Quickened by the Arab Spring, the ongoing May 15 movement in Spain, the grassroots uprising in Greece, the student movement in Chile, the month-long occupation of the Wisconsin capitol earlier this year, and many other campaigns chronicled on this site, we are entering a period where the potential for sustained and urgent people-power to tackle the monumental problems facing the planet is growing.

“Sustained” is the watchword. While the one-day protest will continue to be an important tool in the social change toolbox, organizers are increasingly turning to multi-day, multi-week, and multi-month campaigns. They cast a vision of sustained action—and then see if people will say “yes” to it using the most powerful language they have at their disposal: their own bodies.

So far they have. Recent cases include the two weeks of civil disobedience at the White House in August (where 1253 people were arrested opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline) and the Occupy Wall Street action that has now entered its third week and is spawning similar actions across the nation.

And now, beginning today, thousands of people are launching an ongoing nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

“October 2011,” while pegged to the tenth anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan, has a much broader goal than ending this war. It seeks “a democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions,” and lists 15 core issues that it calls on the country to face, including the runaway power of corporations, deepening US militarism, the criminal justice system, and equal access to quality education.

Ongoing nonviolent action is not easy to sustain. The timing has to be right, the context has to be right, and the organizing has to be right. Sometimes the situation is so immediate and life and death that it can light the spark for sustaining such action, against all odds, like the ongoing weekly nonviolent protests in Palestine. In all cases, sustained action requires a deep commitment, a vision, and a willingness to enter the roller coaster of emotions and perceptions—from elation, connectedness, and the power of doing something truly meaningful to fear, boredom, and the creeping feeling that this doesn’t matter at all.

If things move together in the right way, the action may contribute to a political or cultural shift for the good.  At the same time, long after the event is over, we can savor the power of connection and significance we experienced together there. Often rooted in a vision that transcends ourselves—the healing of ourcommunity, our society, our wounded and sacred world—this action can itself offer an experience of healing and transformation. We recognize that we have been part of an enduring struggle for justice that has been deeply immediate and gritty, and at the same time deeply symbolic of the world we long for.

How, though, can we cultivate this sense of commitment, solidarity, vision, and a willingness to take up the roller coaster of enduring action for change?

One way that October 2011 has nurtured this is by asking people to take a pledge.

On the one hand, one can see such a pledge merely as an organizing device. On the other hand, the power of such a device is rooted in the depth and potential of such a commitment.

A pledge, in its deepest sense, is a solemn promise or agreement to do or not do something. Our lives and our history are woven together by such promises. A pledge obligates us to action or to taking a particular approach or direction. It is a way of saying to ourselves and to the world: “This is serious. This important. In fact, this is so important to me that I will commit myself to this matter and make good on my agreement. I will deliver.”

Public pledges have played an important role in organizing campaigns and movements. Gandhi, for example, at numerous moments invited his cohorts to make a pledge to undertake action. Rooted in a tradition of religious vows, he regarded such pledges as sacred commitments and urged people to think very carefully about making such a promise. When the South African government proposed the Asiatic Registration Bill that would require all Indians and Chinese persons in the Transvaal to be fingerprinted and to carry a registration certificate, the assembled were asked to pledge their refusal. But Gandhi cautioned them about such a pledge:

Gandhi rose to remind the audience that a pledge was serious business. It was easy to make in the excitement of the moment but was everyone ready to accept the risks of jail, beatings and perhaps death? ‘Everyone must search only his [sic] own heart,’ said Gandhi, ‘and if the inner voice assures him he has the requisite strength…then only should he pledge himself.” After he finished, the entire multitude rose and swore to disobey the law even if it meant going to jail.”

Once back in India, Gandhi consciously used a pledge in a labor dispute over the wages of mill workers. In addition to counseling the workers to remain nonviolent and disciplined, he asked them to take a pledge that they not return to work until an adequate increase was established. The pledge became a key aspect of the campaign, as Judith Margaret Brown explains in Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope:

Daily the pledge was repeated at the evening meeting, and processions through the city carried banners exhorting workers to keep the pledge. When the owners offered terms lower than those stipulated in the pledge, the workers’ refusal to work became a genuine strike.

Moreover, Gandhi organized a pledge of nonviolent action to resist the hated anti-sedition Rowlatt Bills that proposed to continue martial law in India after World War I.

There are many examples of pledges being used to organize nonviolent action. A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, written and signed by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, William Sloane Coffin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber, was a commitment by the signers to support draft resisters during the Vietnam War and a call for general resistance to the war.

I have been involved in two pledge campaigns: The Pledge of Resistance and the Declaration of Peace. Seeking to end US wars in Central America in the 1980s, 100,000 people took a pledge to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience or other forms of nonviolent witness. Between 1984 and 1990, thousands of US citizens were arrested for nonviolent action as part of the Pledge. The scholar Christian Smith has documented the effectiveness of this campaign in his book, Resisting Reagan: The US Central America Peace Movement. Since then, a number of “pledges of resistance” have been organized—including one focused on the US war in Iraq and another one concentrating on climate change.

The Declaration of Peace was a campaign in which thousands of people committed themselves to take action backing a declaration calling on the US to create a comprehensive plan to end the US war in Iraq. It organized a series of events across the nation from September 21-29, 2006, which contributed to making the Congressional elections six weeks later a referendum on the war. The DOP campaign continued for the next few years.

Pledges can be effective vehicles for organizing and mobilization. At the same time, their power is rooted in the commitment of each pledge signer to withdraw consent from injustice and violence and to support nonviolent options. Such personal commitment is needed now more than ever. As this crucial season of broadening action unfolds, each of us is being asked: What will I commit to in order to build a more just and peaceful world?

What pledge will we write, sign, and deliver on?

Since Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself last month—inspiring a national uprising in Tunisia—nearly two dozen attempted self-immolations have been reported across the Arab world, three of them fatal. It is believed that most were political acts committed by people suffering from economic despair and political oppression, leaving many Arab leaders fearful that further uprisings may follow. This raises important questions about the dynamics of self-immolation and whether it is not only a legitimate form of protest, but also a strategic form of resistance.

To better understand it within the context of nonviolence, I turned to Michael Nagler, president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education in Berkeley, California. I began by asking him about the history of self-immolation, its ties to culture and religion, and whether we in the West should be careful to pass judgment.

While there are traditions within cultures (think of the Samurai code) and religions (Buddhist monk or monks appear to have set themselves on fire in Ancient Athens, prompting St Paul’s comment “if I give myself over to be burnt” in 2 Corinthians) that countenance self-immolation to various degrees, it is surely an act that impacts others in a universal, not to say shocking way.

The question is, what is the message it conveys? Buddhist monks immolating themselves in Vietnam had a desired effect, while the American who tried it in front of the White House did not. So while the statement “I no longer want to live” is universal, the interpretation of it is potentially positive in a culture (like Buddhist Vietnam) that places a high value on and understands the significance and power of self sacrifice, but not necessarily in a go-getter culture like our own.

Islam seems to me somewhere in between. The concept of martyrdom seems to have originated among Jews about two centuries after Christ, and Gandhi said of the martyr, Imam Hussein, “I learned from Hussein how to achieve victory while being oppressed.” However, there is a big difference between martyrdom and self-immolation, because the latter is voluntary while the former is only accepted.

Let’s take the case of a fast unto death, because Gandhi did accept and actually practice it, as we know, to good effect (that’s an understatement!). What people rarely realize is that there are five rules for such a drastic act, some of which might be met by the contemporary self-immolaters:

1. You must be the man or woman for the job, i.e., really in possession of your will to live. Gandhi and the monks of Vietnam qualify. I doubt most of the imitators of Mohamed Bouazizi do.
2. The audience you intend to reach must be a ‘lover,’ in Gandhi’s language: someone who has enough of a bond with you to be moved. I doubt this obtains in our case now.
3. It must be a last resort. I don’t think other means have been exhausted here.
4. The demand you are making on the opponent must be doable. I worry about the vagueness of what the contemporary martyrs are protesting. Bouazizi and the Korean farmer who killed himself at the World Trade Organization meeting in 2003 were simply at their wits’ end and could not go on living.
5. It must be consistent with the rest of the campaign, or movement.  In other words, the Irish fasters in Long Kesh prison, some of whom did give up their lives, more or less threw away the gesture because the rest of the revolt was not at all nonviolent at that time.

All this being said, there is yet another important difference between a fast unto death and self immolation: in a fast you are ready to give it up the instant the opponent has responded: you are trying to persuade him. With that accomplished, the fast has done its work and you go on living together. But when you immolate yourself you are not having a ‘conversation’ with the opponent. No reconciliation, for example, is possible. For this reason, I suspect Gandhi would have been horrified at what these imitators are doing, without in the least blaming them. He would have accepted their courage but tried to show them a better way.

While self-immolation may lack the constructive attributes of a nonviolent act like fasting unto death, it is, as Stratfor’s Rodger Baker recently explained, “a method of public death that doesn’t harm others in the same way that suicide bombings or attacks of that sort do.” This raises the question: does self-immolation deserve less criticism, particularly in a region where suicide bombing might be unfortunately more expected?

Immolation is vastly preferable to suicide bombing, of course.  But it’s not perfect.  It has the difficulties enumerated above, and it sends a message that there is nothing else one can do, while in reality other nonviolent options are usually available if you happen to know what they are (as so few of us do). This is by no means to overlook the courage of all people driven to that extreme; but it is to say that such a thing is to be contemplated only as a really last resort. And its results, as we can see, are hit or miss, unlike the famous fasts of Gandhi.

In the Garwahl district of the lower Himalayas, tradition relates that centuries before the Chipko (tree-hugging) movement began in the early 1970s hundreds of villagers had thrown themselves off a cliff when the local Raja began deforesting their land for his own profit. So their sacrifice was not entirely in vain: it had some effect on the Raja and left a legacy that the Chipko people could pick up.

In the rare case where suicide does have a powerful political impact, as in Tunisia, it is tough for advocates of nonviolence to relate. But there are important lessons to be learned, as Nagler explained.

We should take from the act the courage and self-sacrifice it implies without thinking to imitate it directly in the same form. We progressives (or whatever we are) often make this mistake: to focus on tactics without understanding their underlying dynamic… This is an opportunity to get some nonviolent principles before the eyes of the public, who badly need to know that nonviolence is not some hapless, hit-or-miss action but a science with discernible principles we can all learn to use much better than we do at present.

Back in 1969, I voyaged into New York City at Christmas time—not to see the tree in Rockefeller Center, or midnight mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or even to shop. I went to Times Square to see John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s billboard: “War Is Over! If You Want It.”

I stood on the sidewalk and my eyes teared up. I loved John Lennon and was touched by the words “if you want it.”

This will be the first Christmas since that day that I will not hear John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas” on the radio, drifting from unsuspecting places into our subconscious psyches. But I hear the words, the chorus, the anthem.

While I have grown up too cynical to believe it is over if I want it to be, I have been profoundly moved by the witness of too many to know that I can’t wait for someone else to declare war over. I must do my part, which is why I wish I could go to Washington D.C. on January 11 with Witness Against Torture and participate in a 12 day fast and period of sustained action to remind us all that 170 men remain imprisoned in Guantanamo.

I have been traveling to D.C. for these actions since Witness Against Torture began mounting them in 2006 and a community of friends has been built up around this action. I shall miss it and my friends next month, but at Christmas, I give thanks for the joyous gift of Witness Against Torture’s presence in front of the White House, Department of Justice, and halls of Congress and Senate in years past. Wherever they can be this January to remind us that men and women languish unjustly around the world, the spirit of John and Yoko’s message will be seen in action.

Bud Courtney is currently serving on a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq.

According to the Disarm Now Plowshares blog:

Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York; Bill Bischel, S.J., 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington; and Steve Kelly, S.J., 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California … cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Navy base during the night of the Feast of All Souls … They then walked undetected for hours nearly four miles inside the base to the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC). This top security area is where the Plowshares activists say hundreds of nuclear missiles are stored in bunkers. There they cut through two more barbed wire fences and went inside. They put up two big banners which said “Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident Illegal and Immoral,” scattered sunflower seeds, and prayed until they were arrested at dawn. Once arrested, the five were cuffed and hooded with sand bags because the marine in charge testified “when we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them…so we did it to them.”

After the jury rendered their verdict, Father Steve Kelly “faced the jury, and all the Disarm Now Plowshares defendants stood with him with their hands raised in blessing as he said, ‘May you go in peace and have a safe, happy holiday.’” These words and loving gesture well encapsulate the profound spirit that animates the witnesses of Plowshares activists and their supporting communities, as well as that of generations of nonviolent peace activists and actions that root the Plowshares.

This spirit was well expressed, for example, by theologian William Stringfellow, who, during an autumn of 1968 Baltimore gathering in support of Catonsville Nine activists, exclaimed: “Death shall have no dominion!” Or, currently, as Lynne Greenwald wrote in a recent Disarm Now blog entry: “Now more than ever I am convinced that this [Plowshares] is the community I want to remain a part of, and with whom to continue working towards the creation of a world without violence. This community embodies the world we previously dreamt and have had glimpses.”

The animating spirit and nonviolent act of the Disarm Now Plowshares provides a clear and stark contrast to the spirit of death and destruction that wields its iron fist at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base. The Disarm Now blog reports:

The eight Trident nuclear submarines home ported at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor each carry 24 Trident D-5 nuclear missiles. Each missile carries up to eight warheads, each one having an explosive yield of up to 475 kilotons, over 30 times the destructive force of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.

Additionally, Bangor is home to SWFPAC where nuclear warheads are stored ready for deployment.  Located just 20 miles west of Seattle, it is home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, housing more than 2000 nuclear warheads.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the 2,364 nuclear warheads at Bangor are approximately 24 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal, more than the combined nuclear warheads than China, France, Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan.

In his book, The Nightmare of God, Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a Catonsville Nine and Plowshares Eight activist, writes that few in our society recognize the “mortal danger” and depraved spirit of nuclear weapons. “It isn’t so much that we have The Bomb,” he continues, “as that The Bomb has us.”

The importance of the Disarm Now activists and action—indeed of each of the over 150 Plowshares actions since 1980—is that they show us how not to be held captive by The Bomb. Each of the activists has spent the better part of their lives working in service to others, risking numerous arrests on behalf of peace, living unencumbered by consumerism, building loving communities, and, in some cases, risking their lives in war zones. Given the possibility of a ten year prison sentence, they demonstrate what it means to “pay the price” that peace in our world demands of us.

Having lived in community and acted with Steve Kelly, Anne Montgomery, and Susan Crane, I can attest to the radiant, compassionate, and courageous spirit of these good people. A sharp intake of breath, upon my hearing of the guilty verdict and sentencing date, was soon followed by a moment of prayer and praise: praise to those who are awake, praise to those who work for peace, praise for those who dare to love. Now it is up to each of us—in our own daring and imaginative and loving way—to “cut through fences, plant sunflower seeds, and proclaim that way of peace not war shall be ours.”

Over at the Independent, the always insightful Johann Hari had a wonderful article last Friday on the power of protest, and how you can’t forsee the impact that taking a stand can have.

Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.

Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.

Hari then writes that evidence suggests protesters might very well have stopped Presidents Johnson and Nixon from dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam, even though they may have thought they were not having an effect at the time.

He also offers another inspiring example from that terrible war of how, as Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”:

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

Over on PBS’s POV website, you can now watch The Most Dangerous Man In America, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about Daniel Ellsberg and the courageous release of the 7,000 page Pentagon Papers in 1971, until October 27. So check it out while you can!

Forty years ago last week, on May 4, 1970, soldiers opened fire on unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and shocking the nation.

As Nick Spencer explains at Al Jazeera:

Of the Kent State killings, President Richard Nixon’s adviser Richard Haldeman wrote in The Ends of Power that the 67 rifle bullets fired that day would, metaphorically, ricochet right back into the White House.

“Kent State, in May 1970, marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate,” Haldeman writes.

[...]

The heart-rending snapshot of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in anguish, was taken by student photographer John Filo. It would help mobilise some four million outraged students in the nation’s first and only nationwide student strike, just days after the killings.

“That clearly had a powerful impact on congress, they started seriously to end the war in Vietnam, they started to cut off the funding” said Alan Canfora, a survivor of the shootings, and an activist who wants Barack Obama, the US president, to open a new investigation into the events of that day.

Unfortunately, despite extensive photographs, audio recordings and video footage of the shooting, no one went to jail for the killings.

What makes Smiley’s program particularly brave is the way in which is insists that King’s speech that night at Riverside Church is entirely relevant today. We have our first black president; in her invocation at Obama’s inauguration, Diane Feinstein spoke of the history of nonviolent struggle that brought him there. Yet, he is a war president. Like Johnson during King’s time, Obama has an ambitious domestic agenda being tragically thwarted by his commitment to pursuing wars abroad and feeding the military machine. Obama most explicitly distanced himself from King’s antiwar commitments in his Nobel Prize speech last year. Smiley insists, as in his evocative interview on Talk of the Nation, that Obama is wrong to make this separation. King was not some naive outsider who spoke out against violence only because he didn’t really have to deal with it. King carried enormous responsibility. Violence tempted him, but he knew it had to be resisted.

This is Smiley, on Obama’s Nobel speech:

Had the president stopped by giving Martin King his just respect—as he did, to his credit—it would have been okay. But when he turns the corner and then says, essentially, that Martin’s philosophy wouldn’t work in today’s world, he goes on to say that Dr. King didn’t know al-Qaida, as if to suggest that Martin didn’t understand evil, that Martin didn’t understand violence, that he himself had not been subjected to it. He was stabbed at one time. His house was bombed.

He gave a famous speech about the fact that he—when stabbed in New York at a book signing, the blade was just a scintilla away from his aorta. He turned that into a great speech when he got out of the hospital. Because he received a letter from a little white girl who said, Dr. King, I read the newspaper that had you sneezed that blade would’ve moved, ruptured your aorta and you would’ve drowned in your own blood. And King gives a great speech out of that hospital called “If I Had Sneezed.” It’s a powerful refrain, Neal, about what would’ve happened in his life, what he would’ve missed if he had sneezed at that very moment.

So King understood violence. Of course, he’s assassinated in Memphis a year to the day later after giving this speech. So when the president suggests—and whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally diminishes in that Nobel speech Martin’s powerful, nonviolent philosophy, it tweaked some people, and you’ll see that in the presentation Wednesday night.

Let’s stop putting words in Martin’s mouth, who knew that it was nothing short of racism to expect nonviolence of oppressed minorities at home while packing them away in ships to do enormous violence abroad: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems,” he said that night in Riverside. “But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.” Nonviolence on American streets and the massacre in Vietnam represented an impossible contradiction that no political convenience could soothe. “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Speaking this way cost King his popularity, and it cost him his good relationship with President Johnson. His advisers counseled him against it, for all the harm it might do to the civil rights movement, but he wouldn’t let them stop him.

“I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences,” said King at Riverside, “and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.”

More annoying than the skeptics who take this position, however, are nonviolent activists who give up after a couple failures. It’s as if they believe what the skeptics are telling them, when history clearly shows that nonviolence works, but almost always after a long campaign with many ups and downs. In an interview aired on Democracy Now! yesterday, Noam Chomsky expounded on this point:

You just can’t become involved part-time in these things. It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or, you know, you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. I mean, things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work. I mean, we’re not allowed to say nice things about the Communist Party, right? That’s like a rule. But one of the reasons why the New Deal legislation worked, you know, which was significant—you know, just changed the country—was because there were people who were there every day. Whether it was a civil rights issue, a labor rights issue, organizing, anything else, they were there, ready to turn the mimeograph machines—no internet—organize demonstrations. They had a memory. You know, the movement had a memory, which it doesn’t have now. Now everyone starts over from fresh. But it had a kind of a tradition, a memory, that people were always there. And if you look back, it was very heavily Communist Party activists. Well, you know, that was destroyed. And it’s one of the—the lack of such a sector of dedicated, committed people who understand that you’re not going to win tomorrow, you know, you’re going to have a lot of defeats, and there’ll be a lot of trouble, you know, and a lot of things will happen that aren’t nice, but if you keep at it, you can get somewhere. That’s why we had a civil rights movement and a labor movement and so on.

The rest of the interview is well worth watching, as Chomsky goes into rare detail of his own activist history during the Vietnam War. Although it’s clear Chomsky believes in nonviolent action, it’s often ancillary to his normal foreign policy talking points. That’s why this interview is so refreshing. It’s a reminder that even the man who knows perhaps the most about the evils of this world hasn’t ever been willing to give up.

There are of course many reasons for the decline of activism at universities, which have historically been a hotbed for anti-war activity.

Mounting economic and academic pressures on today’s youth, intimidation by authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the “good” war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

Tom Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, pinned it squarely on the privatization of conflict.

“Students were the bulwark of the anti-Vietnam war movement because students were being drafted, full stop,” Hayden said. “Ending forced conscription radically diminished the possibilities of future student anti-war protests.”

The article also points out that young people today are “marching with their fingers instead of their feet.”

Some, including myself, question how much pressure this type of activism really puts on those in power to change course.

Stanley Aronowitz, a Vietnam anti-war organizer, insists online petitions do nothing but entrench users in the “anti-reality” of Internet activism.

“I don’t believe petitions do anything,” he said. “They are what middle-class people and intellectuals do to convince themselves they’re getting somewhere.”

Aronowitz, now a sociology professor at City University of New York, acknowledges that new social technologies on the Web — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — have mass mobilization potential.

“But they also privatize people’s lives to much more of a degree than when people had to go to meetings and act collectively.”

A student who runs the Student Peace Action Network also suggests that the use of new “non-lethal” weapons, like the taser, keeps some from taking to the streets or speaking out.

If that is the case, however, I think it simply reveals the lack of conviction of young people today, because activists in the 60s often risked their personal safety to challenge to the war in Vietnam.

As mentioned on this blog before, President Obama’s frequent citation of nonviolent leaders as his heroes is completely inconsistent with, well, just about every aspect of his job. The most obvious, of course, is leading the military. And unfortunately Obama has not approached the task any differently than his predecessors. He is dead set on maintaining our presence in Iraq, bombing Pakistan and increasing troops in Afghanistan. So, to show just how inconsistent this is with the beliefs of his heroes, Rethink Afghanistan compiled a video that combines clips from the movie Gandhi, Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnman speech, and a documentary on Cesar Chavez.

Cara Degette/Colorado Springs Independent, via the New York Times

The story tells of his early work with the Berrigan brothers during the Vietnam War. Despite a life of hardship and imprisonment for his convictions, he continues the struggle into his old age:

At 75 he continues his crusade against nuclear weapons at missile silos across the United States, armed with a hammer and a pair of bolt cutters. He usually wears a clown suit, in homage, he says, to St. Paul’s words: “We are fools for Christ’s sake.”

Though his actions are mostly symbolic — the authorities have always seized him before he could damage a live missile — he has spent half of the last three decades in state and federal prisons.

His most recent protest unfolded on a quiet dawn last month, when he drove down a country road outside Greeley, a few hours north of Denver, used the bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence, wedged his aging body through and stepped atop the silo of a Minuteman III nuclear missile coming up from the ground. He had enough time — about 45 minutes — to drape antiwar banners from the fence, say a prayer and try without success to open a hatch leading to the silo before he was arrested by Air Force security personnel.

Don’t miss the rest of the article. We are, indeed, fools if we fail to hear Kabat out.