The Blessed Peacemakers

...To my skeptical students, the idea of stopping a mugger or a Hitler through the force of love evokes guffaws and cries of "yeah, right...

...Nothing is here on nonviolence and animals, even though a well-organized, gruesome war on cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, ducks, and fish kills at least twelve million of these sentient beings every day for food...

...We graduate our kids—from our 78,000 elementary schools, 28,000 high schools, and 3,000 colleges and universities—as peace illiterates, and then wonder why we are sunk in violence: Pentagon violence, family violence, corporate violence, crime violence, media violence, abortion violence, killing-animals-for-food-and-clothing violence, environmental violence, verbal violence, military violence, religious violence...

...3) deliberate lawbreaking for conscience's sake (civil disobedience...

...Students aren't to blame...

...The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him...

...The varicolored methods of how it is applied—ranging from the individual seeking inner peace to the larger groupings of organizations or governments pursuing global peace—create an equal diversity of definitions of nonviolence...

...As the Lynds are aware, nonviolence is not easily defined...

...Don't get me wrong, I think it is amazingly broad now...

...Many in the peace movement are oblivious to the war on nonhuman animals, as if only relations between humans can matter...

...The sampling is diverse and deep, ranging from the known to the obscure, from the dead of past centuries to the living of today...

...Yet, unlike the current thirty to thirty-five wars raging around the world, the war on animals and fish is one in which immediate resistance can be taken: at the next meal, by refusing to eat the flesh of a being breathing and pulsed with the same life force as humans...

...No anthology—short of one weighing a half-ton and needing a dolly to haul around—can tell the full story of nonviolence...

...Nonviolence," they write, "is the very opposite of one person imposing his (or her) truth on another...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...Then there are the other war zones of cruelty to animals: zoos, circuses, laboratories, horse and dog racing, fur farms, puppy mills, and pet shops...

...Surrender of special privilege is certainly foreign to the psychology of those who supply, command, and rely on the military...

...This is the most difficult notion to explain to those who are unread in the literature and history of peacemaking...

...That's a natural reaction, the same they might give to a complicated mathematical solution to an algebraic problem...

...At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love...

...Nonviolence means all these things and something more: the vision of love as an agent for fundamental social change...

...If you want the world to be one way, you have to live that way, and that helps the world to become that way...

...Colman McCarthy (Colman McCarthy is a columnist for The Washington Post...

...One essay is included—"A World Where Abortion Is Unthinkable," by Shelley Douglass—but it comes in a chapter called, "A New Catholicism," suggesting that opposition to abortion is a Catholic gig and not much harm is done in indulging the Romans with a piece on abortion...

...I can't imagine a more useful idea, in the classroom or out in the world...

...Grant, Paul Revere, Jane Addams, Jeanette Rankin, and Dorothy Day...

...David Dellinger: "Nonviolent defense requires not only willingness to risk one's life (as any good soldier, rich or poor, will do...

...Which is why we teach math in first grade and every grade after...

...They are arranged historically, beginning with William Penn's first letter to the Delawares and John Woolman's "A Plea for the Poor," and ending with some anti-nuclear statements from tribal members, including the Western Shoshones...

...As competently as any editors have, Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd—lawyers who work for the Northeast Ohio Legal Services—have compiled essays and excerpts that are the core of America's peace literature...

...Gandhi of India never liked the word...

...Ninety-seven of what the authors call "documents" are included...

...Within the broadness of the meaning of nonviolence, the Lynds identify several "overlapping but distinct elements: 1) refusal to retaliate (pacifism, nonresistance...

...This is the supreme value of the Lynds' collection...

...Every conflict, whether in families, workplaces, neighborhoods, or among governments, has been, and always will be, solved through the use of force: violent force or nonviolent force...

...Out of 5,000 students over the years, not one has named all six...

...Either fists, guns, armies, bombs and nukes, or the force of justice, the force of shared wealth, the force of organized resistance to Caesar or the Pharaohs, the force of noncooperation with injustice, and the strongest force of all, love...

...Gandhi preferred satyagraha, a Hindi word roughly translated as truth force...

...He is a volunteer teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, and is on the adjunct faculty at Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Maryland...

...It requires renunciation of all claims to special privileges and power at the expense of other people...

...They weren't taught...

...In their thirty-six-page introduction, the Lynds rightly emphasize that nonviolence is both a personal and a political philosophy...

...He said it's a negative, defining what it isn't...

...Nonviolent resistance avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit...

...But just one...

...Perhaps in their next revision—as this is a revision of their 1966 work—the Lynds will broaden their range...

...Nonviolence is supremely the weapon of the dispossessed, the underprivileged, and the egalitarian, not of those who are still addicted to private profit, commercial values, and great wealth...

...It provides the intellectual material to build a moral structure in which the mind and heart can live with inner peace and begin to work for outer peace—in the community and among governments...

...Their teachers weren't taught...

...In the courses on nonviolence that I've been teaching since the early 1980s, I start off with a spot quiz: "Raise your hands if you can identify these six people: Robert E. Lee, U.S...

...Throughout the text, one author or another has a go at defining this vision...

...Cesar Chavez: "I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for others...

...Nearly all hands go up on the first three, with rarely a raised hand on the last three...

...That said, the Lynds do have their omissions...

...2) acting out of conviction by demonstrative action (direct action...

...Everyone knows the peacebreakers but not the peacemakers...

...Shelley Douglass: "One of the guidelines for nonviolence is that, if you want to go someplace, you have to go by getting there...

...In nonviolent action, one seeks a truth larger than the truth that can be glimpsed by a single human being at a particular time...

...We don't teach methods, skills, history, practitioners, and successes of nonviolence...

...With some 1.5 million abortions annually in the United States, a large literature exists on conscientious objection to the war on pre-born life...

...If a vastness is found in all that, an equal breadth—larger, in fact—is to be found in the literature of nonviolence...

...He founded and directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C...

...The Lynds would have to strengthen their text, also, with some essays on nonviolence toward fetal life...