From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

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Colman McCarthy, the former Washington Post columnist who established a second career teaching nonviolence in high schools and colleges, once published this pithy gem: “I had a student at the University of Maryland who wrote a 13-word paper that has stayed with me: ‘Question: Why are we violent but not illiterate? Answer: Because we are taught to read.’”

There was a time when only the 1 percent learned to read, but in the 19th century a movement for universal literacy took hold. Though this global effort is still a work in progress (even today illiteracy is enforced culturally, religiously, politically and economically in many contexts) it has dramatically changed the world. This transformation has not been easy or magical. Like every movement, this far-reaching campaign challenged the injustice and debilitating inertia of the existing order. It resisted the systems that benefited from the literacy monopoly and slowly established the right to read as the default.

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Andrew Breitbart at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Conference. Photo by Mark Taylor, via Flickr.

Much of my work in nonviolence and nonviolent action revolves around the assumption that the ends never justify the means, and that the way you fight a battle has everything to do with the ultimate result. “Victories” won through violence—whether literal or verbal—are dubious at best, and disastrous at worst. This is because they do nothing to eliminate the underlying cause of the grievance being addressed, and only pile on new hatreds. They expand the divisions between people, rather than close them. This is why Gandhi said that “a victory won through violence is tantamount to defeat—for it is momentary.”

What does this have to do with the recent sudden death of BigGovernment.com’s scorch-and-burn blogger Andrew Breitbart? Everything.

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Violence plagues our lives, our communities, our societies, and our world. At the same time, a growing movement for nonviolent change is challenging this violence. This movement is marked by four interlocking trends:

• The exponential increase in campaigns for nonviolent social change focused on numerous critical issues, including climate change, poverty, human rights violations, warfare, homophobia, racist and sexist policies, and many other forms of structural violence and injustice (as sites like this one help illuminate);
• The dramatic emergence of new resources and innovative techniques for nonviolent change, including methods for restorative justice; conflict transformation; trauma healing; interpersonal interaction and communication; forgiveness and reconciliation; anti-racism training; and nonviolent intervention, accompaniment, and movement building;
• New research on and application of the deep foundations and spiritual values of nonviolent change: the transformative power of empathy, forgiveness, compassion, creativity, unity, and the willingness to risk for a more just world; and
• A slowly emerging shift in worldview. As peace builder Louise Diamond among many commentators puts it, this is a shift “from a reductionist, mechanistic understanding about how things are in the world that sees everything as separate, to a holistic, integral view that recognizes the interconnectedness of everything in a larger whole.”

Nonviolent change is an ancient reality rooted in many rich sources, especially movements and initiatives of communities of color, poor people, and women who have long histories of nonviolent struggle and have been largely responsible for bringing its power to the fore. Grounded in this visible and invisible history, a strategic, resourceful, deeply grounded, and interconnected movement for nonviolent change is emerging to challenge the numerous intractable problems confronting our lives and our world.

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The character attacks, verbal harassment and forced resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod last month is one more example of the ugliness and insidiousness of gotcha journalism and craven political hypocrisy and expediency. By now, it is likely you are familiar with this tragic story of deception and betrayal. While apologies have been doled out like candy since the day Sherrod was fired, the American people have been left without answers to the questions of how and why the events of this injustice unfolded as they did.

On July 19, with the intention of advancing an agenda of hate, fear, intimidation and denigration, far-right zealot and propagandist Andrew Breitbart and his corporate collaborator Fox News Channel (FNC), two notorious smear artists and purveyors of disinformation, invented a story about racial discrimination and dressed it up as factual news. In doing so they successfully duped media organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and top officials in the Obama administration. Breitbart and FNC, both of whom market themselves as paragons of truth, have a history of direct and malicious trickery. You will recall that in 2009 they convinced political leaders that White House green jobs czar Van Jones and the federally funded community-based organization ACORN were engaged in scandalous activities. The fabricated stories led to the firing of Jones and defunding of ACORN.

Shirley Sherrod is the latest victim of Breitbart and FNC and their right-wing propaganda machine. What they generated this time was a selectively excerpted, decontextualized and misleading video of a speech Sherrod gave at a NAACP function last March, effectively vilifying and railroading Sherrod with the charge that the video was not only incontrovertible evidence of reverse racism, but according to Breitbart it was “video proof” that “the NAACP awards racism”, and according to a FNC headline, it was “government discrimination caught on tape.” Seemingly, the targets of Breitbart and FNC were the NAACP and President Obama, not necessarily Sherrod. However, to incriminate and discredit the NAACP and Obama, they used Sherrod as a tool of convenience and as a means to end, utterly without conscience or a sense of responsibility.

In the manipulated video, Shirley Sherrod, daughter of Hosie Miller, a victim of racial murder by a white neighbor in the Jim Crow South, and wife of Charles Sherrod, a 1960s Freedom Rider and leading member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is seen and heard recounting a time twenty-four years earlier when as an employee of a nonprofit land assistance agency she was initially disinclined to afford the “full force” of her job capacity to help a white farmer to save the family farm. The reason Sherrod cited for her pause and reluctance was the discrimination against black farmers she had witnessed during the span of her lifetime and career. In fact, the full anecdote shared by Sherrod that day revealed very clearly that she overcame any thoughts about permitting race to play a part in her decision making about human need. Instead, she summoned the courage and strength to confront her initial thoughts and feelings and, as a result, discovered her capacity for empathy and was guided by an unadulterated appreciation, respect and value for the impoverished, regardless of race.
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