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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Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

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If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
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Jason Ahmadi of the War Resisters League carries a sign with a quotation from Gandhi on the first day of Occupy Wall Street, September 17.

At Religion Dispatches, Ira Chernus (whom I interviewed here a few years ago) ably responds to Ian Diaz’s New York Times op-ed, which argues that Gandhi would call for disbanding the Occupy movement:

[T]he Mahatma would have been amazed at the conclusion Desai draws: Dismantle the occupations and fan out to establish “community centers, schools, shelters, charities” everywhere. That’s a subtle distortion of Gandhi’s program of “constructive work.” It had nothing to do with charity and everything to do with creating alternative economic and social institutions while actively resisting the dominant, dominating institutions.

Where better to start brainstorming and experimenting for a new society than in Zuccotti Park and the dozens of other urban spaces where occupiers are building real 24/7 communities? Split those communities up into little teams of volunteers and their creative energy would soon be gone, which is no way to fulfill our responsibility to transform a society that is unjust in so many ways.

Chernus goes on to reply to Desai point by point—very much worth reading. But the whole question seems odd to me. This is of course a whole sub-genre in the debates about the Occupy movement, that of asking what this or that historical figure would do if suddenly transported to the present. Would Jesus occupy? Would the Founding Fathers? How about Rosa Parks? The trouble is, the reason these people changed the world is that they responded to their circumstances creatively, beyond a simple yes or no. What they did to confront the challenges of their time pushed beyond the either-or that other people were stuck in. If they lived in our time, they’d probably surprise us too.

On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

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.)

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The day after Mothers’ Day, May 14, 1961, the front-page picture of a Greyhound bus engulfed in flames galvanized the American public. It was Anniston, Alabama, and Klansmen had fully intended to burn the freedom riders alive. For the first time many Americans realized the full depth of hatred faced by black southerners—and those who came to help them.

Right now two videos may be having a similar effect. They show shockingly savage attacks on students by the police; at Berkeley, we see protesting students with linked arms being jabbed and beaten by police “batons” (as poet laureate Robert Hass pointed out, this is not an orchestra and those are not batons—they’re clubs). At Davis it’s a line of seated, peaceful students being casually doused with pepper spray by an apparently impassive police officer.

If the salutary shock of this confrontation were to wake up the public as the photo of the burning bus succeeded in doing in 1961, what might they learn? I think, three things.

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Most of the rich nations gathering at this year’s UN climate summit have already conceded defeat when it comes to producing any kind of binding treaty to slow greenhouse gas emissions this decade. But that isn’t going to stop poorer, more climate-vulnerable nations from trying.

Costa Rican president José María Figueres is calling on these vulnerable countries to “occupy Durban” — the South African city hosting the summit from its launch yesterday until December 9th.

“We went to Copenhagen [in 2009] with the illusion we could reach an equitable agreement. We went to Cancún [in 2009] where we saw slight but not sufficient progress. Frustration is now deep and building. Now we hear that we will need more conferences. Sometime we have to get serious. We should be going to Durban with the firm conviction that we do not come back until we have made substantial advances.”

While it is not known whether anyone will take up Figueres’s call to action, the Guardian did speak to one ambassador who said, “In the corridors [here] there is talk of occupying the meeting rooms, but there could be sanctions. So it needs to be big inside in order to have impact and nobody is punished. We are at the beginning.”

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In the spring of 2005 I stood on the roof of the Student Union building in Berkeley, overlooking Sproul Plaza, where I had lived through the exhilaration of the Free Speech Movement four-plus decades earlier. Milling about behind me were about thirty or so young adults, the youth contingent of the first Spiritual Activism Conference convened by Rabbi Michael Lerner and myself. It was impossible not to compare “then” with “now,” and I found the comparison instructive, even inspiring.

Listening to them, I ticked off the critical mistakes we had made in those heady days of protest, and it was immensely reassuring to note that the folks around me had made a lot of headway correcting them. Back then we were, of course, dead set against racism, or tried to be (the FSM was an aftershock of the Civil Rights movement) but these young people were totally color blind. I heard even more progress in an area we had barely touched on: fully integrating women as true equals. We famously “didn’t trust anyone over thirty” (that became a bit awkward for me in ’67 when I slipped over the line!), but the concept of “mentor” had subsequently come in to make it acceptable to benefit from an older person’s experience — absolutely critical for a movement facing, as we still do, sophisticated, if wrong-headed, opposition.

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Ever since Paul Hawken published Blessed Unrest (2007), it has been clear to many that the progressive world is a million projects in search of a movement. A movement, Hawken reminded us, has “leaders and ideologies; … people join movements study [their] tracts, and identify themselves with a group,” while the Occupy movement today seems to be just a continuation of the style that is “dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent.  It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with.” Can #Occupy provide the framework that will pull these far-flung but inwardly resonant energies together—and in so doing become a force that could, in Gandhi’s terms, “o’ersweep the world”? I believe we can make that happen, and we should, because in any case, as Gandhi also said, a movement that is simply against something cannot sustain itself.

The 1,500-odd sites of #Occupy already have many hopeful things going for them. They are global, as Naomi Wolf has recently pointed out, which has not been seen since millions of people attempted to stop the war on Iraq in 2003, only to have President Bush dismiss them as a “focus group” (more on that later).  They are touching a nerve of widespread discontent: as one commentator said recently:

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I have long argued that nonviolence works best when it deals not with mere symbols but with real things that have symbolic power. Gandhi’s Salt March was an outstanding example; another is the ongoing actions of Palestinian farmers, oftentimes organized and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Project, to plant and replant olive trees that are uprooted, poisoned, and otherwise destroyed by Israeli settlers or the military.

There is something primordial, and even beautiful about a direct confrontation of something real and true — and especially a living thing — with the destructive power of human delusions. The olive tree is both a symbol and an actual source of Palestinian well-being, and hence of Palestinian hopes and dignity. To uproot them, which is contrary to Jewish law, is to enact one’s own violence in a way that even the perpetrator is forced to understand the evil that person is perpetrating.

This “forcing reason to be free,” as Gandhi called it, is an important part of nonviolent dynamics. Not long ago, a courageous woman who ran a shelter for destitute mothers with children in Delhi was told by city authorities that she would have to pay taxes that up until then had been waived. She explained that they were a shoestring operation and if the taxes were imposed at least three of her women would have to be turned out on the street. “We can’t help that,” said the men.  “All right,” she replied, but then took them through the door to the large dorm where her charges were housed, and said, “You choose which ones to turn out.” The men left and the tax waiver remained in place.

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