Waging Nonviolence editor Bryan Farrell (in handcuffs, right) being arrested alongside activist and journalist Bill McKibben (in handcuffs, center). Photo by Shadia Fayne Wood.

On Saturday, Waging Nonviolence editors Eric Stoner and Bryan Farrell were arrested while reporting on and participating in the Tar Sands Action against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Bryan wrote about last week. They will be held longer than expected—until today, we’re told.

I received a phone message from Bryan on Saturday night, in which he said that he is well—and, in fact, is sharing a jail cell with Bill McKibben, one of the action’s leading organizers. Our main concern was that Eric, who has cystic fibrosis, will have access to the medicine he needs daily, but it appears that he has been sent to a hospital for treatments. Sunday was also his birthday, so we were anxious that it was celebrated properly in the slammer.

Bryan concluded his message on a high note:

This is really something. I just hope that more people show up tomorrow, that this doesn’t scare them, because that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to intimidate the rest of the protesters.

He got his wish. On Sunday, 50 more protesters were arrested.

Ironically, one of the reasons that the Park Police are being so aggressive is that they’re acting on behalf of some strange interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory. According to the action organizers’ press release:

On a phone call late this afternoon, U.S. Park Police told organizers of the sit-in that the jail time was expressly intended as a deterrent for future participants.

The Park Police were especially concerned that sit-ins would continue during the week of events beginning on August 28 surrounding the dedication of a new memorial to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest exponents of creative nonviolence.

Keep waging, guys!

The Park Slope Food Coop is probably the only grocery store in America where non-members must: a) accompany a legit member and b) sign in with a photo ID, pledging not to buy any products. There’s just something about exclusivity that makes the kale chips taste better.

“You’re on alert,” the woman at the Coop entrance told me, not unkindly, when I swiped my membership card. Having missed my previous work shift bagging dried nuts and fruit, I am a member in poor standing (which is to say I am basically your average Cooper). Still I was able to bring my friend Jesse Bacon as my non-shopping guest.

Jesse had a cameo in my first Waging Nonviolence installment (“Co-oping BDS, part I: Progressive except Palestine”), which covered the campaign to have the Coop join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He’s a longtime justice-in-Palestine activist who is involved in Jewish Voice for Peace’s campaign to get the pension fund TIAA-CREF to divest from Motorola and other companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories. For this second installment, Jesse was a natural choice to help push the Israeli boycart through the aisles of the Park Slope Food Coop. Here’s some of what we found on the shelves.

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• Hundreds of foreign exchange students walked off their jobs at a Hershey’s chocolate plant in Pennsylvania to protest low pay and physically draining work.

• Latino activists held a protest outside President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign headquarters on Tuesday to ask him to end a criminal deportation program they say is snaring large number of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes.

• Syrian security forces fired at thousands of protesters who poured into the streets throughout the country Friday killing at least two, activists said, a day after the United States and its European allies demanded that President Bashar Assad step down.

• Indian activist Anna Hazare began a public hunger strike in the country’s capital Friday, accompanied by thousands of cheering supporters, who want to see stronger anti-corruption measures in India.

• Hundreds of striking Verizon workers held a candlelight vigil outside their CEO’s Mendham, New Jersey mansion Thursday, hoping to draw a stark contrast between the contract demands of blue-collar workers and the quality of life enjoyed by the company’s executives.

• What began as the latest public hearing organized by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security task force to address deportation policy concerns ended in the arrest of 10 immigration reform activists Wednesday evening in Chicago.

• Protesters gatecrashed a mining and exploration conference organised by the New South Wales government in Australia yesterday, abseiling off the balcony of a Sydney hotel to unfurl a banner against coal seam gas.

Starting Saturday, farmers, ranchers, Gulf Coast residents, faith leaders and climate activists from across the United States and Canada will be marching on the White House, holding sit-ins and risking arrest every day for two weeks because President Obama, with the support of the State Department, may soon allow the construction of an oil pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast—a decision that would not only endanger farmland and drinking water, but also, in the words of NASA scientist James Hansen, signal “game over for the climate.”

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In a certain sense, retired politicians have it easy. If they’ve found a way to keep a relatively clear conscience, they have the benefit of tremendous insider experience—and all the ironclad authority that comes with it—and little actual responsibility. They can say what they want about what should be done, and make it sound real good, and all we can say is, Well, why didn’t you do that when you could have? But good-enough excuses always seem to be on hand. Easy-peasy.

It’s fitting, therefore, that Harper’s lent former senator, congressman, and presidential candidate George McGovern their “Easy Chair” column this month (subscription required). He put it to use with “A Letter to Barack Obama,” which lists a bunch of really decent ideas about what could be done to fix the country and, in particular, its economy. It dwells mostly with what’s probably the most obvious idea of them all—with the possible exception of campaign finance reform: cutting military spending. He cites his efforts, following Eisenhower’s famous warning, to hold back the military-industrial complex. Obviously that didn’t work. What we need now, says, McGovern, is

a new definition of “defense” that takes into account the quality of our education, the health of our people, the preservation of the environment, the strength of our transportation, the development of alternative fuels, the vigor of our democracy. These were the concerns expressed by the people who stood in Cairo’s Tahrir Square holding up their signs for more than two weeks this winter. Without guns, knives, or the use of their fists, they brought down the dictator who had exploited them for nearly thirty years.

He goes on to recommend the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the closure of US military bases in the Middle East (and probably in Europe and South Korea), a $500 billion cut in our $700 billion military expenditures, and taxation for the richest Americans (as Warren Buffett recently called for). Then he goes on to describe all that could be done with this money: high-speed rail, a new GI Bill, and the expansion of Medicare to all Americans.

Easy-peasy.

Sometimes, when one belongs to the richest and most militarily over-equipped country in the world, there’s a bit of a temptation to overthink things. I was reminded of this at the end of my interview—just published at The Immanent Frame—with the great Pakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood. I asked the tangled question of what American women can do to help their Afghan counterparts. Some American feminist groups, you might recall, were among those who mobilized to support the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Her reply was thorough, though the gist of it was plain: “Stop bombing them.”

The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

At the heart of Gandhi’s revolution was a new kind of hero: brave, but also compassionate; bold, but also empathetic; powerful, but also unarmed. For millennia, traditional heroism had been fueled by the implacable absolutism of the Us vs. Them script (“we are good, they are evil”) enforced by justified violence. Gandhi’s new heroism-subverting hero—whom he called a satyagrahi, a practitioner of Soulforce—bet her life on challenging and dissolving this ceaselessly reinvented and endlessly lethal dividing line.

“The Interrupters,” a new documentary from director Steve James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, vividly dramatizes this gamble in the midst of a culture of extreme youth violence on Chicago’s South and West Sides. The film is an up-to-the-minute account of the haunting terror of seemingly inescapable gang conflict that is continually threatening to spin out of control—and that often does.

What sets this sobering account apart, however, is that it settles neither for ineffectual hand wringing nor a more traditional criminal justice perspective, including prosecution and incarceration as the solution to gang violence. Instead, it tracks over the course of a year a trio of “violence interrupters” – Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra –who, like Gandhi’s satyagrahis, are nonviolent first responders intervening in numerous disputes on the streets that threaten immediate carnage but also could touch off a larger war.

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"Si Se Puede," unknown artist, August 1973. California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, UC Santa Barbara.

Bayard Rustin, long-time organizer and activist involved in the peace, civil rights, economic justice, gay rights, and African movements, envisioned a coalition of African-Americans and civil rights activists, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups, that could alter the social and political makeup of the country. This culminated in the March on Washington and was marked, shortly thereafter, by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Not without controversy, Rustin’s ideas of ensuring social justice—not just political rights—through a broad-based coalition enjoyed some significant success. The coalition’s success was not necessarily due to its organizational strength so much as its ability to turn out large numbers of people for protests and political actions.

As Waging Nonviolence has reported, there are a number calls out for “occupations” a la Arab Spring this autumn: Stop the Pipeline, #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and October 2011. While certainly interconnected, the likelihood of overlapping activist participation, with the exception of “career organizers” and “lifelong activists” in each of these three calls for action seems remote. Despite strides taken by activists and scholars to connect the dots across environmental justice, economic justice, and the peace movement, these movements remain somewhat separated for a variety of reasons: problems of focus, unique histories, and/or fatigue.

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• A program that is central to President Obama’s immigration enforcement strategy has drawn protests by Latino and immigrant organizations in six major cities on Tuesday, as those groups stepped up their confrontation with the administration over the fast pace of deportations.

• Anna Hazare, India’s leading anti-corruption activist, began a hunger strike in police custody following his arrest Tuesday morning. His unlawful arrest sparked massive outrage across the country and widespread protests were witnessed.

• Bolivian indigenous activists started a long protest march on Sunday from the Amazon plains to the country’s capital against a government plan to build a 306km highway through a national park in indigenous territory.

• On Monday, hundreds of people attending the Midwest Rising! Convergence took to the streets of St. Louis to protest Bank of America and Peabody Coal. Fifteen community and climate activists were arrested.

• Jubilant students at Glasgow University were celebrating a victory on Monday night after one of the longest sit-ins in British history. The students will move out at the end of the month after reaching agreement with the university which they say will ensure no further cuts and a new club.

• Roughly 25 percent of the Trinidad’s police officers joined in a one-day strike on Monday to protest the government’s offer of a 5 percent pay raise, which the union says that isn’t enough.

Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.

This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal promise of New York, home of the strange. (That and crazycheap organic food.) Founded in 1973, the Coop is a Brooklyn institution with enough character to have spawned its own genre of trend piece. Some examples: the Coop has Byzantine rules and work requirements (debatable); the Coop has nannies covering their employers’ shifts (dubious); and, most recently, the Coop is becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism (downright wrong).

The New York Observer has contributed the latest addition to the genre, with a smug piece earlier this month devoted to Coop members’ efforts to initiate a boycott of Israeli products and divest from whatever Israeli holdings the Coop might have. At the historically progressive Coop, the Observer procured a chorus of sources declaring the campaign anti- Semitic and intolerable in “the heart of Chaimtown,” as one man put it, referring to Park Slope’s high Jewish population. For the full sensationalist effect, Alan Dershowitz—the de facto representative of the hawkish Israel-right-or-wrong Jewish establishment—denounced the campaign’s “bigotry” and threatened to shut the joint down, an ambitious goal for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident who is not a member of the democratically-governed Coop.

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