Several weeks ago, a 28-year-old Army vet, who had worked with drones during two tours in Iraq and is now a radical art student in New York, came up with a creative act of protest to raise awareness around the growing use of drones domestically by police forces across the country.

According to an article in last week’s New Yorker, over the course of several nights, the veteran (who remains anonymous) and a few friends posted eleven unusual street signs around New York City, which is apparently investigating using drones as a law enforcement tool.

Designed to look exactly like official street signs, the fake NYPD signs had several different messages: “ATTENTION: Drone Activity in Progress,” or “ATTENTION: Local Statutes Enforced by Drones,” or “ATTENTION: Authorized Drone Strike Zone, 8am-8pm, Including Sunday.”

Near each sign, they also stenciled a quote from a Founding Father, such as a warning from Ben Franklin that seems particularly apropos: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As Avaaz pledged to do as part of a recent petition, activists now need to buy or build their own drones and fly them over the city to back up these signs and make the reality of drones just a bit more tangible to an American public that often seems completely disconnected from the issue.

In Beautiful Trouble, seasoned pranktivist Andrew Boyd assembles the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest in order to place it in the hands of the next generation of change-makers. Part manifesto and part reference guide, Beautiful Trouble is the anti-textbook—a dynamic, 21st century how-to that brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.

The book will be officially released on April 1 by OR Books, an innovative new print-on-demand publisher. But if you pre-order between now and February 15, you get a 20% discount.

It’s also much more than a book. BeautifulTrouble.org says that it “will soon include the core content of the book as well as a growing array of additional modules, resources, profiles, debates and much more. With your help, the site will evolve in real time with new social movements and their latest tactical innovations.”

Rest assured, you’ll be hearing more about Beautiful Trouble on Waging Nonviolence. This is an extraordinary contribution to the work that’s our mission: to make the stories of creative, courageous struggle for a better world more accessible than ever.

Illustration by Piotr Lesniak, Illustrations Portfolio.

Václav Havel, who died on December 18, epitomized the power of the pen. A playwright and actor, he was born in Prague in 1936, two years before Nazi Germany militarily occupied Czechoslovakia. As I have written elsewhere, the Stalinist effort to destroy internal opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime and its worsening economic policies led to hundreds of executions and tens of thousands of imprisonments. Millions were left suffering. Rigid communist economic views, bureaucratization of all dimensions of life, and recurring shortages meant that people could survive under communist rule only through venality and by shortcutting regulations. Those who went along with the habitual corruption—including the great proportion of managers and professionals—found themselves subjected to blackmail and entrapped by lies.

Havel’s family property was confiscated after 1948 by the regime, and he was denied access to education because of his “bourgeois” background. Yet he managed to reach the university level. In 1959, he got a job as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical group and started writing plays with Ivan Vyskocil. By the late 1960s, Havel was a resident playwright of the Balustrade theatrical company.

One of the first Czechoslovaks overtly to refuse conformity with the totalitarianism that descended after 1948, he would be in and out of prison starting in 1977. On August 9, 1969, Havel sent a private letter to Alexander Dubček, first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, urging him to oppose reintroduction of callous one-party rule, following the Soviet-led invasion by 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops in response to the reforms led by Dubček and during what came to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, the government blacklisted Havel’s writings and charged him with subversion.

Under Stalinism, the Havel family’s farmhouse in northern Bohemia, where he died, served as a retreat for informal authors’ conferences. There, writers and theatrical personalities found a place of calm and strength after being alienated from each other when authorities destroyed their articles, novels and plays.

For more than a century, those ruling in the name of Marxism maintained that theirs was the true opposition to repression and injustice. As Havel and his colleagues sought to uncover such hollow posturing with a strategy called by Havel “living in Truth,” it challenged the pretenses of the communists, who would over a period of years lose their ability to make the people obey. In due course, the erosion of the legitimacy and authority of the party-state by these activist intellectuals would be among the currents that forced the communist party to abandon its efforts to hold onto its hegemony.

Throughout the 1970s, statements and manifestoes were being posted overnight on kiosks and walls. Citizens copied or memorized them to share them with other sections of the country. In April 1975, Havel publicly criticized the government’s disdain for the principles it had accepted in the Helsinki Accords, the Final Act of which was signed on August 1 of that year. In an “Open Letter to Gustáv Husák,” general secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, he voiced the deep ethical crises faced by communist Czechoslovakia and protested the policy of “normalization”—code word for re-imposing harsh Soviet control after the crushing of the Prague Spring. Doing what the party-state most detested, he violated the protocols of silence. Having sent the letter by regular mail, he simultaneously released it to international news agencies. In this, his first systematic philosophical writing, Havel concentrates on fear and moral decay. As the letter’s contents quietly spread, waves of dissent broke, followed by repression. In 1976, civic defiance groups rapidly formed.

An active figure in a dissenting community of actors, playwrights and staff of Czechoslovakia’s admired theatrical companies, and connected with university-based academicians, in 1972 he and others founded Edice Petlice, or Padlocked Editions, a semi-clandestine press that published typescripts of fiction, philosophy and literature. Photocopy machines were forbidden, but typewriters were allowed. By 1987 Padlocked Editions had available more than 400 manually-typed volumes. Havel damned the party-state “not because it was Communist, but because it was bad.” Forbidden printing presses cultivated fearlessness, as clandestine publications and journals communicated below the radar of government censorship. Musicians, rock bands, entertainers and artists spread ideas. One popular tactic was to bog down government officialdom with incessant protest letters from aroused citizens.

When musicians from the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock group, were arrested in 1976, it set the stage for Charter 77. The energies of diverse former party reformers, artists, theater people and Roman Catholic intellectuals congealed to defend the musicians’ right to free expression. Milan Hlavsa had created the band in 1968, soon after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, basing its name on the song “Plastic People” by the U.S. musician Frank Zappa. On New Year’s Day in 1977, a document signed by 243 citizens materialized. The most significant occurrence since the 1968 Prague Spring, Charter 77 contested “the system of the virtual subjection of all institutions and organizations in the state to the political directives of the apparatus of the ruling party and the arbitrary decisions of the influential individuals.” In muted and studiously “antipolitical” wording, it suggested that the Moscow-imposed and Czechoslovak communist system had no popular mandate. Among the signers were leaders from the Prague Spring, artists, clergy, engineers, journalists, professors and its creator, Václav Havel. Charter 77 argued that the Czechoslovak regime must honor all international agreements, including the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords that it (and the Soviet Union) had agreed in 1975 to uphold. Within two years, eleven of the foremost signers were locked up, Havel and five others receiving prison terms of two to five years.

By 1979, with Havel under a four-and-a-half year sentence, his letters and other prison writings continued to spread covertly, inspiring pro-democracy movements across Eastern Europe. His major works include four plays and three one-act dramas. Havel’s writings often ponder the justifications given by individuals who cooperate with a repressive machine and are compelled to reconcile, within themselves, their collaboration with a malicious order. Shunning the cliché of excusing individuals as impotent against state coercion, he penned essays on the origins of power and totalitarianism. His dramas enact the pressures of living under corrupt authoritarian systems of tyranny, non-accountability, unrelenting moral compromise, random violence, cruelty, police states and the necessity of living in Truth as a means of breaking a vicious cycle.

The concept of living in Truth brought Havel recognition as a moral philosopher and playwright. He never joined the communist party. The Beatles musician John Lennon was an icon of clever defiance for the growing opposition in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s; Havel said he was a Lennonist, not a Leninist.

Havel’s years in prison, and an even longer time being banned and censored, made him emblematic of those who sought to prevail despite a ruthless Eastern bloc. Deeply grasping the value of communications, he relied on underground publications called samizdat (Russian for “self-published,” as opposed to state-published) to spread his commentary and tracts on political responsibility. Czechoslovaks had been using samizdat as a means of contention since the country fell under Soviet domination in 1948. Frequently typed on yellowed onionskin paper onto ten carbon copies, samizdat was crucial for the covert circulation of ideas leading to the Velvet Revolution. Samizdat also established essential links between democracy movements throughout Eastern and Central Europe, often reaching the West. Havel’s fellow countrymen and women viewed him as a leader who prized honor and honesty.

Havel’s living in Truth concerns the ability of persons who regard themselves as powerless to understand that they possess a form of power and can act upon it. Otherwise, he argued, one mutely functions in the midst of injustice, official deception and corruption—doing nothing to produce change, while sustaining an unjust structure through one’s silence. To stop living within a lie, one must withdraw cooperation with the machinery of oppression. Living in Truth lets citizens repossess their humanity and take responsibility, in compatibility with the appreciation of nonviolent struggle for the connection between the means and ends. Havel said this in plain words: those who live in Truth “create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.” He regularly expressed his conviction that the power that comes with living in Truth is the power to overturn repressive structures and undermine dictatorships. Such power resides within each person.

When historian Timothy Garton Ash arrived in Prague in November 1989, he said to Havel of the time required for the self-liberation of adjacent nation-states: “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!” November 17, Day One of what would be called the Ten Days, marked the start of the Velvet Revolution, which began with 15,000 students condemning the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and honoring Jan Opletal, a student killed by Hitler’s army half a century earlier. By some accounts, the pupils numbered 50,000 when they turned toward Wenceslas Square, where police accosted them, beating some and arresting others. By Day Two, word spread to Prague’s Charles University and other universities. Students first called for strikes, but the theatrical circles soon declared support and proposed a national general strike. On Day Three, a pro-democracy Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been active in Charter 77. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague, as they would indeed for much of the famous Ten Days. Havel became the beacon for the Civic Forum, which used the Magic Lantern Theater for its headquarters. Speaking to multitudes in Wenceslas Square on November 24, the seventh consecutive day of massive demonstrations, he invited the police and armed forces to join the opposition.

The Ten Days in reality took twenty-four. At gatherings, processions, and rallies nationwide, popular sentiment favored Havel assuming the presidency, which he would soon do.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a proud, cultured nation that had lost its freedoms gradually re-developed a civil society, a domain not controlled by government. In this political space, the artistic, drama, journalism, literary and university communities—and those who had been obliged into manual labor washing windows or stoking furnaces, banned as authors, or tossed in jail—interacted and worked to set themselves free from the corrosion of economic, moral and political decomposition. Its guiding light was Havel.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

Activists both in Syria and abroad collaborate via Skype, Facebook, and Twitter to make their voices heard without resorting to violence. The results are inspiring: a laser shines a green beam across Damascus and onto the Presidential Palace. Activists in Homs—the city with the best sense of humor—videotape themselves launching eggplant grenades. They yell, “We are your armed gangs!” and hurl zucchinis at the oncoming armed security forces. Hundreds gather in a main square in Bayada, Homs, and lay on the ground, motionless. In unison, they begin to whisper “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam.” As they rise slowly, so do their voices—until their shouts to topple the regime become a deafening roar.

And then there are the names they choose for the major days of protest. Friday, December 2 was known as the “Friday of the Buffer Zone,” when protesters were calling for the international community to create a buffer zone or humanitarian corridor to protect unarmed civilians from the regime’s military and armed thugs. A few weeks ago, protesters named the day “Your Silence is Killing Us” in response to the Arab League’s inaction on Assad’s brutality toward unarmed civilians. The named protests carry the Syrians’ messages to the world. To decide on these names, several ideas are proposed on a Facebook page and everybody—in Syria and abroad—gets to vote. The most popular name is then selected and communicated all over Syria. Welcome to democracy! For most Syrians, this is the first time they have been able to participate in a free and fair election.

Another example is general strikes. Students went on strike about a month ago in response to a new Assad “reform” measure under which failing students would be allowed to pass their courses. Elementary, high school and university students went out in protest, chanting, “No school until there’s no Assad.” Last Thursday, notices went out to Syrians via Twitter, Facebook and Skype, and from there, hushed whispers across entire communities, to declare a general strike. As it turns out, it is now illegal to be on strike—in other words, to stay at home—in Assad’s Syria. Being outdoors, however, carries its own deadly risks—whether from the tanks positioned at the entrances of every city, or the snipers tending their posts on rooftops.

Finally, Syrian activists abroad are taking bolder steps to assert their independence from the Assad regime. In Libya recently, activists hoisted the Independence Flag over the Syrian Embassy in Tripoli. In Cairo, a huge poster of Assad was placed in the street so that motorists could drive over it. During a recent protest in Washington, DC, horse manure was spread on a portrait of Assad. Syrian-Americans proudly snapped photos and immediately shared them with their friends and family in Syria. In Mississauga, Ontario, Syrian-Canadian activists conducted a flash mob at a popular shopping mall. At a designated time, all participants “froze” while watching YouTube videos of protests in Syria, while holding up Free Syria flags, and while displaying banners detailing the number of massacres that day.

These nonviolent expressions, taken widely as flagrant disrespect of Assad, would have been unthinkable before the revolution.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

More from Occupy Museums:

We believe that institutions promoting a cult of celebrity, unfair labor practices, extreme commodification of art, and which trivialize or glamorize political struggle and protest are only the logical outcome of an entire culture stolen from the people by the 1%. We point to the visual promotion of corporate or private sponsorship seemingly without limit—as if this small group, not the public, truly own our cultural commons.

Some people at the December 1 protest reportedly complained about the high ticket prices at the opera; to that, Seth Colter Wells at The Awl responds well:

[A]t the Met, the most expensive opera tickets are indeed expensive, but you can stand behind the orchestra section—or even sit at the upper reaches of the house—for less than the cost of an IMAX showing at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 multiplex up the road. This persistent fiction of “elitism,” and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer you not ever cost-compare a Family Circle seat to Satyagraha alongisde a 3D screening of Transformers 3. … [W]e can take a page from Adbusters‘ “every dollar spent is a vote” ethos and decide what do with the $20 bills that we do control.

It’s also worth mentioning the $20-25 rush tickets for orchestra seats, or the Met’s “Live in HD” program. Still, those programs depend heavily on 1-percenter donors, so point taken: there needs to be more public support for the arts.

There’s a better point these protests call us to consider, though: are we really listening to the operas themselves?

Both Satyagraha and Faust carry quite radical messages. Glass’ work confronts us with the politics and spirituality of Gandhi’s life. When this production of Satyagraha first came to New York in 2008, as I wrote back then, the Met even put on a publicity blitz with messages on posters like “Could an opera make us stand up for truth?” and “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” Reasonable questions. As usual, though, audiences attended, reviews came and went, life went on. It was just marketing, after all.

The new production of Faust—an opera composed in mid-19th century France—has a polemic of its own. Director Des McAnuff sets it during World War II, with Faust as a nuclear scientist. Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that would fall on Japan, dangle overhead behind him. It’s a conceit that works remarkably well with the libretto and is remarkably damning—literally, to hell—for a country that for more than a half century has built its quest for global dominance on possessing enough nuclear weapons to bring about the end of the world at will. (The Met has previously taken on similar issues with performances of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic.)

Why, then, are these operas not treated as revolutionary? Why are they not causing their establishmentarian funders to stand up (“for truth”), leave, and take their money with them? Probably the simplest answer is that the productions enjoy the benefit of what’s now quite distant hindsight: it’s easy enough to pretend that the empire Gandhi opposed and the Promethean dawn of the nuclear age are past. Of course they’re not. But they’ve now taken ostensibly different forms, which somehow makes it conveniently optional to translate these operas’ implications to the circumstances of the present.

The Occupy presence, for all its rough edges, might at least lend the performances of works such as these the urgency they deserve. This is not polite social commentary, the protesters say—this is a crisis. This is our crisis. Listen harder.

An eye-opening set of experiences to say the least, Kirk—a professor of Religious Studies at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Tex.—interviewed more than 140 people in Iraq, including women spanning three generations currently residing in one of the most war-trodden areas of the world. Her research partner, Sister Patricia Madigan, the Director of the Dominican Centre for Interfaith Ministry, Education and Research from Sydney, Australia accompanied her this year.

“Our culture has been saturated with violence, destruction, and negative images of Iraqis since about 1990,” said Kirk, when asked about her interest in the women of northern Iraq. Through her research, she hopes that we may all “recover our common humanity.”

At the center of her investigations lie women’s voices, experiences, and resilient courage, many of which have been ignored in years past. The women range in age from elderly to little girls. Their education levels are often as disparate; many illiterate grandmothers and mothers determined to work hard to provide better opportunities for their daughters.

Kirk’s research is funded by the Gülen Institute at the University of Houston, an organization affiliated with the Institute for Interfaith Dialogue and founded by Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic scholar who encourages education through respect for diversity, justice and peace. Turkish Muslim volunteers promote Gülen’s movement through schools worldwide, including some that Kirk researched in northern Iraq.

Built in 1994, six years after Saddam Hussein ordered the massacres of 150,000 people in northern Iraq, the Fezalar schools brought education and hope for a better future to the children of this area. This same education is opening the horizons for many young women in this area, providing them with confidence, knowledge and skills that can encourage reconciliation and peace.

Kirk sat with these women in their homes, shared food, and took photos and notes as she documented their experiences.

“We have had wars and wars and more wars,” said one woman. Though peace has yet to be found in northern Iraq, these women’s words and friendship give glimpses of hope. Another woman said that the best thing she has been learning from the Fezalar schools is not to hate. “Hate is a prison,” she said.

Kirk says: “We need to see the faces of children—our human brothers and sisters, so that we may build a future together that gives their children and our children a chance to develop a world of hope and compassion.”

Kirk’s photo exhibit—titled “Iraqi Women of Three Generations: Challenges, Education, and Hopes for Peace”—will be shown in Austin at the St. Edward’s University Library from October 1 to 28.

Since 2007, Sister Martha Ann has been facilitating “Creating Art, Creating Friendship,” Iraqi children and U.S. children exchanging art. To learn more about this visit here and here.   

This exhibit of 23 panels has about three photos and stories of the women on each panel.  The panels are 36 inches tall and 24 inches wide. Use of the exhibit is free through the generosity of the Gülen Institute, but those wishing to host the exhibit must pick it up and return it to San Antonio, TX, or pay shipping charges.  For more information, contact Sister Martha Ann Kirk kirk@uiwtx.edu  Phone:  210-829-3854 or 210-225-3011.

As Valerie Elverton Dixon notes in a post on God’s Politics:

In both the Hebrew and the Greek concepts of peace, the idea goes far beyond the absence of war or violent conflict. Shalom includes the ideas of health, friendship, safety, prosperity and rest. The holiness of Shalom is wholeness. Similarly, the Greek word eirene includes the ideas of quietness, rest, prosperity, happiness, harmony, and to set at one again. Eirene is also the Greek goddess of peace whose sisters are Eunomia (order) and Dikē (justice.)

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” his 1962 book about nuclear weapons, which was published widely for the first time in 2004:

The whole world faces a momentous choice. Either our frenzy of desperation will lead to destruction, or our loyalty to truth, to God and to our fellow man will enable us to perform the patient, heroic task of building a world that will eventually thrive in unity, order and peace.

Forty-nine years later, we still face that choice. The International Day of Peace is a useful and increasingly popular opportunity for the general public to reflect, individually and collectively, on how to make sure we choose wisely.

While the Bible talks about beating swords into plowshares, over at God’s Politics, Sojourners web editor Cathleen Falsani writes of another, more artistic possibility. Some of the more the 2,700 guns that were traded for grocery gift certificates at a gun buy-back event run by the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles (VPC) earlier this year are now:

being “up-cycled” — melted down and re-purposed — as works of art.

One such guns-to-art creation is the “Angel of Peace” sculpture by artist Lin Evola, founder of the Peace Angels Project in California. Founded by Evola in 1992, Peace Angels “uses art as a tool for peace, working with schools and organizations at both a local and global level.”

Evola has created peace angels for Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

As Zak Stone writes in GOOD, VPC has also comissioned a series of these statues “to commemorate the work of local leaders who take a stand against violence with their ‘Angel of Peace Award,’” and is getting the local community involved in the process:

La Fonderie, a local metalworking studio, offered to forge the statues. The gang prevention nonprofit Homies Unidos provided youth volunteers to participate in the metalsmithing process during a multi-week mentorship program.

“Every time the kids would come in, they’d bring other kids,” says Hector Calderon, a graffiti artist and metalsmith at La Fonderie who coordinated the youth program. Athina Cuevas, a 21-year-old intern at Homie Unidos, says she helps out because she “believes in a world without violence.”

Bonnie Urfer exudes calm and strength. Her eyes twinkle and her voice stretches o’s like a Wisconsinite. On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Guyton called her a “prolific criminal.”

Prolific? Sure. Bonnie has been an activist since the 1980s. Working with a group called Nukewatch out in the forests of Wisconsin, Bonnie has tracked nuclear waste and materials shipments, cut down the Extremely Low Frequency poles that studded her sylvan landscape to communicate the first strike orders to nuclear submarines, and been arrested dozens of times. Criminal? Not when nuclear weapons are illegal (at least according to international law—which by treaty is our law too), immoral and just plain useless.

But Bonnie is prolific in her artistic gifts as well as in her resistance.

Earlier this summer, my then-almost-husband Patrick got an envelope marked:

Irwin County Detention Center, Oscilla, Georgia. This letter is being mailed by an inmate/detainee of this facility. The Administration has not reviewed the contents. I.C.D.C does not assume responsibility for the written contents.

Inside was a card drawn by Bonnie (above). She inked it with just the cartridge of a pen because the jail does not allow the women to have real pens. It was signed by Jean Gump, Sister Ardeth Platte, Sister Carol Gilbert and Bonnie Urfer and congratulated Patrick and I on our upcoming wedding. These women, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, were awaiting trial for “trespassing” on to the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee Security Facility last July in an action organized by the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

The Y-12 facility is nestled in the rolling hills of Tennessee. In 1945, its scientists and engineers fabricated “Little Boy”—the nuclear weapon used to incinerate 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. Today, under the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Administration, the site processes uranium for the new hydrogen bombs being built to replace W76 warheads on Trident submarine ballistic missiles.

Sister Carol shared their daily jail routine in a letter. It mentions, among other things, how much prisoners pay for phone calls: 50 cents a minute for out-of-state numbers.

In her sentencing statement, Bonnie relates what she and her cell-mates experienced in jail and asked:

Do I begin a campaign to highlight the illegal starvation diet in the Blount County jail, for which no one has been arrested? Do I join the effort to condemn the practice of overcharging mostly dirt poor inmates for phone calls, and commissary, so that corporations and counties receive greater kickbacks?

Bonnie received an eight month sentence, meaning she’s slated to serve an additional four months on top of the time she has already spent in jail.

Jean Gump, the first of the 13 activists to be sentenced, received time served earlier this week. Father Bill Bischel, a Jesuit priest, was sentenced to three months in jail. In his statement before the court, he pointed out to the judge and prosecutor:

When we threaten other nations with nuclear weapons, we can hardly say we are bent on peace, sisterhood and brotherhood. Nagasaki and Hiroshima have shown us the terrible destructive power of these bombs. We can do something as a nation instead of using our power to show Afghans around, we can share with one another, enter into a dialogue.

On Friday, Sr. Carol Gilbert Sept. 16 and Sr. Ardeth Platte, Dominican nuns and members of the Jonah House Community, will be sentenced.

Keep an eye on the Nuclear Resister blog or OREPA’s website for daily coverage of the sentencing of brave and resolute peace activists and nuclear resisters.

The signature tactic of this revolutionary year, it would seem, is a mass protest in a large, symbolic public space. We saw it in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, and then in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square in Athens. Now, in the U.S., the October 6 movement is planning to take over Washington’s Freedom Plaza, while another coalition has been planning to do the same on Wall Street on September 17—tomorrow. (For a basic account of what’s going on with the latter, see my report from earlier this week.) If you want to get something done, apparently, the way to do it is to take the square. And this is exactly what the people at Adbusters had in mind when they made their initial call to occupy Wall Street, observing that “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future”; they continued, “We want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

There’s a problem with this, though, and one sees it on the flip-side of 2011′s revolutions. There was Egypt, yes, but there was also Libya, Syria, and—tragic, too, but far less reported upon—Bahrain; each of these cases showed how public protest, Tahrir-style, makes a movement extremely vulnerable to crackdown. We at Waging Nonviolence were biting our fingernails throughout the initial Tahrir Square protests, filled as the place was with throngs of people in the open air, surrounded by tanks and soldiers. The protesters trusted their army, but maybe they shouldn’t have, for they were (and now still are) at its mercy. What really won the day, in the end, was not simply the highly vulnerable Tahrir crowd, but a coordinated, distributed, nationwide general strike that crippled the entire country’s economy until Hosni Mubarak left office. The crowd alone wasn’t enough. Gene Sharp, after all, has identified 198 different kinds of tactics that nonviolent civil resistance movements employ, and many more are imaginable—why stick to just one?

So, Wall Street. Manhattan’s financial district doesn’t have a Tahrir Square or a Puerta del Sol. It’s a cramped, confusing area full of narrow streets and tall buildings. It’s architecturally cold and thoroughly militarized. Even if there were the 20,000 people Adbusters wants to see, no one area could hold them all. Further, if a mass of protesters clustered together too much, police would have little trouble isolating them. A relatively quick dispersion seems highly possible on Saturday, and it may be disappointing to some who traveled from far and wide to take over that part of the city en masse. But, in fact, among those who have been thinking hard about the occupation for the past two months, it has become largely a matter of agreement that dispersion is part of the plan.

From the outset, the NYC General Assembly’s Tactics Committee has been discussing contingencies in the event that a mass assembly gets broken up: just break up. That’s okay, they think. Discussions are more inclusive, anyway, when a smaller number of people is involved. The General Assembly as a whole actually agreed at its last meeting that, on Saturday night, everyone should aim to disperse into smaller sub-groups in different areas of the Financial District. These little assemblies are to focus on coming to consensus—taking however much time they need—about what’s wrong with the system, what their vision is for a better future, and what it will take to get there. According to the tactical plan circulated by US Day of Rage, one of the major promoters of the effort, protesters should even consider spreading throughout the whole borough:

We consider the entire island of Manhattan and even the Citicorp building in Long Island City, Queens to be ‘Wall Street’. The NYPD may kettle or blockade Wall Street, but they cannot kettle or blockage [sic] Manhattan.

There are worse things than not getting to have another large public protest in the streets of New York that accomplishes little. It has been done before. According to New York City law, permits are necessary for groups of more than 20 to gather legally in public parks—so why not gather in groups of 19? Why not conduct small, legal, and still powerful actions like those that #occupywallstreet activists have been conducting throughout this week, such as yoga classes where Wall meets Broad and declaring guerrilla free-speech zones with free wireless internet access? What if this were happening on every corner in the city, for weeks at a time?

These days, nobody is more masterful with dispersion tactics than those behind the Jasmine Revolution in China. Working in an environment of extreme, ruthless oppression, they’ve learned to be very creative. Their signature move is the so-called “strolling” protest: large numbers of people gather at a public place, designated over the internet, and walk around innocently, looking up at the buildings and ignoring each other. Obviously, there’s a protest happening, because there’s a huge crowd of people in one place, and a phalanx of police are watching. But how do you distinguish a protester from a bystander? You don’t. You can’t, really. You’ve created a disruption, but no targets, and no actual illegality. Meanwhile, people become less afraid to resist when they know that others are with them.

When the Chinese protesters want to hang a subversive banner, they don’t just tie it to some building where it can be easily taken down; they attach it to a hot-air balloon and let it loose in the middle of a big city. There, everyone can see it and nobody can remove it until the military revs up its anti-aircraft batteries and shoots it down, making the shooters themselves look foolish—they’re shooting down a balloon. That’s a textbook dilemma action.

Many people in the NYC General Assembly have concluded that their goal right now is not so much to announce a demand as to build a movement, to break down the habits of business-as-usual and get the public to imagine that a different kind of world is possible, while taking steps toward making one actual. They have to create a broad-based, powerful uprising if they’re going to obstruct the influence of money in politics with their own human capital. Staging a massive, centralized, unified protest mob is one impressive way, perhaps, of doing that. But it’s not the only way. It may not even be the best way.

In any case, the organizers have made it clear that their main priority is not some kind of futile clash with the police, or an orgy of tactical masterminding. The goal is to be inviting, rather than to scare potential allies off by dwelling too much on what the police will do. That’s why they’ve planned to start Saturday—well before the 3 p.m. assembly at Chase Manhattan Plaza—not with the building of barricades but with the making of art: a New York Fun Exchange, which begins at noon around the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green, just south of Wall Street. Get ready, too, for the Michael Jackson flash mob.

King was in St. Joseph’s Infirmary, Atlanta, for exhaustion and a viral infection when it was reported that he would receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. As Gary M. Pomerantz writes in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, this was the apparent cost exacted by intelligence surveillance efforts and the pressures of learning that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had formally approved wiretaps by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His evolving strength as a leader is revealed in his remarks in Norway that December, which linked the nonviolent struggle of the U.S. civil rights movement to the entire planet’s need for disarmament. Noting that the movement’s most exceptional characteristic was the direct participation of masses of people in it, and crediting Gandhi’s influence on him, King’s remarks in Oslo were also his strongest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals across the world were concerned about world peace: “I venture to suggest [above all] … that … nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations … which [ultimately] make war.” Telling journalists that he would donate the prize money to the movement, he returned home to engross himself in plans for the  54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, which would be the last major surge of direct action for the movement.

King is sometimes associated with “principled nonviolence,” an approach based on moral constructions and philosophy, in contrast to “pragmatic nonviolence,” resting on grounds of practicality. In real life, however, these are not separate and independent paths. His ethical framework and his practical goals converged in a civil resistance of shrewd political astuteness. He knew that well-sequenced nonviolent sanctions can place adversaries in a quandary that they cannot solve through violence.

Today, across the world, people who have little or no familiarity with details about the civil rights movement know about King. He had not sought leadership for himself—it was thrust upon him. Once entrusted, he drew upon the full depth of his ideals, stature, and presence, of which he possessed more than possibly any other U.S. figure of the 20th century.

Notwithstanding his own preoccupation with his own shortcomings, he had the ability to accept others as they were and was ready to accommodate arrogance, rebelliousness, and egotism from some with whom he worked. His equanimity was remarkable in the midst of a true people’s movement staffed by impetuous and occasionally mutinous individualists.

The rapidity with which alterations occurred not only in the South but across the nation in attitudes, laws, mores, practices, statutory programs, and values can obstruct the perception that for most of King’s short lifetime he was struggling for the simplest, most straightforward recognition of full citizenship for African Americans. He was often attacked for moving too slowly or for not fulminating with outrage and militancy. He himself was well aware that three-fourths of the inhabitants of the globe were people of color, as he wrote in Stride toward Freedom, and understood graphically through trips to Africa, in 1957, and India, in 1959.

The unrealized dimensions of the deep yearning for justice that was embodied in the movement in which I worked for four years have been written about by many by now, and it is appropriate to consider how much remains unrealized and unacknowledged in the pursuit of racial equality. Yet it is also important to assess the fuller measure of King’s leadership: his quest had been for strategies that left no hostility and offered potential for eventual reconciliation. Indeed, usually without notice or news releases, the blatant signs, physical barriers, and customary accessories and protocols of racial discrimination quietly came down or disappeared in the United States. King, as had Gandhi, wanted no declarations of victory and sought to deflect any triumphalism. Mutual respect, he believed, could protect against white citizens feeling defeat or humiliation, while the black community could avoid temptation from what he called “the psychology of victors.” This appreciation of human frailty allowed him to prepare the groundwork so that the United States could continue laboring for a more perfect union.

Since King’s death, nonviolent direct action has ascended in political significance on every continent, yet civil resistance has remained underdeveloped as a political technique. Insignificant efforts have been made to increase our comprehension of its systems and logic, or how it works. Minimal research and planning has been invested to support its study, development, and fine tuning. This stands out against the vast assets allocated in developing and improving military and security studies, and the investments in refining the practices and procedures of representative democracies. It therefore falls to us to make nonviolent action “immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict,” as he bade in Oslo in 1964.

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.

Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.

Unfortunately, our country takes the opposite route: from hate crime to crime, leaving us with a cycle of retribution and injustice that will never solve the problem. Racism is a form of violence and it isn’t going away until we repudiate violence itself. We demand that our political leaders be “tough on crime,” but forget to ask ourselves, where are the candidates who are “tough on hatred, tough on violence”?

One needn’t look far, then, to see one critical reason why racism doesn’t die—a reason  that we ignore only because so many of us are numbed into insensitivity by its sheer familiarity. We ourselves saw a shocking example the other day on the main street of liberal Berkeley: a graphic poster for a popular television program with the bold message, “LET’S GO KILL SOMETHING.”

Coming as it did right after the very real murder in Mississippi, the echo was sickening. It isn’t just the message that violence is fun, but the enabling denial that makes violence possible, which is dehumanization: you cannot kill something, of course, but someone, some form of life.

There is something we can do, however, if politicians will not: we can start turning our backs on violence as a form of “entertainment.” In one recent study carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig it was shown that children were three times more likely to behave with empathy if they were shown a picture of two dolls in a friendly pose than if the doll images were negative or neutral. There are so many studies now showing our sensitivity to this “priming,” as scientists call it, that the effect is something we can no longer deny but on the contrary can take responsibility for and use it as a lever for pushing back against, and eventually perhaps banishing the violence that’s become endemic in the industrial world.

“Mind precedes action” as the Buddha said, and getting extremely dehumanizing images—the constant fare of our films, books, and video games—out of our minds is the point of leverage from which to start getting real or physical violence out of our lives. Right now we are relying on violence for “security” in everything from individual bullying to criminal “justice” and finally war. It will be a long struggle to rebuild every one of those behaviors and institutions, but that struggle can’t even begin until we detoxify our mental environment and let our native capacity for empathy —which science has recently shown to be well ‘wired’ in our very nervous systems—regain the upper hand.

One advantage of starting this by boycott of violent media is that it doesn’t need to be organized; we can just do it, and we should not overlook the power of even one mind that is concentrated and backed by positive energy. From there, of course, by educating and organizing we can start growing the change into a real movement. Many individuals and many families have borne witness to the healthier, sometimes deeply happier lives they enjoyed soon after they stopped watching television. Once the initial feeling of deprivation subsided, their taste for reality (which violence is not) came back into their lives. Pointing this out and experiencing it will add drive to this key campaign that is surely a sine qua non for racial justice. For this reform cannot take place in a vacuum because as Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Nor can it take place on the political or even the social level alone because it’s by now too deeply rooted in how some people think and see the world.

Not all media need be renounced, however. One recent attempt to portray at least part of the other side is the film Help, which illustrates what the famous Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung has called the “Great Chain of Nonviolence,” where oppressed, voiceless people—in this case black domestic workers in the south—link up by a chain of relationships to people in power, in this case through friendships that naturally form with the white women they work for. Help is an indifferent success, however; some reviewers have felt it was sappy at best and racist at worst due to the depiction of black men as abusive, alcoholic and illiterate. It may only help to confirm the belief that violence is real (the graphic effect of the “Let’s go kill something” vampire genre), whereas love and nonviolence are only weak and uninteresting imitations.

Much better is a 1989 film, The Long Walk Home, with Whoopi Goldberg, Cissy Spacek, and Dwight Macdonald. It not only stares racism in the face, but it is also one of the few films in history to show an actual representation of nonviolence working against a fierce opponent—something even Attenborough’s Gandhi, for all its sophistication, did not quite do. In the climactic final scene a group of terrified black women penned in by a chanting racist mob conquer their fear by singing a pertinent spiritual and walk unhindered through the confused men trying to stop them. This is realism: many scenes like it actually took place in the Civil Rights movement and elsewhere..

With the likes of Gandhi, The Long Walk Home, or the 1995 political drama Beyond Rangoon we could “reprime” our lives. When we run out of such films—and Lord knows they are rare—we can spend time with friends and family that we would otherwise have spent watching someone else’s idea of entertainment. As Gandhi once said, evil does not exist: it can only make its appearance as long as we cling to it. Why not put that to the test by not clinging to images of violence?

LA Vs. WAR presents some of today’s most prolific, pro-peace/anti-war, political artists in a multi-media exhibition chronicling the creative responses to the current military conflicts in the Middle East/North Africa/Central Asia, The Global War on Terror, the Drug Wars, and other wars on marginalized peoples. After the September 2011 show, we plan to travel the exhibition as “Vs. WAR”to other cities in the U.S. and abroad in the spirit of peace and creative collaboration.

LA Vs. WAR is part exhibition, part experience. The art show will be curated by Yo! Peace, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Political Gridlock and Ad Hoc Art and will feature a large selection of fine art and limited edition prints and posters. Live art demonstrations and workshops will engage the audience in creative activities ranging from graffiti, t-shirt printing, stenciling, and more. Teach-ins with our grassroots partners will inform and inspire attendees to transform their own lives and communities.

Right now, LA Vs. War is trying to raise $5,000 on Kickstarter to make this great project a reality. At the moment, they are less than $600 away from reaching their goal. However, as you may know, if you aren’t able to raise your goal on Kickstarter, you don’t get any of the money, and there are only 70 hours left for this campaign before time runs out. So if you feel the urge, donate now to help pull off this worthwhile event. And as a bonus, depending on how much you pledge, they are offering a range of great gifts—including t-shirts, books and prints of artwork—for your support.

That’s the idea behind 10 Years and Counting, a new initiative hatched in the Adirondack compound of the Blue Mountain Center, an activist and artist residency community nestled beside a high-country lake. 10YAC’s goal is this: between September 11th and October 7th of this year—marking the 10-year anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan—launch an artistic groundswell by coordinating protest and arts events around the country. Their network includes activist groups, including Code Pink and the War Resisters League, as well as arts organizations and galleries. To see some of the visual art, poetry, music, and performances they’ve been gathering, take a look around the 10YAC blog.

But art, for 10YAC, is not quite an end in itself. “One of the most important visions” of the project, according to Alice Gordon, program director at Blue Mountain, is to see “as many Americans as possible getting onto the streets for peace around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.”

Just as the project’s duration comes to a close, an ambitious occupation will begin—endorsed by many of the same organizations, in fact—in Washington DC on October 6th. This convergence may be a chance to see whether 10YAC can really translate its art into mobilization. The October 6ers, anyway, could do worse than take as a rallying cry a poem like this one, recently posted on the 10YAC blog, by Holly Karapetkova:

LOVE AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE

If love were a dirty bomb, you could set
it off in Washington and it would spread
into the suburbs unseen, contaminate
the air and water. People would breathe it, feed

on it unknowingly and slowly love
would infiltrate their lungs, make their fingers burn.
In a week, you’d see them start to pair up, leave
the office early for lunch and not return;

even the evangelists are born again—
this time to love—they grab the nearest nun,
and scientists are too involved to look
for cures, not that anyone cares. Attack

on US, the foreign press reports
with real concern, seeing the SUVs
abandoned on the interstates, the airports
unguarded, army generals on their knees.

Don’t they know love is always like that,
tearing you out of the spaces you once thought
meant something, making you forget each
last defense, the guns rusting along the beach.

The pre-action publicity flyers read:

Brothers and sisters, a dark beast lurks within the bosom of one of our most cherished arts institutions. While good-hearted, god-fearing, gallery goers glory in the miracle of art, the beast below is encircling the planet with its oily tentacles, destroying righteous communities, poisoning God’s beauteous creations, and bringing us all ever closer to the climate apocalypse.

This is not the first oil spill on the floor of the Tate Modern’s enormous Turbine Hall. Two years ago, as we reported here, activists splurted tubes of oily liquid in a radial pattern. And, last year, at the Tate Britain museum, more “oil” was poured over a performer’s naked body. The group Liberate Tate—one of the several groups that together invited Reverend Billy—was behind both actions. (They actually got their start at a workshop on art and activism sponsored by Tate.) Like Billy’s action, both of the earlier ones were beautifully recorded by You and I Films, an London-based activist production company.

One thing that’s striking to notice, especially when this is compared with a great many Reverend Billy actions in the United States, is that there are no police charging in to break things up and arrest Billy in the middle of it. He does his act and walks right out. I asked him about this, and he replied:

Whereas after our protest at Lincoln Center—against accepting $100 mil from the Koch Brothers and naming the New York State Theatre building after David Koch—got me shoved into a black car by plain clothes cops in front of my wife Savi and 15 month old baby Lena for a night in jail on bizarre trespassing charges, the Tate Modern’s approach was to let the church roar. The Tate doesn’t know how to respond to the rising movement against corporate sponsorship. It has arranged arrests in the past. We snuck in with our robes in backpacks and I had my “gospel whites” under civilian clothing. We advertised our action publicly—witness the number of participants. Amen!

Back in New York, the Rev will be re-opening the weekly Earthalujah Show at Theatre 80 on Sunday evenings at 5:30 pm, starting September 18th.