{"id":75838,"date":"2016-07-04T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-07-04T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=75838"},"modified":"2016-07-01T18:08:50","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T17:08:50","slug":"the-time-for-silence-is-over-grasping-the-reality-of-nonviolence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/07\/the-time-for-silence-is-over-grasping-the-reality-of-nonviolence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Time for Silence is Over: Grasping the Reality of Nonviolence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stephanie<\/a>The Background:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

With a rainbow pin on his lapel, signifying–on that day at least–the most recent gun massacre in the United States, Congressman John Lewis made an impassioned\u00a0cri de coeur<\/em>\u00a0before members of Congress and the people of this country: the time for silence is over. \u201cSometimes,\u201d he said, \u201cyou have to do something out of the ordinary.\u201d And that\u2019s just what they did: he and other members of his party put their bodies in the way of the daily operations of the Congress, by using a nonviolent tactic known as a sit-in–when you occupy a space in order to dramatize an unmet need; in this case, the need to do something for gun control on behalf of the American people who put them in office to strengthen their common security. While the Speaker of the House had the C-Span cameras turned off, in an effort to censor what was taking place–knowing the power of the media–others whipped out their phones, sent a live-feed to Periscope, and C-Span picked it up anyway.\u00a0 It was \u201cout of the ordinary,\u201d indeed.\u00a0 It was the first time an event \u00a0of this scale had taken place in the U.S. Congress.\u00a0 Lewis himself, of course, is a legendary Civil Rights-era nonviolent activist. After 26 hours, the congresspeople end the sit-in, and Congressman Lewis claims it as a victory.<\/p>\n

Enter the media.\u00a0What just happened?\u00a0<\/em>And this is the problem. Our media–most of them, at least–can give us the sordid, often insignificant details of a violent event, to the point of having us live and re-live the trauma. But our media does not tell us how to stop such events from happening. In other words, when it comes to understanding nonviolence, its principles and strategic dynamics, our media is sorely lacking. The way that the mass-media, and even progressives on social media, represent what took place can give us insight into some myths held about nonviolence, and offer a teaching moment to go deeper. Because if nonviolence were better understood, we\u2019d quickly grasp that it makes us safer than guns any day. As father of the Catholic Worker Movement, Peter Maurin said, \u201cwe need to build a society where it is easier for people to be good.\u201d Nonviolence, properly understood, even just slightly so, can do just that.<\/p>\n

Gandhi coined a term for nonviolent struggle: satyagraha. It means \u201cgrasping to reality.\u201d Imagine if our media could help us to that. In this spirit, then, let\u2019s ever so briefly glance at what the media has gotten wrong about this event so we can better understand it and in the process elevate another story about who we are and what makes us safe:<\/p>\n

Myth One:<\/strong>\u00a0You can\u2019t be angry and be nonviolent.<\/p>\n

Reality:<\/strong>\u00a0When we listen to Lewis\u2019s speech, it confronts a very basic assumption that has to be overcome about the source of nonviolent power: Anger. He\u2019s angry, no doubt about it, but he knows a secret about that anger: how to\u00a0use<\/em>\u00a0it: to transform and channel it toward constructive action. As Martin Luther King famously said, \u201cWe did not cause outbursts of anger; we harnessed anger under discipline for maximum effect.\u201d Remember this the next time you feel angry at injustice: make it work for–not against–you. It\u2019s good fuel when coupled with discernment and discipline.<\/p>\n

Myth Two:<\/strong>\u00a0You have to dislike\/hate\/disassociate from your opponents.<\/p>\n

Reality:<\/strong>\u00a0Corporate media, and progressive media for that matter, have both made statements to the effect of Lewis breaking his friendship with House Speaker Ryan, with whom he even walked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to honor the famous 1965 march in Selma. One article that circulated in several corporate outlets offered a sad (and sadly incorrect) analysis that Lewis used to be on Ryan\u2019s side but now with this sit-in, it seems that those days are over. Not true. In nonviolence, we can oppose people, even our friends and colleagues, and not feel separate from them. We don\u2019t have to hate someone to oppose what they are doing. Secondly, the media is setting up that infamous dualism that pervades every story, every movie, every news plot about anything from sports to political rivals to terrorism: good guys vs. bad guys. There are not good and bad people. There are people who make choices based on information and constraints that they have, both personally and politically. Nonviolence can help cut through all of it and get to the heart of the matter. Never are we against persons, we are against what people do. There\u2019s a critical difference.<\/p>\n

Myth Three:\u00a0<\/strong>If you don\u2019t get what you want, your nonviolence didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Reality:\u00a0<\/strong>It\u2019s interesting that no one yet has really analyzed the strangeness of Congressman Lewis\u2019s declaration of victory. How could they \u201cwin\u201d if they didn\u2019t get what they wanted? They were not granted a vote, after all, so what happened? Michael Nagler\u2019s concept of \u201cwork\u201d vs. work sheds light on this one: sometimes in nonviolence, you get what you want, and it works; and sometimes you don\u2019t get what you want, and it still works. Whenever we use nonviolence, we inject positive, humanizing energy into a situation of escalating dehumanization, and every ounce of that nonviolent energy does constructive work. It is not lost. Ever. One of Gandhi\u2019s biographers, the late B.R. Nanda, put it this way, \u201cnonviolence is the kind of thing where you can lose all of the battles and still go on to win the war.\u201d Not to mention, it\u2019s entirely good strategy to claim real victories, however small, as they take place, and even more strategic to do so without humiliating those whose actions you are opposing.<\/p>\n

Myth Four:<\/strong>\u00a0Nonviolence does not have any logic. It\u2019s signing petitions and sit-ins. Nothing else.<\/p>\n

Reality:<\/strong>\u00a0Again, not true. Congressman Lewis demonstrated that there is a natural escalation to nonviolent action.\u00a0 This is described in Nagler\u2019s\u00a0Search for a Nonviolent Future\u00a0<\/em>with a nonviolent conflict escalation curve.\u00a0 In Phase One of a conflict when the dehumanizing is still low, you reach for the basic, and well-known tools of conflict resolution. This is the time for petitions, for meetings, for letter writing, mediation.\u00a0And this is necessary.\u00a0<\/em>You start here, assuming your opponents are listening to you — and you are listening to them. You\u2019re all prepared to work on a solution, however hard it might be. But when it is signaled that your opponent is not listening to you, when dehumanization escalates, nonviolence has to do the same. This is Phase Two: satyagraha, creative nonviolent action that puts ourselves in the way of the operation of society as normal.<\/p>\n

Myth Five:<\/strong>\u00a0Either you\u2019re nonviolent or you are not. And if you\u2019re not, you\u2019ll never get there, so don\u2019t even try.<\/p>\n

Reality:<\/strong>\u00a0Even though Congressman Lewis has an admirable track record for nonviolent action, being literally an icon of the most famous nonviolent movement in the United States, from going on the Freedom Rides to acting as a key leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a lifetime champion of civil rights in general, he was surrounded by colleagues–and a public–whose lives have been very different. But nonviolence is not reserved for a Congressman Lewis alone. It\u2019s an invitation to all of us. No matter where we\u2019ve been on issues in the past, we can change. In fact, if we do not allow each other to change, or humiliate people until they do, we have to ask ourselves if we are making a strategically sound choice that will create a tipping point or if it will only harden people\u2019s stance? Allowing each other our full humanity means giving all of us, no matter what we\u2019ve done in the past, no matter what choices we\u2019ve made, a chance to live up to something else. No one heard a word of humiliation from Lewis. We can learn something from him on this point. It\u2019s intentional and strategic, not merely a moral choice, because nonviolence at the end of the day is not a moral issue; it\u2019s not black and white: it\u2019s the art of justice with dignity, a science of belonging, of the untapped human capacity for mercy.<\/p>\n

Gandhi\u2019s own\u00a0cri de coeur\u00a0<\/em>resounds now through the decades since his great experiments: \u00a0\u201cNonviolence is not the inanity it has been taken for throughout the ages.\u201d It\u2019s a science; it\u2019s a skill–and it\u2019s time that we learned everything we can about it, because nothing else is going to make this country secure.\u00a0 For those of us who want the world that Congressman Lewis and his colleagues sat down for, let\u2019s seize this opportunity to end the silence, too, and tell the\u00a0real\u00a0<\/em>story behind his words and actions on the floor of Congress last week.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

Stephanie Van Hook is Executive Director of the Metta Center.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Myth One: You can\u2019t be angry and be nonviolent.
\nMyth Two: You have to dislike\/hate\/disassociate from your opponents.
\nMyth Three: If you don\u2019t get what you want, your nonviolence didn\u2019t work.
\nMyth Four: Nonviolence does not have any logic. It\u2019s signing petitions and sit-ins. Nothing else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonviolence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}