as Aldo Leopold referred to it. In Appalachia, hope springs eternal from communities like Coal River Mountain Watch that, through education, organization, and research, are advocating for sustainable environmental and economic alternatives to mountaintop removal such as the Coal River Wind project. Other communities like Climate Ground Zero that engage in nonviolent direct action to stop mountaintop removal exhibit tremendous courage in a society built on fear and show a willingness to suffer persecution, arrest and jail for being the voice of the mountains.

It is in places like LSP, Coal River Mountain Watch and Climate Ground Zero that the American conscience is being forged in the burning fire and struggle for social change. The communities that are built consist of strong-willed, principled individuals who have the capacity to make moral judgments and discern a course of right action. They are not distracted or dissuaded – although they are at times disillusioned and often depressed – by the empty promises of corporate-backed politicians. But the resiliency of these American people, closely connected to the life of the Earth, is what will save the people from the self-destructive war abroad in search of oil and at home in search of coal. There are many ways to resist what are termed the works of war, of which include the destroying crops and land and contaminating water. The alternative models that the aforementioned communities promote ween us from our dependency on a broken, violent system toward one of communion and sustainability.

In an epoch such as ours, where postmodern skepticism runs deep of authority figures and leaders of any sort, the force for moral transformation will not come from the likes of Day or King (we’ve seen where the Obama hope has left us). Instead our hope is in the bottom, in the communities on the margins doing the work themselves. Leaders already exist in these networks and will continue to emerge. But it is in community that we will be propelled into the revolution of the heart and our conscientization needed for peace, social change, and ecological justice.

• 1,000 New York City high school students walked out of classes on Friday to protest the proposed elimination of free student metro cards.

• A series of labor strikes pushing for higher wages and better conditions spread through China last week. Some 1,700 workers at a Honda Lock factory staged a march, while 2,000 workers at a Taiwanese computer parts plant walked off their jobs.

• Doctors in Massachusetts protested the use of squirrel monkeys in a NASA-funded experiment to test the effects of radiation in space on June 10.

• Thousands gathered to protest a youth’s killing by police in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

• A rally was held in Sofia, Bulgaria on Thursday to protest Neo-Nazi attacks against a peaceful refugee’s rights demonstration days earlier.

• Tens of thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin on Saturday to protest Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity measures.

• A Saudi man walked on an electric wire to protest frequent power cuts in his community. The man said that he wanted to prove that the wires often did not carry electricity.

• Women and children in Nepal stage a demonstration to protest against human trafficking.

• In Copenhagen, tens of thousands of people demonstrated outside Parliament to protest the Danish government’s three-year austerity package.

• An Irish nurse sat atop a ladder for seven hours to protest her family’s eviction from their home for back-rent.

• Thousands of priests from around the world rally in Rome in support of the Pope.

• More than 5,000 Guatemalan peasants blocked a border crossing with Mexico in protest against constant power outages in parts of the western province of San Marcos.

The New York Times ran an interesting piece about the power of protest music in Iran earlier this week, saying:

Since the Iranian authorities have cracked down on the demonstrations that rocked the country after a disputed election a year ago, a flood of protest music has rushed in to comfort and inspire the opposition. If anything, as the street protests have been silenced, the music has grown louder and angrier.

The authorities have also tried their hardest to crack down on the spread of this music, shutting down sites where music can be downloaded and arresting musicians, but, as the Times puts it, “clamping down on music in the digital age is like squeezing a wet sponge.”

Protest songs are downloaded on the Internet, sold in the black market or shared via Bluetooth, a wireless technology that Iranians have adapted to share files on cellphones, bypassing the Internet altogether. Fans have also made dozens of homemade videos, setting montages of protest images to music and posting them online.

Since there are no functioning music charts in Iran, it’s hard to know how huge this phenomenon has become, but according to the Times:

An opposition Web site has posted about 100 protest songs recorded since the election. About two dozen of them honor Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old teacher shot at a protest in Tehran in June who became an icon of the opposition after her last moments were captured on a video that has since been widely circulated.

Read the rest of this article »