{"id":50872,"date":"2019-10-01T19:53:22","date_gmt":"2019-10-01T19:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/?p=50872"},"modified":"2019-10-02T17:28:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T17:28:14","slug":"what-would-gandhi-say-today-150th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/metta\/2019\/10\/what-would-gandhi-say-today-150th-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"What would Gandhi say today on the 150th anniversary of his birth?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Who ever thought we would be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gandhi\u2019s birth with everything he lived and died for driving itself to extinction. \u201cUnprecedented\u201d seems too weak a word. There have been catastrophes of some magnitude, like the ice age; but up to now they have been beyond our control. Now it is we ourselves responsible for the destruction that has unmistakably begun \u2014 and therefore we ourselves can find the capacity to set it right. This is what Gandhi would certainly say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hats off to the millions, young and formerly young, who have gone on strike to get some attention \u2014 and hopefully some action \u2014 on the most critical task ever to face humanity. But if we have learned anything from the slow but gratifying spread of knowledge about the science of nonviolence since Gandhi\u2019s day we have learned that yes, protest can be an important first step, if we make it one. This point is made very clearly in a timely resource called \u201cClimate Resistance Handbook: Or, I Was Part of a Climate Action, Now What?<\/a>\u201d by experienced strategist Daniel Hunter (and a foreword by none other than Greta Thunberg). I learned a great deal from this 62-page book, available to all as a free download. I learned that it\u2019s a waste of time, and unnecessary, to worry about how to change the most intransigent opponents, the extraction industry giants and the politicians they buy over. Instead, as Hunter advises, think of the much more numerous and much less entrenched people who lie along your \u201cspectrum of allies.\u201d They are the former\u2019s \u201cpillars of support,\u201d as the great nonviolent theorist Gene Sharp would say. By winning them over, or galvanizing those who always cared but were uncommitted to action, the intransigent power holders will be left without influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These die-hards are \u2014 to extend a metaphor he offers about politicians in particular \u2014 like balloons tied to a rock. You can blow them a certain distance to one side or another, but it\u2019s much more effective to move the rock. The rock, as I see it, is twofold. Above the surface is public opinion and the behaviors and policies it supports; below that, the bedrock, so to say, is the general worldview or narrative about reality that the vast majority of people in the industrialized world still share: that we are physical beings, separate from one another and the nature around us, both of which we often have to exploit to get on in life. The Earth may indeed be finite, but we will simply ignore that fact because we can\u2019t deal with it. Not, that is, unless we change our worldview. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we do that? We have to start with ourselves. We\u2019ve been so badly served by our cultural conditioning for several decades now that before we do anything else we should think about our own \u201cbasic training.\u201d Here are the essential, practical steps we\u2019ve come up with at the Metta Center for that purpose:<\/p>\n\n\n\n