100 Days of Nonviolence

PART 2 of a story that began on Day 42... 

          Noncooperation may include marches, vigils and tax refusal, but it includes also an inner dimension: the refusal to allow our minds to be manipulated, our hearts to be controlled. Refusing to hate those who are identified as enemies is also noncooperation.

           The discipline of nonviolence requires of us that we move into the various forms of noncooperation. We will probably move slowly, one step at a time.  Each step will lead to another step; each step will be a withdrawal from support of what is wrong and at the same time a building of an alternative.  Negativity is never enough.  It is not enough to oppose the wrong without suggesting the right.  … religious roots can help [many] here, with their insistence on confronting the evil within ourselves and on our unity with all peoples.

            The difficult thing about nonviolence is that it is a new kind of power to us, a new way of thinking. Even as we resist the structures in our society that separate us from others, we incorporate those structures in our own minds.  Nonviolence becomes not only a process of resisting our own unloving impulses. Jesus’ injunction to remove the beam from our own eye before presuming to treat our sisters’ and brothers’ eyes, and his direction to overcome evil with good can point [the] way [for many].  It is true that we resist what we understand to be evil. The system does evil.  But the individual people who make up the system are people like you and me: combinations of good and evil, of strength and weakness.  To hate people is to incorporate part of the evil that we resist.  We must learn instead to love the people while we confront the system with our lives.

            At the base of love for those caught within an evil system is the understanding that we are they: that we too are caught in the same system.  Just as people in the peace movement have important insights and criticisms for people in the military, military folk have critical insights to share with [people in the peace movement]. No one person owns the truth -- each one has a piece of it, as Gandhi said, and if we can put all our pieces together we may find a bigger truth. Recognizing our own complicity in an evil system means that we can take responsibility for it through noncooperation.  It also means that we can confront our own failures, forgive ourselves, and from that process learn compassion.  We can be honest enough to admit our own imperfections and our lack of certainty, and accept the same in other people.

            Just as we do not have to hate Russian people or Chinese people, we do not have to hate those who stand against our beliefs within our own country.  We can be friends. We can work together in ways acceptable to all of us: to feed the hungry, to help at a school, to plan a liturgy, to sponsor activities for our children, to encourage freedom and creativity.  As we work together we can get to know each other, and when that happens we can begin to explore our feelings about [the issues at hand] with mutual acceptance.  Even when we feel that the people who range themselves against us have become close-minded or unreasonable, we do not have to retaliate in kind.  We can find the places in ourselves where we are close-minded and unreasonable, and understand the fear behind such feelings. We can forgive and refuse to be drawn into a cycle of hate and fear.  It is possible to hold out the hope of community to all people, and to work at conflicts within our communities and neighborhoods in the same spirit that we would like to bring to international conflict.

            The new power of nonviolence comes from taking responsibility: personal responsibility for our own lives, and our share of responsibility for the country and the systems in which we live. The power of nonviolence lies in facing ourselves with love and compassion while honestly confronting our own evil, and then in facing the evil of our country honestly, while confronting it with love and compassion. Nonviolence is an invitation to nurture the good, to confront the evil, and in doing so to build a new community which will bear in it the best of the old.

Shelley Douglass is a longtime peace and justice activist.  The following essay was written in 1983 when she was part of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Washington State, which conducted a Gandhian campaign focused on the Trident nuclear submarine fleet whose Pacific base was nearby. From Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living (Session 4: Another Way, page 63-65) Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.