Seven Challenges of Nonviolence

During this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Stephanie and Michael discuss a new resource offered by the Metta Center called, Seven Challenges: nonviolence, new story, third harmony, compassion, constructive program, unity in diversity and from chaos to creativity. Their conversation offers some advice as to how to incorporate them into our daily lives so that over time, they become rooted in us, an active part of who we are. Nonviolence, for instance, can be strengthened in each of us by the simple (yet not always easy) practice of cultivating the habit to pause before we react to a perceived aggression, remembering that a “person's anger is not the core inflexible being of that person. That is what makes nonviolence possible.” 

All of the challenges encourage us to recognize that we can choose – again and again – to exercise nonviolence in our lives. We can choose to see the world not as a fixed external entity that often seems out to harm us, but rather as an ongoing dynamic process which we actively co-create. Though these seven terms are aptly called challenges, ultimately they can be a tremendous source of inspiration and empowerment. And they are available to each and every one of us right now.

Transcript

[Music]

Stephanie: Well, greetings everybody and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. 

So, we took a little bit of time at the beginning of the show, two minutes exactly, in order to have a moment of remembrance for veterans, as today, the day we are recording is November 11th. The show is beginning at 11 a.m. And it's a time that's notably marked at 11th hour of the 11th day on the 11th month to pause and remember the sacrifices that humanity is making of itself in war. 

Obviously on Nonviolence Radio, we believe that there are other ways to handle conflict than war and violence, and we're doing everything that we can with every fiber of our being to make sure that no human being ever has to put themselves through war ever again.

And we think that the peace movement and the military and military families really can find a lot of common ground that war hurts everybody. And in the long term, it's not a solution for us. And yet we can also hold the truth that war is happening, and people are suffering from it. Michael?

Michael: Thank you. Stephanie. You know, I was on this very day and time and date that I happened to be in Heathrow Airport in London. I didn't know, I'm an American after all, that all of Europe went into a standstill to grieve and memorialize. And so, I simply stepped up to a lunch counter and asked for a cup of coffee and the fellow behind the counter gave me a look as though to say, how could you be so insensitive? And then I looked around and I realized this whole bustling airport had come to a dead stop.

It was very moving. And I think it tells us something about, you know, how humans can be together in an act of remembrance. If we could only be together in an act of prevention, we'd be on our way to a nonviolent future.

Stephanie: There's ways that the military industrial complex can try to claim this as like a celebration of war, or a celebration of our military in ways of – that's really not what we're saying. We're saying that people can reclaim this day to make it a day of, as you mentioned, acknowledging grief for what we have done to ourselves and to one another.

And wouldn't it be wonderful to have a day of planning and strategy for how the military can be used to help combat climate disaster, or help distribute food where food is needed, or to help work on unarmed strategies, or to help build cultures that are under the throes of terrorist leadership. You know, there's just so many other conversations that we can have on this day, and there's so much knowledge and funding in the military to make these things happen.

And not to mention there's wonderful organizations like Veterans for Peace, people who have been through the military and have experienced moral trauma, moral injury that suggests also that, what psychologist Rachel McNair calls “perpetration-induced traumatic stress”. So, people in the military do know that the harm that's been caused and many have taken that path as well to say, “I no longer want to use this training to promote just my country or to promote just the safety of my people, but for I want to use my skills and knowledge to promote safety for everyone, everywhere.”

Michael: Stephanie, in that connection, I'm remembering when the terrible tsunami hit the shore of Sri Lanka. I believe it was 1992. There was an American serviceman who was handing out blankets and supplies like that. He'd been hard at work all day long. A journalist asked him at the end of the day, “You know, this is not what you're trained for. How do you feel about this?”

And he said, and I will never forget this, he said, “I have been ‘serving my country’ for 34 years, and I never got a day of satisfaction out of it until today.” So, there's plenty of regenerative potential in the military.

Stephanie: Absolutely. And one of our team members at the Metta Center was a medic in the military. And now he's working for nonviolence. So happy Veteran's Day to you, Matt.

So, I want to talk today with you, Michael, and our audience about the nonviolence, what it is and how it works, sort of as a regrounding in this great power, as people are scrambling in some ways to decide how they want to respond to political changes in our world and political challenges.

And I think that at this time of confusion for some people, and increasing division and misinformation and disinformation in our world, it's important to ground ourselves in some basics once more, and think about why we're committed to nonviolence. What does it mean to have a practice of nonviolence?

And so, we have this wonderful resource that we've developed at the Metta Center called, Seven Challenges. It was a project that we worked on with a lovely intern this summer, Leah Cox, who is now studying at Northwestern. She helped put the resource together with Michael. And it was a team effort as well, with transcripts and the audio editing and everything. And it goes through seven challenges, obviously, for nonviolence. 

And it's a really great supplement as well to the Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature film, where that's an introduction to nonviolence. And this is seven challenges of how do we establish our practice? What are things that we need to think about?

So, maybe with that bit of introduction, I have this Gandhi quote in front of me and I think that it's a good intro to nonviolence for us to start with. This was sent to us by our friend Max, who signs his letters, Ahimsa Max. Hi, Max. Ahimsa meaning non-injury, nonviolence. Michael will say more about that. But the quote is from Gandhi, and it says, “Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.”

Okay. That's a challenge in itself. Whenever you're confronted with an opponent, conquer them with love. That's not an easy thing to do.

Michael: I think that what we need to be able to do is take a bit of a step back from our immediate emotional reaction, which will be the good old, inbuilt, almost instinctive response of fight versus flight. And when we feel that emotion, that set of responses physical, mental, and so forth, we tend to yield to it.

And the beginning of nonviolence is the ability to say, “Wait a second. This isn't me necessarily. This is something that's happening in my mind.” The next step is relatively easy. It's quite critical and very, very helpful. And that’s to realize that that person who is threatening me, who is angry at me, his – I'm going to use him for the time being – his anger is not him. Just as I've got a space between myself and this potent emotional brainstorm going on in my mind and at heart so similarly, that person's anger is not the core inflexible being of that person. That is what makes nonviolence possible.

Stephanie: As they say they, it's simple, but no one said it would be easy.

Michael: Yeah, definitely not.

Stephanie: Simple, but not easy.

Michael: And I would add exhilarating. It's extremely exhilarating if you pull off a nonviolent conversion in yourself, that's already exhilarating. And when you can see its impact on other people, it can really be thrilling. And in our culture, we are not trained to recognize this. And I think that's where we lose a lot of the potential for moving forward into a nonviolent future.

If only we would recognize this and think how to institutionalize it, we would be creating a new world order.

Stephanie: And thank you for that to get us started, Michael. So, I'm going to play the first track of these Seven Challenges as a way of encouraging people to think about what is nonviolence. So here we go.

Michael: I want to think with you about nonviolence as an ideal and a practice. You know, Gandhi said it was absolutely critical to have an ideal. Something which was so perfect that it would be in practical terms most of the time just about unobtainable. So, what’s the correct way to use an ideal? I say it’s to use it for inspiration, not rebuke. In other words, we shouldn’t feel chagrined because we're not there yet. That’s kind of the nature of an ideal to not be there yet. But it is a milestone, a flag telling us which direction we are heading in, and that is absolutely critical. Without it, we could be all over the map.

Now, the term that’s usually translated nonviolence in English comes from a Sanskrit word, an ancient word, ahimsa. And the literal meaning of that word is the complete absence of the desire to harm. So, there’s your ideal for you.

Now, in practice, that desire comes up in us now and again. Somebody “gets in our face,” we have an unpleasant reaction in this episode. So, how do we practically approach the ideal of nonviolence? It means first and foremost that we're going to be against the behavior and not the person. Ideally, we are against the behavior partly because we want to help the person. It does not help an oppressor to oppress us.

There was an Arabic sage who was approached by one of his devotees because the sage had challenged him by saying, “You must help everyone, even an oppressor.” And the devotee said, “How on earth shall I help an oppressor?” And the sage said, “By preventing him from oppressing you.”

So, this is where a practice starts to approach the ideal. That you are against the person’s injustice, against their behavior because you want to release them, you want to liberate them from that oppressive modality, which as we now know from science and from many other avenues of research, that harboring ill will against another person injures yourself psychologically and spiritually. So, in practice, what we do is we try to liberate the oppressor from their oppression and that inches us closer to the ideal of a complete absence of the desire to harm.

Now, if this sounds very challenging to you as it did to that devotee, I would say what we want to do is to practice nonviolence daily. “Nonviolence is a way of life,” as Martin Luther King and Gandhi and others have said. It’s not just something that you call upon in an emergency situation, though it can be that also.

But it’ll only work for you if you’ve been practicing it all the time. So, even when you're off by yourself, thinking about stuff, reading stuff, watching stuff, try to remember that in the very depths of your being, you do not wish to harm anyone and neither does anyone else. When you just do that simple thing, you are practicing the core energy of nonviolence in your daily life. And that means when you're in a tough spot and really need to call on it, it will be there for you.

So, I would challenge us to do this every day, do it in our minds and in our hearts, and then try it out where we feel we have the capacity to succeed. I’ve known people to get very demoralized when they try out a little bit of nonviolence in a very difficult situation and it doesn’t “work.” To avoid that, I think we need to be realistic about ourselves and our capacities, and of course, test them against experience, but try to push that limit without overwhelming your capacity to be nonviolent.

Stephanie: Well, there's certainly a lot in that practice of nonviolence. I think you really helped emphasize, Michael, that in nonviolence, we are not looking at other people as enemies or as people to harm for the things that they've done. And, well, that sounds again, easy to say. I think that when we are experiencing hurt or injury in some way in ourselves, it's very hard not to want to let others feel what you're feeling, or to see if you can make them feel what you're feeling, or to get even, or to harbor resentment. And all of those things feel natural. 

But I think that part of the practice of nonviolence is to remind ourselves that I'm going to hold as a hypothesis, as you say in the Third Harmony, I'm going to hold as a hypothesis: I don't actually want this other person to suffer from what they're doing in a way that harms them. Thinking of a situation that might count in terms of my practice of nonviolence, I might want the other parties to see the harm that they've done. And yet also that there is a doorway for them to come through to change their behavior.

Michael: So, what you just said, Stephanie, it's very important and it requires a certain amount of tact. After all that’s said and done, this is just basically what you're doing in nonviolence is holding up a mirror and reflecting back to the opponent harm that he or she or they are doing.

But I had a colleague at Berkeley next door to us. He was in the gym department. I was in the classics department. We were catty corner from one another. I got to know Fritz very well. Fritz Tubach. He was in the Hitler Youth. He was a young kid. That's all that you knew. And then at the end of the war, the American Army started showing films to German soldiers and other citizens, showing them what they had done.

In the case of my friend Fritz, I don't think he ever got over it. So, that also can be a source of great harm. You have to be able to say to a person, and nowadays we have this formula down pretty well, “That was what you did. This is not who you are.

Stephanie: And in a way that is holding up a new story of who we are, that this is not necessarily something that we're going to have reinforced to us in the media. As exciting as the media is, it's usually stories of generalized fictional media, on screens, on our streaming devices, and it tends to be stories of getting people back, revenge, murder, violence, tit for tat, really.

And some of the best shows out there are actually about the opposite of, you know, there's this kind of beauty of transformation in them. And so, there's these little windows out there, even in the media, but they're very hard to find in the media or in our news. But we know them as human beings, so the more that we unplug from the media, the more we can identify something called a new story. This kind of Thomas Berry term that suggests a different paradigm, new values.

And the story that we tell ourselves as who we are as human beings is not a story of tit for tat, but us together in this and our well beings. Our well-being is one. It's intertwined. So, let's hear what you have to say about that last comment before I turn on this audio, Michael.

Michael: Yes, my last comment would be that – this again is a very important part of nonviolence. And what's new today is there is an alternative media network. Guess what you're hearing right now from us? 

So, what needs to happen is it needs to become more prominent and gradually let the old habits of violent stimulation in the media simply go away and make over to this. As Bucky Fuller used to say, “The thing to do is not to overcome an evil, is to create a good and let the evil fade away in a natural harmless way.”

The term ‘New Story’ refers to the fact that coming out of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 study called, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” he showed us that communities of people, be they national or subnational or whatever, they tend, in a given culture, to share a given framework.

And because of the tremendous external success of materialism that has prevailed for about the last 250 years up until very recently, we created or adopted a story about who we are which is now referred to by thinkers as the old story. The old story says we're primarily bodies, really. Matter is the only thing that exists in the universe. Everything else is what they call an emergent property from matter.

And therefore, as human beings, we are primarily bodies and therefore, we are separate and we are doomed to competition and violence. So, as you can tell, I wasn’t very fond of the old story.

The new story says no – and this arises even in the scientific fold from the discovery of quantum reality, primarily by Max Planck in earlier part of the last century -- that no, the fundamental reality of the universe, something that the Greek philosophers had looked for for millennia is now best described as consciousness.

And consciousness creates this phenomenal world. And I’m using that term advisory, because phenomenal world means the world of appearance. So, there’s not too far from the famous Sanskrit concept of maya. Maya doesn’t mean illusion, exactly. It means the appearance, how things appear, which is not necessarily what they are.

So, the new story is an attempt to reinterpret human nature and, you know, political theory, how we should behave, how institutions should be built, based on the fact that we’re all conscious beings and that that consciousness cannot be divided.

So, instead of having, for example, a litigious criminal justice system, we look to new developments like restorative justice where the assumption is that we do not have incompatible goals. We have incompatible understandings, perhaps, of how to reach those goals.

But justice and security can be achieved for everyone. That’s part of the new story. So, in sum, we are body, mind, and spirit. We are really primarily spirit, otherwise known as consciousness. And therefore, we are not separate. Our individuality is important. It’s real, but it is not the ultimate determinant of who we are.

Stephanie: Well, there you have it. That's a very inspiring picture. And it raises a lot of questions as well. If we see ourselves as bodies, how that becomes associated with the need – or to be violent in some way. But I suppose if you look at the way that animals are treated, animals are not seen as part of a web of consciousness, that they don't have thoughts or feelings or the right to be themselves. They're seen as bodies that provide nourishment and nutrients for other creatures. Which then, as some would argue, creates immense suffering for both animals and themselves.

So, I could see it from that lens. And I could also see the question that comes up for me is how the new story integrates not just, you know, human beings as animals on this planet, but all creatures, all of creation, all of all of life, into that story as something that's completely entirely interconnected.

Michael: Yes. Gandhi even said, “The purpose of life is undoubtedly to find out who we are. And there's only one way to do that, which is through the service of all that lives.”

Stephanie: Beautiful. So, the next challenge of nonviolence as we often talk about here on Nonviolence Radio – you've heard us talk about the third harmony. It's more than our documentary film. It's a concept that helps to illuminate some of the clear connections between who we are, who we believe we are, and how nonviolence works. So, I want to include this as our next challenge here.

Michael: The third harmony refers to the fact that the real energy of social change comes from within us. So, the first harmony, this is a traditional Buddhist model. The first harmony would be with the outside world, with the environment. The second would be with other people. And the third would be within ourselves.

So, while it’s third perhaps in our list, it actually is where a lot of nonviolence has to start. You have to bring out love and wisdom from yourself and apply it to situations and relationships around you.

So, the way that you do that is always the same in a sense. It’s always the same psychologically, more or less, what I was just trying to describe. Every single one of us has resources of love and wisdom within ourselves. The way society, the way culture is structured today, there are precious few outlets for that love and wisdom.

And what we do in nonviolence is ignore these constraints that are put on us by society. In some cases, it even means we're going to have to disobey a law – not all cases, but in some. And find ways to bring our lively concern with the wellbeing of others and the planet into constructive action in the outer world. If necessary, even obstructive action, as I was just referring to, like disobeying a law, or something like that.

But it’s primarily being aware that we have that reservoir of goodness within us and we're not going to reach it by looking at our anger and fear. We’re going to reach it by looking through our anger and fear to the original sources of even those negative mental states which turns out to be that reservoir of concern for others, love for the planet, and for the people on it that I was just describing.

Now even if you do act on the world with the best motive in the world, there can be very different results. There can be apparent failures. And so, a large part of living the third harmony is knowing how to deal with feedback, how to understand where what you did perhaps went wrong, how to adjust that going forward, whether it’s a question of what was I really thinking, was I really feeling? And partly a question of how we could get organized. It’s often a question of were we patient enough in making our case with the opponent and never losing faith that the same goodness that we've contacted in ourselves is in them.

So, you could describe nonviolent action or the nonviolent movement as holding up a mirror to the better natures, the better angels as the expression goes, of another person. They may be angry, frightened, jealous, insecure, but there is that core of goodness within them. And you know it’s there because you've contacted it within yourself and you instantly know that it’s not your private possession, but what you have contacted is something basic to humanity.

And this is the testimony of Gandhi and King and many others that when we act nonviolently, we are actually expressing the fundamental nature of who we are as human beings. We should have confidence in that. It will give us the ability to go through apparent setbacks and what appear to be failures and to understand what went wrong and how to make it better when something did go wrong.

So, it becomes a very creative experimental process. You don't expect necessarily that the exact outcome that you want will be realized. But if to the extent that you're being nonviolent, which in the present terms means that what is being expressed in you is that core of love and wisdom which every human being shares, to the extent that that is expressed, it will have a positive effect on your social environment.

Stephanie: Wow, Michael, these are really powerful reminders. And it's such a beautiful resource that was created around these ideas. That was the encouragement and challenge around the third harmony. I mean, you could use them as a sort of meditation. And in the way that if you have a conflict that you're in, to just put that on and listen to it and allow those principles to seep in, in a way. It's quite beautiful.

We have a few more of these that I'd like to share. Maybe just one more before we jump into the news, because it's important to have both the principles and a deep practice of nonviolence. It's also really inspiring to hear where it's happening in our world right now because the news can be quite demoralizing.

So, let's listen to the next small challenge – the simple to say, yet challenging to enact aspect of nonviolence. And this one is compassion, which is another word for nonviolence. It's also another word for metta. So here we go.

Michael: Let’s talk about compassion today and the challenge of compassion. Since I’m an old classics professor, we can start with where the word comes from and what it means. Compassio literally means to feel along with another person. And that is why the Dalai Lama said, “Compassion is the radicalism of this age.” Because often we are so isolated from one another and that leads to radical separateness, conflict, and ultimately to violence.

So, compassion is right at the heart of nonviolence. It is the enabling factor within the heart, if you will, that enables us to practice real what we call ‘principled nonviolence’, where you have the welfare of the opponent at heart.

Now, going off the Dalai Lama’s definition, I would say compassion is radical in two senses. It’s radical for us today because it would be such a departure from the culture that we have imbibed from our mass media and surroundings which makes us all feel that we should really be out for ourselves and everybody else is a potential competitor. So, to have compassion for others is the radical opposite of that.

But it’s radical in another sense, a deeper sense. Radical means having to do with the root radics in Latin. And then what we get to is that compassion is actually the core of our being. It is our natural disposition as a human being to everything that lives.

So, the question becomes how do we develop compassion? And on one level, I think spiritual practice is the most effective way because it dampens down the activity of the mind, which is kind of a smokescreen between us and other people. But also it’s very helpful just to remind ourselves that other people are not radically separate from us. They have the same basic needs and the same basic desires, though they may express them very differently.

One day I was sitting in the plaza in front of my building on the University of California Berkeley campus and the bell rang, hour was over, and suddenly this quiet plaza erupted in thousands of students and hundreds of dogs going in every direction.

My first feeling was one of acute discomfort. What is this confusion, this mob disturbing my peace? Then I simply reminded myself, every one of those students and faculty members and whoever they were are human beings just like me. And they’re here on this campus for a similar purpose to myself.

And I found that just that simple reminder was able to open up an awareness of their humanity. And I have to say, that felt very good. And the challenge then became why do I not do that spontaneously all the time? So, those little reminders might help us at critical times during the day to remind us of our capacity for compassion, which is a great part of our human being.

So, the challenge of compassion is when somebody is annoying you. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for just or unjust reasons, you have that feeling of annoyance of separateness coming up in you. Remind yourself about compassion. Immediately your attention will shift to what does this person really need? What do they want? Sometimes they’re articulating it and sometimes they aren’t. But you can always address it and that will be a nonviolent solution to whatever situation you found yourself in.

Stephanie: It's so beautiful to be able to contemplate these aspects of nonviolence. And if nonviolence isn't the word for you today, maybe compassion is the word today. And that's the practice. It's not something that you should be expected to be able to do. I mean there's people who dedicate their entire lives to just the development of compassion.

Just as you were describing that whole scene of students coming out and realizing that each student was a universe in themselves and was born and has a life and, you know, hopes and dreams, and realities, and financial conditions, and romantic interests. You know, all of life is in every single one of us. And to recognize that is such a beautiful way to develop ourselves as people throughout our entire lives.

So, this is a really fun series. You can find it at MettaCenter.org/sevenchallenges. And listen to the rest of those, put them on repeat. Use them as meditations, whatever you need. But thank you for sharing them with us today. And thank you, Michael, for your experience as a nonviolence teacher to help us along in that.

But now I want to turn the mic over to you at long last, to fill us in about what is going on in the world for nonviolence. And, you know, try to cheer us up a little, Michael.

Michael: Thank you for that introduction, Stephanie. I actually call myself a nonviolence student rather than teacher. But you can do as you wish in that regard.

So, I will reach some very positive news, but I want to start off by remembering what I might call a good friend of mine whom I never met. His name was Professor Philip Zimbardo, and he passed away last month.

He was a professor at Stanford. His daughter, Zara, was one of my favorite students at Berkeley. His wife, Christina Maslach, was a dean, and I think became a provost of the university.

And Professor Zimbardo is perhaps best known for what is called the Stanford Prison Experiment. And not just because of the scientific findings of the experiment, but by the way that it became extremely controversial.

What it was was a psychological simulation of prison life that Professor Zimbardo set up in 1971. He took 24 male students, and they were arbitrarily, that's important, arbitrarily subdivided into prisoners and guards, and they were asked to simply act out those roles. After a little over a week, at the bidding, especially of the Provost Maslach, Mrs. Philip Zimbardo, that experiment had to be called off because the “guards,” quote unquote, were being so sadistic.

And so, there was this ethical problem involved. And there were also people that said there were methodological flaws, but that doesn't concern me very much. But what does concern me is the realization it leads us to. That people are very deeply affected by the roles that we put them in.

To quote one of my favorite poets of World War II, that if you slap helmets on a billion men, you're going to have a billion people who are being pushed into violent roles by just, in this case, their outer uniforms.

And, in fact, there's another example of this I happen to know about. Again, through a colleague. This is from one of my mentors at Berkeley, Alain Renoir. He was Jean Renoir’s son.

And so, he was hanging out in the studio when Jean Renoir was filming “La Grande Illusion,” you know, “Great Illusion.” And there was a cast of hundreds, and they would step up to the counter and be given a uniform. And the rank of that uniform was determined by the fit. That is, “Is this your size? So, no, you're too – you're smaller than that. I got to get you a different uniform.” The point I'm making is there was absolutely no real difference between people wearing the uniform of officers and people wearing the uniform of enlisted men.

But Alain, who was very alert to this kind of thing, noticed that within one week, the people that had the officers uniforms, when there was a break in-between the filming, they would collect over in one corner of the studio, and people who were just in enlisted men uniforms would pass by, and the, “officers,” who were getting exactly the same salary, would give them, one of those guys at ten franc note. He'd say, “Go get me a quarter of Red, will you?” And start ordering those people around. And they obeyed.

This is not unlike Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments at Yale. But it does go to show us that it makes a very great deal of difference what roles we put people into in our society, it will very deeply color their feelings and their behavior.

So, there are a lot of resources that are being developed now for nonviolence. It's really a burgeoning field. I would like to, in the course of this report, mention a few of them. There's a new organization called Mediators Beyond Borders International.

We were talking, in one of the experiments earlier, about restorative justice as an alternative to litigious conflict. Mediation is also something that we've been growing for about 10 or 20 years, as Community Boards in San Francisco is one organization that's been promoting this.

And this group, Mediators Beyond Borders International, has a website, and they're calling it the Trust Network. And that network, the Trust Network, has a lot of resources about mediation. Which I recommend to your interest.

Incidentally, I read this in a series of articles and the article just before it was about how road rage is dangerously increasing in this country. So, there you have those two paths to choose between.

Now, as for recent actions, Campaign Nonviolence had a campaign that ran from September 21 to November 2, and it was called, and this is why I like the idea so much, it was called “Oppose and Propose.” In other words, oppose, that's one kind of nonviolence. And propose, which is what we call constructive action, as opposed to obstructive action. 

Gandhi, way back in 1894, in South Africa, he wrote that alongside the agitation, that is the presenting of petitions to the Boer government, they were also developing the community in itself. So, the two wings of the bird, I like to think of it that way – opposition and proposition were already starting at the very early era of nonviolence in our age.

So, Campaign Nonviolence contacted numerous groups that proposed various solutions. And these groups, and CNV itself, was able to give communities a taste of a culture of nonviolence. They had teach-ins. They had school wide de-escalation trainings. They had healing circles in jails. They had listening circles for racial justice. They had peace literacy trainings, public art events, they staged a march to affirm racial and cultural diversity, to affirm regenerative agriculture, mutual aid efforts, and much more.

They helped people turn off violent films, that’s the first thing we usually do at Metta, and tune into the Global Peace Film Festival, or Peace Week live streams, or Neighborhood Peace Processions with the Meta Peace Team in Detroit, Michigan. That’s ‘Meta’ with one T by the way.

And they were able to de-escalate violence in some tense situations and some hot conflict zones in the US and abroad, operating in conjunction with two of the groups, Cure Violence and Nonviolent Peaceforce, that we talk about a great deal on this program.

So, every year now, from September 21st to October 2nd, Campaign Nonviolence Action Days offers a glimpse of the nonviolent world that is possible. “It is a vision of a future worth striving towards.” That's a direct quotation from their literature, and I think it's very inspiring and very accurate to what they do.

Now here in Sonoma County, where we were talking just a while ago about animal welfare. We interviewed on this program a young woman who was in the group that put Measure J on the ballot. And it was to curtail what is popularly called, factory farming, because of the – well, ultimately, the abuse that it sometimes causes for animals. 

Wayne Hsiung is a leader of that movement, and his day in court is coming soon. The case involves him going into a set of farms, Ridglan Farms, that was housing 3000 dogs. For his civil disobedient action, Wayne is under threat of 7 to 16 years in prison. So he has exhibited what I really can with great confidence, nonviolent courage.

The measure itself, while very local, only pertained to Sonoma County, and it was defeated, by the way. It touches on some issues that are universal and of interest to all of us.

One of them is that the motive behind it was highly idealistic. And I think it is a pity that idealistic young people can barely get their voices heard and are not able to create substantial change in society. That says something that needs to be addressed. It's precisely the voices of young, idealistic people that we need to inoculate into our – into the veins, so to speak – of our culture and our civilization.So that, for me, identified a problem area that we need to look into. 

Something also was touched off in my mind recently by watching the upcoming, almost finished documentary, “Inside the Free Speech Movement,” where your humble servant actually got his start as a political activist. And I was very idealistic, and I still am idealistic, but I'm hoping to be a little more sensible.

And that brings me to my next point. Many of my friends and colleagues, where I live out in West Marin, are farmers and they have animals. Just recently I was talking to a very good friend of mine who runs a very large dairy operation. She told me that 80% of the farms in Sonoma County are organic certified, which includes the fact that animals are not abused on those farms. And I know personally from my friends that they do not abuse the cows that they milk on their farm.

So, what is the point that I'm leading up to? Leading up to the point that this was a project to get Measure J passed, which had the greatest of possible motives, in a desire to protect animals, and therefore protect people from abusing them. In nonviolence, we have to look at the big picture.

But it was not perhaps as strategically thought through as it might have been. And it ended up causing confusion, though I think it did succeed in raising the consciousness about how animals are treated. I think they went to legal measures too soon. There needed to be more conversations, they needed to inform themselves more.

Mind you, I am not blaming them. I love those kids. This is a beautiful thing they tried to do. But I would hope that they would learn from their experiences and not be discouraged and do things even smarter next time. And if there's anything that we could do to help them here at Metta, I would be more than happy.

Another thing that happened last month was called the Re-imagining Education Conference. And here, a lifelong educator is speaking to you right now. It was a four-day online gathering, and it was organized by yet another of these big intersectional alliances that characterize nonviolence today. It was called Ecoversities. You can understand that term. Ecoversity’s Alliance.

And they invited people from diverse backgrounds to explore innovative educational practices. It's a darn good thing that they didn't do that 20 years ago, or I would still be teaching at UC Berkeley. So, what they offered was to join us in re-learning from the wisdom of ecosystems and fostering a collective learning experience that supports life and care for the Earth.

I will conclude on that upbeat note.

Stephanie: Well, there's even one more upbeat note, which you found out about the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, that it has not, contrary to popular –

Michael: Contrary to my concern. The program that we started called Peace and Conflict Studies back in the early 80s is still going on, and it's thriving.

And the people who are now in the administration and running that program from their angle, they remembered me fondly. So, all of our – see, that goes to show you, all of our good efforts were not in vain.

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, this has been another episode of Nonviolence Radio. You might have noticed some really wonderful instrumental music in the background on today's show. Even now, we have it. It's all from Jim Schuyler, his soundtrack to The Third Harmony, which you can find on Apple and Spotify and Bandcamp and all those places that you can get your music.

So, we want to thank our summer intern, Leah Cox, for her support on creating the Seven Challenges of Nonviolence. Matt Watrous, who helped transcribe and edit those, Sophia Pechaty, who also helps to share those with our larger audience over social media. That's at MettaCenter.org/SevenChallenges.

And to everybody who helps support the show, Nonviolence Radio, KPCA, KWMR, to all the stations across Pacifica. Thank you so much.

Metta is, and Nonviolence Radio is, looking for volunteers to help us reach more radio stations, so do get in touch if that is of interest. Thanks to, Brian Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence, who helps syndicate this show with our transcript.

And to you, everybody, until the next time – as I said at the beginning, whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer them with love. That is from Gandhi. And until the next time, please take care of one another and yourselves at the same time.