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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately, we have many options.

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

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

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

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

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

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Poised on the threshold of a new year, I’m again drawn to a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities we face in this urgent time of ours: the crossroads.

Two roads intersect, and now we confront an unavoidable choice. Do we carry on as we always have—or do we, with courage and imagination and verve, make a dramatic course correction?

While it may be too early to definitively rank 2011 as the year of the Great Nonviolent Turning (even greater things may be coming in the new year or in the years that will follow it; or, on the contrary, the passage of time may reframe this period entirely), the events of the past twelve months—from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to Spain, from Chile to Jeju Island, from China and Russia to a more or less Occupied America—have signaled a growing determination for a qualitative shift.

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Last week the news broke that nearly one out of every two Americans is poor or low income.

According to a new study by the Census Bureau, 49.1 million people in the United States are below the poverty line, while another 97.3 million are “low-income” (gauged by a new “supplemental measure” devised by the bureau to provide a more accurate picture of poverty) for a total of 146.4 million, or a whopping 48 percent of the U.S. population.

There has been some back-peddling on these findings from the Census Bureau since the original story was published by the Associated Press, but its explanations—which focus on a lack of clarity about the new supplemental measure—seem to raise more questions than they answer, especially since it has now shied away from defining “low-income.”  (The confusion deepens in light of the fact that its past definition—which one news report says is still operative—was, indeed, anyone making less than 200 percent of the poverty level.)

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“Building a Rainbow” is the title of an old poster I picked up somewhere along the way. The rainbow’s swath of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet layers is dazzling—and only half finished. In the picture, this symbol of peace is not an idealistic dream but something real. It is under construction, with a troupe of cranes carefully maneuvering sections into place, countless trucks and overworked paint wagons, scaffolding everywhere, and a flotilla of helicopters lumbering across the sky, each with its own precarious splotch of color dangling below.

We live in a violent world. But we also live in a world where a growing number of people everywhere are determined to confound the assumption that there is nothing we can do about this. They gamble that violence need not have the final word. They wager that there are options. They assert that we needn’t be victims of a cycle of violent history; rather, we can dare to be active subjects of a more nonviolent history that engages and transforms the violence around us. For them, violent history isn’t a given, it is made. So, too, is a nonviolent one.

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