Living Nonviolence

This Winter Solstice I've been in contemplation about violence and the path of liberation from violence. To remove violence from my own heart and mind, I first had to remove it from my fork, from my daily meals. I became plant based about 25 years ago and the change in the violence contained within me shifted dramatically. The Green Tara of Tibetan Buddhism has been a touchstone for me as an empowered female form working toward the liberation of all beings. Most literature focuses on the liberation of humankind, but I see how complicit we are in the violent oppression of billions of animals, and until we can untangle our hearts from that, we will be enslaved with them. The liberation of any being, is connected to that of all beings. The Gods and Goddesses of ancient times cared little for nature and animals. They cared more for the hunt. That time for our species is over. We need new mythologies and iconographies of what a liberator of caged farm animals and netted sea life might look like. We need a new Goddess to focus our energies, to help us tap into our deepest wells of compassion, and help us in this effort of liberation.

As the days lengthen I dedicate myself in finding this goddess within myself and taking the path of love and liberation for human and animal kind. To redefine right relationship between the planet, the people and and animals. The balance of the life force of this planet has been deeply disturbed by our abuse of it. It's time for course correction, which simply means opening our hearts to all the suffering we are causing.

“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”

— Mark Twain

So that’s our challenge today – to begin visioning what a World Beyond Violence might look like and then part two is figuring out the steps to get us there. Everything in and about our world today began as a thought, someone’s vision or dream for improving life either for themselves or for society at large.  Our language, our alphabet, our number system, our buildings, and even how we relate to one another has come from us over the years.  We got tired of fetching water from the river and so we created aqueductspl;o and plumbing.  We wanted a closer look at the moon so we created a ship to take us there.  But that same creative spirit has been used to vision and make machines of war and destruction.  We include and exclude people from our social circles depending on whether they comply with the social standards that we ourselves have agreed upon, albeit, unconsciously.   Sometimes we exclude, or other, people based on appearance, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, or religion – basically any discernible difference can be used.  And in the process of “othering” we are able to shut down our empathy for the other group, even come to hate that group, which allows for violence without endangering our sense of still being “good” people.  It’s suggested that in our early tribal development this trait is what kept us in line in our tribes.  As social animals we need each other, we need to belong.  So much so that we will comply with group think and group wishes even when we know they are wrong.  Philip Zimbardo was the creator of the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment that demonstrated just how dangerous the combination of “othering” and authority to have.  This experiment selected a group of young men and randomly split it into two groups, guards and prisoners.  The experiment had to end in 6 days because of abuses were moving quickly into torture. We’ve seen this play out over and over in real prisons and on the world media after the Abu Graib photos were leaked. We’re also seeing it with this election cycle as democrats and republicans begin to demonize each other to win votes.  With more and more guns on the streets it’s becoming ever more threatening.  It’s time for a new vision, time to co-create new ways of seeing each other and working together.

I find it informative to look back as I begin to vision what future I desire. My daughter found something she had written in 1st grade, while cleaning her room.  She brought it to me and asked if I could read it.  The words were written phonetically and I chuckled and said yes, I could read it.  I said to her, “Just look at how much you’ve learned in just a few years – and I bet you didn’t even notice you were learning so much did you?”  And she agreed.  So often we get so caught up in the work we’re doing as activists, writers, artists and visionaries that we don’t notice the changes that are happening.

In fact some of our institutions that we identify now as sources of inequality and structural violence today came from early visionaries that worked to end violence in their time.  

For example there were cycles of retaliatory violence that plagued Greece for centuries.  In 6th Century BC Athens turned to Solon, a poet, philosopher, and social critic of his time, for his vision which he had shared through his writing.  He instituted changes and established a legal code that began a non-violent social revolution and transformed the passion for vengeance into a justice system. This system was based on rule of and equality before the law, a redistribution of power through law, and resolution of conflict through a public court system with juries of peers in an adversarial process before the presiding judge. Religion was separated from the administration of justice for the first time in human history. Solon converted private revenge into public justice.  So this shows that even back in 6th Century BC people were visioning a World Beyond Violence and taking steps to make it happen.

Just in the last 100 years there has been incredible advances toward a more peaceful way of existing.  There are peace organizations world wide working toward a better future.  We have Conflict Resolution programs, peace programs, mediation programs in colleges and universities all over the world. Before the World Wars you would have found none.  And we have people in kayaks turning back large ships headed to the Artic to drill. Gandhi and Dr. King showed us new ways of creating change, change that has a better chance of lasting.  So it’s good to take a moment to look back and look around before we start looking forward again.  We have more tools and knowledge now than ever before.  But now we must answer Mark Twain’s question, “What do we want?”

My vision of a nonviolent future is not likely to look like yours. I have no doubt that violence has touched each of us along our life’s journey, and it’s in that personal relationship with violence that helps us define and refine our vision.   In 2008 I became involved with an organization called Nonviolent Peaceforce, becoming a trainer for domestic NV workshops.  We were all over the US, but gathered yearly to share stories and plan.  One year those of us leading workshops realized how little we knew about each other. So we did the common ground exercise. For those not familiar that’s where we form a circle.  Someone steps into the circle and says I share common ground with anyone who…. What we discovered was that we had all been profoundly touched by violence in our lives and that experience was driving our desire first to learn another way, nonviolence, and then share that way with others.  Later today we will take time to explore our relationships to violence more deeply. It’s in this exploration that you may find keys to your vision of a world beyond violence.

Sometimes as we grow deeper in our understanding of nonviolence we make a discovery: that to change the world outside of ourselves we have to first change the world inside of ourselves.  We need to see the ways in which we judge and other those around us. This is the strength of principled nonviolence, where nonviolence becomes a part of our spiritual practice. This practice often involves meditation and/or prayer to open our capacity for empathy to ever widening circles, to the point of seeing all as one tribe.  Principled nonviolence asks us to re train ourselves away from the violence our social structures and Hollywood have taught us.  Even if you lived in a quiet, loving home, if the tv was on you were getting a message about who we are a human beings.  The messages of othering and violence played out over and over again.  

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of turning off the tv.  A study was done in the mid-80s that looked a three communities, one that had just introduced television, Notel, and two control communities that still has no tv exposure.  The rates of physcial aggression among the Notel children increased 160% in both boys and girls.  There have been many studies that reproduce and support these findings.  Dr. Centerwall did testing all over the world and in a public statement he says, “if television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 few murders 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious results”.  (1992) To learn more about these and other studies you can read “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill” by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.

The images and games we play teach us.  Our brains are active, constantly wiring in new neural pathways of response.  If we are to co-create a vision of a world beyond violence we’ll need to train our brains with better messages and images of who we are as human beings.  We are not helpless captives of our reptilian brain. This is where nv trainings come in. We’ll be hosting one here on Nov. 7th and invite you to attend.  

 Let’s do a quick check on our hero potential.  Imagine you are a bookkeeper and a grade school in Ga. You’re a black woman.  You have a child with disabilities that you are the sole care giver for because your husband left a year earlier.  You’ve put yourself through school to do this work to give you and your child a better chance.  In walks a young white male with an AK-47 ready to shoot the children and teachers at the school.  What do you do?  Did you duck for cover?  Call 911? This is a real story and our real hero is Antoinette Tuff.  She didn’t hide, but she did call 911 and you can listen to her on the recorded call. You can hear her talk with this young troubled man.  She doesn’t other him, condescend to him, call him names or yell at him.  In fact, at one point she even tells him she loves him.   Rather than othering she goes into mothering and everyone lived that day, even the would be shooter.  This is key to my vision of a world beyond violence. My vision is a world where we recognize the frailty in one another and rather than exploit or hurt each other, we help.  We admit to our own failings without fear of being pushed out, no longer belonging to the tribe.  

While at my daughter’s fall festival a father commented to me that he didn’t trust anyone.  That is not the world I want my daughter and my future grandchildren to live in.  I don’t want to fear guns in schools.  I want the wars to end in our hearts, then in our homes, then in our streets, and eventually war everywhere will be illegal. When I envision my world 25 years from now, there is no war and I continue to refine the steps I have to take to get there.  This includes co-creating with my fellow earthlings and modifying the vision with them. That’s why I’m here today with you. Let’s make this the world we want.

Thank you for taking this first step.