By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.
We could not waste time harboring bitterness or resentment. We knew that our focus had to be on what we hoped to create, not the indignities we were pressing to leave behind.
It is only through examining history that you become aware of where you stand.
No government, no multinational corporation, no agency at all could counter the mandates of a unified world community. And that is why so much energy and resources are invested in division and separation.
We saw that our attackers were also victims, victims of a negative indoctrination that taught the false values of superiority and inferiority, the sanction of violence and brutality, and the justification of inhumanity and hate.
Each and every one of us has the power to turn our enemies around because we are all a spark of the divine. It does not matter whether we are fit or weak, short and scrawny, or big and strong. There is no adversary who can defeat us if we believe in our own inner capacity to overcome. Sometimes we have to gain tools to overcome our adversaries. We might need to study, to get help, to pray, or develop a plan, but there is no obstacle we as human beings cannot overcome.
America, a nation destined for greatness but tarnished by a persistent, nagging untruth.
It is the responsibility, yet the individual choice, of each of us to use the light we have to dispel the work of darkness, because if we do not, then the power of falsehood rises. Through our inaction it becomes stronger, and a more potent force. It can even lead to the dimming of the light of all humanity born on this planet.
If we are truly to learn the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, or the conflict in Northern Ireland, we must concede that discomfort breeds dislike, dislike breeds disdain, disdain breeds contempt, and contempt breeds hate.
We think of ourselves as more enlightened, more developed than the “primitive” peoples our civilizations have supplanted, yet in all our advancement, we are responsible for more death, more suffering, more murder and mayhem than any period in recorded history.
Martin Luther King Jr. was much more than a dreamer. He believed that faith had no meaning unless it had the power to resolve the problems of our daily lives.
We were very aware that our civility demonstrated above all the absurdity of brutalizing peaceful, law-abiding citizens and detaining them from exercising their constitutional rights.
Informed activism requires reading the newspaper, tracking bills through the Library of Congress’s THOMAS website, and watching legislative debates on C-SPAN. It also means learning which legislators on all levels sit on committees that affect your issue.
Whenever the people finally reject the efforts to fragment their collective energies into warring factions and remember their divine union with one another, when they throw off material distractions and irrelevant negativity and hear their souls speak with one voice, they will rise up. And whatever is in their path will either transform or transpire.
Soul force is the ability to counter the forces of injustice with fearlessness, knowing that your soul is connected to the greatest force in the universe. Threats, violence, and aggression are simply tools that are used to make us doubt our capacity to overcome.
During the 1960s, we protested with non-violent methods. There is something peaceful, cleansing, and wholesome about being orderly and not threatening.
Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.
Destruction doesn’t work. Rioting isn’t a movement. We must be constructive and not destructive. Chaos is sowing more division and discord.
When you burn down a building or topple a car, the violence drown out the injustice of what’s being done to you. It puts you on the same moral level as the people whose violence you are protesting. You’re no longer on the higher ground or plane. You make enemies of the people you need to win over to effect change.
There is still much more work to do. One movement will never offer all the growth humanity needs to experience. To expect so is to build your hopes on a puff of smoke, on a whispered breath; it is to anticipate an illusion.
We no longer dwell in that daydream. We were shaken to realism by the harshness of what we have witnessed in the last few years – the vilification of President Obama, a drive to wreck his legacy and undo the progress we have made as a nation in the last hundred years, a disdain for the sick and the poor, militarization of the police, and the weaponizing of government not to serve as an advocate, but as an agent of oppression and compliance.