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You’re not wrong but,as we learn in the holy book of Patrick Swayze’s Next of Kin: “You ain’t seen bad yet, but it’s comin’.”
Avoid crowds. If you can get you and your loved ones out of the cities, do it now before your skin becomes your uniform.
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Doc, I understand the skeptism, I genuinely do. But I think of nonviolence this way: it’s a practice–a means, not a destination. That means that I can expect to practice it everyday. The question is: does doing so bring me more peace than misery? My two options, put starkly, are: practice nonviolence or practice violence, in my daily life. From that perspective, everyday that I have brought more peace than pain to myself and others is a win and a counter to escalating violence. Ghandi’s thesis was: we are likely to bring more peace than pain to each other the more of us focus on doing so. It only takes one jerk to undo nonviolence through a violent act. But I am doing nothing to bring peace back by matching violence with violence.
Put another way: we have no historical evidence that violence permanently ends violence. But many of us have at least a few examples of days where peace lasted all day long because we contributed nonviolence to the mix.
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First, thanks for the Bill Hicks. He was a genius. Second, I find those two charts fascinating, for the reasons you describe. But I’m not sure I agree with all your conclusions. You might want to take a look at a 2016 book called “This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century,” by Mark and Paul Engler. The subtitle makes their argument pretty clear. Beyond that, they make an eye-opening (and encouraging) claim: that current nonviolent movements (widespread and successful, at least by certain measures) are fueled not so much (as was the case with Gandhi and MLK) by this or that deeply held religious conviction, but rather by a pragmatic belief in the systematic efficacy of nonviolent strategies and tactics. Gene Sharp, probably the most important scholar and theorist of nonviolent struggle of the last fifty years, is largely responsible for this pragmatic approach. I just (as in on Friday) sold a book proposal on nonviolent activism of the last hundred years (for young readers), so stayed tuned. But I’m cautiously optimistic that nonviolent change is making a comeback (assuming it ever went away). Thanks for the post.
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Doc, as a Quaker, you might be especially interested in Alice Paul (a Quaker) and the nonviolent campaign she led, from 1913-1920, to win women the right to vote. Part of what’s fascinating about her story is that she applied nonviolent tactics before the modern (Gandhian) discourse of nonviolence reached the United States (something your first graph bears out). But there is no doubt that she intentionally crafted a nonviolent movement (parades, picketing, hunger strikes, instructing her followers to never fight back violently, etc.). I mention this as well to point out that sometimes nonviolent activism isn’t named or identified as such. If you’re interested, I can send you more information about her–one of the under-appreciated heroes of the last hundred years.
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