Changing the world for good doesn’t depend on money, status, or political power. It hinges, instead, on ordinary people unleashing their creativity and gumption.

This is not an airy theory for Jack Healey. It’s something he has experienced throughout his life. The former executive director of Amnesty International USA took another opportunity to spread this news this past Monday night when he spoke to a group of students at DePaul University in Chicago.

His message to them: Shake off any powerlessness that might be holding you back from making a difference. At a time when the concern for human rights has been largely sidelined in the national conversation, tap your power to work for those rights in their most comprehensive sense: from jobs to justice. In short, take action for a world where everyone matters.

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Direct Action, by Luke Hauser.

Thirty years ago today a handful of us nonviolently blocked the South Gate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a top-secret nuclear weapons lab in Northern California.  Most of us were sentenced to a week in the local county jail. It was my first arrest.

Though LLNL successfully fended off years of mounting opposition—it continues to operate to this day—a surge of global anti-nuclear resistance in those years created the conditions for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which 157 nations have signed) and a string of arms control agreements. Our little action, organized by the Livermore Action Group (LAG), was a modest contribution to that groundswell.

As the Occupy movement gears up for its second wave—and as people from around the world ready themselves to protest the NATO and G8 summits in Chicago in May—my thoughts turn to that winter morning three decades ago when another movement was beginning to gain traction and when I, who had stood at the water’s edge for some time, gingerly waded in. While civil disobedience is only one of many tools with which to make social change, it was this particular practice that quite rapidly introduced me to a way of being that, to me, was a foreign but increasingly meaningful path with its own language, lineage, set of expectations, and peculiar ability to be taken seriously under the right conditions.

In his novel Direct Action, Luke Hauser captures the heady intensity of Livermore Action Group from 1982 to 1984, when it organized dozens of actions and built a network of nuclear resisters organized in hundreds of affinity groups throughout Northern California.

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We can’t change the world by ourselves. We need ordinary, cranky, thoughtful, and creative accomplices for this absurdly daunting task. To envision transformation, to take action, to weather the inevitable storm—groups generally do this better than single individuals, however rugged they may be.

So far I’ve been part of two circles that thrived on this kind of group wisdom and gumption. In the early 1980s I found my way into Spirit Affinity Group, a band of graduate students in Berkeley that resisted the nuclear arms race and the U.S. wars in Central America. For several years we conjured up one dramatic, nonviolent action after another. It was exhilarating to engage in a conversation with the larger community about war and peace using the most powerful language at our disposal: our vulnerable and unarmed bodies. Many of these public performances netted us from a few days to a few weeks in jail, and here, again, being in a group came in handy. There was always somebody to water the plants or call your boss, or—when things got a bit too heavy—to help you walk on into the unknown.

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For some time I have been increasingly convinced that, in spite of the horrific systems of violence and injustice that grind away, we are in the midst of a long-term “nonviolent shift.” By this I don’t mean we will create a utopia where conflict, violence, and injustice cease to exist. Interpersonal and structural violence—reinforced by a deeply rooted violence belief system—are grim realities that humanity will long have to face. The nonviolent shift, rather than portending an ideal society, here signifies a world where people are increasingly equipped with the tools to challenge, transform, and heal violence and injustice in a more powerful, creative, and effective way.

The Egyptian revolution, which began just over a year ago, was dedicated to ending a thirty-year dictatorship and sparking a long-term process of transformation within the country. But like many other powerful movements, it has also had unintended world-historical consequence that have helped to boost the momentum of this shift.

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The acrid fumes of tear-gas hung in the air as a young woman, her face swathed in black fabric, readied to heave a newspaper box through the plate-glass window of the Nike Store.

It was the afternoon of November 30, 1999 and the “Battle of Seattle” was on. Tens of thousands of people had traveled from across the globe to the Northwest United States to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which was on track to reinforce the injustice of corporate globalization and the perils it posed to indigenous societies, labor standards, human rights, civil liberties and the environment.

I had been asked by Global Exchange (a San Francisco-based organization that has long been a proponent of fair trade) to join in as a peacekeeper during the multi-day protest. Moving through the increasingly chaotic streets, I spotted the woman with her conscripted newspaper box and, just before she hoisted it through the glass, I trotted over and asked her what she was doing.

For the next half-hour, we had a heart-to-heart.

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The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

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Fifty years ago Thomas Merton was doing everything in his power to sound the alarm about the peril of nuclear apocalypse.

Merton, a Catholic monk best known at the time for his many books of contemplative spirituality, poetry, and compelling autobiographical reflection, had suddenly taken the full measure of the atomic threat in 1961. Between October 1961 and October 1962 he penned a flurry of letters to friends, activists, artists, and intellectuals vigorously and prophetically urging a new way forward. These 111 “Cold War Letters”—supported by numerous essays and poems he also produced at the time on this subject—were part of an effort by Merton to create (as theologian and activist James W. Douglass put it in the foreword to this collection that was finally published in 2006) “a spiritual chain reaction counter to the Bomb.”

With Merton’s birthday approaching (had he lived, he would have turned 97 next Tuesday, January 31), it seems an appropriate time to remember—but also to learn from—this pilgrim for peace and how he “waged nonviolence.”

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Mary Elizabeth King’s bracing account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolence education published on this site is a vivid reminder that acquiring the vision and tools of nonviolent change does not happen by magic. As she stresses, “these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.” Like other skills, they require study, reading, practice, and mentors who know the ropes and who can model what strategies for nonviolent action look like.

Now more than ever, each one of us is called to play a role in the local and global movements emerging to grapple with the monumental challenges facing our communities and our societies. This participation will require commitment and courage, but also training, preparation, and rigorous education for nonviolent change.

Fortunately, we have many options.

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As the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday approaches, I was struck by Fort Lauderdale, Florida’s theme for this year’s celebration: “Non-violence is Contagious…CATCH IT.”

Contagious literally means “communicable by contact” and, of course, it generally signifies the transmission of disease. The earliest appearances of the word in the English language, while hundreds of years before the germ theory of disease was worked out in the nineteenth century, signified illness and infection (but also, by extension, moral corruption or defiling influence) flowing from a particular place, the air, or specific people.

Then there is this more recent connotation: the rapidity with which something spreads. The dictionary offers this quaint example—“Contagious laughter ran through the hall”—but no doubt this meaning also had its roots in disease, mirroring the exponential spread of epidemics (and the concomitant rise of the science of epidemiology) in the modern era. Contagion is a 2011 film from Steven Soderbergh that draws all of these meanings together as it tracks the rapid progress of a lethal contact transmission virus that kills within days and sparks worldwide panic. The movie’s tagline? “Nothing Spreads Like Fear.”

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Eleven members of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State are on trial this week for blocking the entrance to Navy Base Kitsap-Bangor, the Pacific coast Trident submarine base that, according to Ground Zero, contains the largest concentration of operational nuclear weapons possessed by the United States.

Two back-to-back trials, stemming from civil resistance actions that took place May 7 and August 8 of last year, will be heard in the courtroom of Kitsap County District Court Judge James M. Riehl, who has indicated that he will allow the defendants to talk about why they blocked the road. In November he denied the government’s motion seeking to prevent the defendants from discussing nuclear weapons or international law. In what is likely to be a narrowly circumscribed way, these defendants will attempt to put nuclear weapons on trial, even as they are being tried.

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