Nonviolence v Nazis: Occupation novel

Denmark rising is a first novel by Barry Clemson, a new writer from Virginia--new since retiring from a variegated work life that included such a variety of positions and jobs that his storytelling truth is assisted.

The point of the novel is to illustrate how strategic nonviolence works. Research done in the preparation of the book (and video series that premiered on PBS in 2000) A force more powerful tells the average student of nonviolence (all students of nonviolence should start with A force more powerful) that Clemson has done his homework and is writing an authentic historical novel. His purpose is to produce reading material that is entertaining and teaches us the possibilities. He uses the artistic license of fiction to put fictional detail and dialog into a historical episode that helps us learn something.

Is every detail correct? No, nor is it supposed to be. In some ways, that is the truth of fiction, much like the notion that the majority of messages we send and receive in our interpersonal daily lives are nonverbal, yet they are sent and received. In a historical novel, the dialog and details are fabricated to show us the deeper truths.

The deepest truth of Denmark rising is that nonviolence is a legitimate and effective method of a 'powerless' society using strategic nonviolence to resist occupation by the far more militarily powerful invader nation. Clemson has life experience understanding this in an entirely different geographical and chronological experience. He was a member of the cohort of American youth who went to the Deep South in 1964 as part of Freedom Summer. He and about 1,000 other youth--mostly college students--risked life and limb accompanying African Americans who were brutalized and denied their civil and human rights at that time. Applying the counterfactual to both situations provides a clear contrast.

What if the Danes had resisted militarily?

What if African Americans had resisted militarily?

It would have been quite bloody and quite lethal in both cases and the outcome would have been guaranteed. Danes would have been crushed. African Americans would have been slaughtered.

But Clemson was part of another approach and it worked. There were costs, but they were far lower than the costs of violent resistance would have been. Clemson's work on Denmark makes that point in an interesting and readable fashion.

My wish was that he would have provided a much more serious and involved Foreword or Afterword to explain his research and sources. It is impossible to tell what he made up and what was documented fact. To the student of nonviolence, this would be helpful.

As a historical novel, Denmark rising is very good, with a rich look at what a civilian-based defense would look like and why it might work. Clemson doesn't make extravagant or unrealistic claims, he doesn't soften the Nazi ruthlessness, and he explores the psychological aspects socially and individually of this unusual and instructive historical case.
(pictured: Dane King Christian X, who rode daily through Copenhagen and kept his people united and rallied around their independent Danish national identity, even though the Nazis wanted to showcase Denmark as a protectorate, as part of their new empire).

Pick up copies for your holiday stockings. They are the best book value in quite some time at $10.

Keep researching and writing, Barry. You have a lot to offer us and there are precious few novels that we can bring to the cabin or the beach and gain both enjoyment and knowledge about how to replace our dysfunctional social conflict management methods.

Clemson, Barry (2009). Denmark rising. Norfolk, VA: Cybernetica Press.

Nonviolent reclamation: Armistice Day

When Armistice Day was first declared it reflected a commemoration of the signing of an armistice, ending the shooting of World War I. It was the agreement to stop the fighting between Germany and the Allies and it was signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

Like a kindergarten class abducted from the peace of an elementary school to be dazzled by the tools of hightech warcraft on a military base, we have all been subjected to the militarization of something which was peaceful--Armistice Day--and now exists to glorify war--Veterans Day.

This is how a peace culture becomes a war culture. Find the pieces that represent gentle transformation toward peace--e.g., the signing of a peace accord--and transmogrify that to a great honor and adulation for those who invade and occupy someone else's land in the name of empire behind the banner of lies. The violent warrior may lose his life but if we can valorize, indeed transcendentalize, his sacrifice, we can actually recruit more toward war. Show us how we can die for honor too! It is American jihad, glorifying the objectively insane practice of taking a certain number of our people and marching them into the fatal jaws of the beast of war, all the while showing that the culture will fawn over them even more if they do die. Are you nothing alive? Be something dead.

It is time to reclaim this as a day of peace, just as Christmas, Dr. King's birthday, Gandhi's Salt March launch, Easter, Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday, Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemoration, Gandhi's birthday, Rosa Parks's sit-down day and other days should be noted as Peace Days. What other days can we add or transform? Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day, Thanksgiving into a real spirit day of thanks to Native Americans and gestures of reparation. A culture of peace would orient itself around such days from a pluralistic appreciation for positive peace--peace and justice by peaceable means. I would celebrate September 9 as Swords Into Plowshares Day, on the anniversary of the original 1980 Plowshares act of hammering a nuclear weapon nosecone into a symbolic plowshare. These aren't days to stop our work, necessarily, but to transform it to works of positive peace, to times of peace education and peace enculturation.

In the US, Armistice Day was first declared in 1919 by Woodrow Wilson, resolved as such by Congress in 1926, and made into a federal holiday in 1938. After WWII, a bunch of Kansas Republicans took the Armistice out of the day in their successful campaign to transmogrify the day from a peace day to a day to honor Veterans. That campaign, started in 1953 (how well I remember, as a two-year old in Minnesota), quickly succeeded in the McCarthy Era with a Kansan war hero president, and it's been Veterans Day, a war glorification day ever since Congress declared it so in 1954.

Time to declare peace and live peace and celebrate peace and honor peacemaking, not warmaking. Let us conclude with a war poem from Wilfred Owen, young Brit in the trenches in WWI, on the recruitment lie versus war reality. Owen referred sarcastically to the recruitment language of the day, from Horace, dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori: It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland. Then he gives us the real picture of dying in misery from a poison gas attack.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like
hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our
backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep.
Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all
blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped
Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of
fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was
yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green
sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering
dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's
sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling
from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell
with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen wrote this from the trenches, where he died shortly after. Time to end the war worship.

Thinking like an editor

How do peace and justice activists use local media to promote their campaign goals?

First, it's crucial to develop our own peace media, and most peace and justice groups have that done. Social networking, list serves, websites, email lists, and even old fashioned phone trees are normal organizing practice. We know how to whip ourselves fairly well, and we need to spend organizing time doing that. Part of the internal movement communication is issue education, part is logistically informative, and part is motivational. But what about recruitment?

Interesting and enlivening others who may have some value affinity but have not be involved is a challenge. Bringing them to events, encouraging them to participate in online groups, and activating them in campaigns is not easy. It means using local media, including mainstream newspapers and radio. To succeed in that, start learning to think like an editor of a mainstream local paper or mainstream local radio station.

“Media intervention assumes that publishers and journalists, especially at the local media level, can disregard the interest of their specific audiences, but communication theory suggests that this assumption is unnatural and economically impossible” (Gilboa, 2009, p. 470).

Who are the "specific audiences"? Generally, two categories, each with subgroups.

First, readers and listeners. The editor is thinking of two groupings. One, the middle. How can the content of the media interest the most consumers (readers and listeners)? They like lively communication, not too angry, not weak, but engaging. They like sympathetic stories but not cloying sentimentality. They don't care much for jargon. Two, those who will be offended by partisan messaging. The editor needs to be able to handle that and each editor has a different tolerance level. Learn it and respect it.

Second, money bosses. The owners have an agenda and each editor needs to account for that. If your message is outside that box you will be rejected. Learning those boundaries is also important. This category also includes advertisers, each of which has its own relationship to the media outlet in question. If you can appreciate these you stand a stronger chance for success.

Is all this possible? Of course, and much of it is experimental. You try and you are rejected. Call. Ask. Listen. You'll learn as much from the subtext of your relationship to an editor as you will from the spoken information. Each editor has simultaneous and conflicting pressures.

Happily, one of them is for content. If you get good at framing and composing your content, you win. You earn the trust of each editor and you maintain it for ongoing local mainstream media access. This doesn't mean you have to blunt or dumb down your message, but it does mean that you have to be the best message composer you can be operating using nonviolent communication, coupled with gentle personalism in your relational work with editors.

References
Gilboa, Eytan. (2009). Media and conflict resolution. In Bercovitch, Jacob; Kremenyuk, Victor; & Zartman, I. William (Eds.). The Sage handbook of conflict resolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p.p. 455-474.

Integrating our relational work

(Joe Rose on the Bad River Reservation on Gitchii Guumii)

Consensus organizing argues that you really don’t know what people need or desire until you meet them and have built a relationship with them. Relationship building is the heart of all effective organizing work and, in particular, consensus organizing, which believes relationship inside and outside the community can be developed for the common good (Ohmer & DeMasi, 2009, p. 67).

Often the difference between a campaign that sparkles its way to success and one that fizzles out fast is what Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin
--founders of the Catholic Worker movement--call gentle personalism. All that means is that our relationships are at the center of our social movements. Mass action means individual connection. There is no dichotomy except those which are false.

So, for example, when we were organizing to affirm treaty rights in northern Wisconsin, James Schlender, Joe Rose and Walter Bresette would go out as lone emissaries to hostile groups and outreach with respectful and courageous assertion. They were fearless, walking through crowds of racists who were armed and dangerous, telling the members of a Rod and Gun club, for example, that the treaty rights were going to be their best friend in the end, if they wanted to save the habitat of wildlife. It was a winning, if risky, strategy. Schlender, a brilliant and sometimes caustic lawyer, came out of one meeting to find his tires slashed.
Bresette (pictured), a charismatic speaker and activist on the national and international levels, was told by the founder of one of the most racist groups, "Nice speech. You know this means war." Rose, sometimes accompanied by his son, Joe Dan Rose, knew everyone, was quite grounded locally, was a Mdewin spiritual leader, and had no serious problems. All three used their own brand of relational work to help the campaign and all three were effective in their own differing ways.

When we just organize through mass media that component is missing. When we argue logically and ignore relationships, we are not promoting our campaigns as well as we could. Combining gentle personalism and media work is a stronger package of organizing approaches than either alone.

Dorothy Day said that the reason she was able to keep going for so many decades and not lose community members faster than she gained them was that she was able to apologize sincerely. She was curt, authoritarian, and dismissive on occasion, and would return to the conflict to express regret for her behavior. She didn't demand perfection and she admitted her own lack of it. This was what she called her secret. She would also simply spend the time with a person others avoided, listening. She was massively busy and yet might be seen sitting in a corner listening to one of the most beaten down street people, hearing that person's story and pain. All this is gentle personalism and it is all relational work.

There is not enough time to do all that we know is helpful. We have to make priorities with our time and other resources as we work to change social norms, public policy, and practices. Honoring the place of relational upkeeping work is important.

References
Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hoka hey!

Trying to understand Native American nonviolence requires substantial context. Some of the elements might include the following.

US-Indian law: a double-edged sword
When tribes were overrun by the Euro-invasion, the tribal sovereignties were forfeit in favor of the so-called “trust” relationship, defined in the Chief Justice Marshall’s 1831 opinion Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, in which Marshall described the tribes in a state of “pupilage.” (Slade: online) Marshall may have been referring to the incorporation of a unique Cherokee Syllabary just a decade earlier, in 1821, by Sequoyah, though literacy rates among the Cherokee immediately skyrocketed past those of their EuroAmerican neighbors (Arnold and Plymire 2003, 715). This corpus of law has permitted the abrogation of treaties on the one hand and has subsequently been used to protect the tribes on the other. In a further and updated paradox, this body of law has been used to provide elevated and more robust levels of environmental protection for both reservation land and even ceded territory, while at the same time leaving open an avenue to negotiate government-to-government for US disposal of federally managed wastes—nuclear waste in particular—on tribal lands.

When white sportsmen’s groups and resort owners associations opposed Anishinabe treaty rights in the 1980s, tribal leader Walter Bresette predicted they would come to appreciate those treaty rights as the best environmental protection for all. He was scoffed at and then proven correct. Treaty rights law has been defended nonviolently and has, in turn, provided a tool in the nonviolent tool chest of various tribes.

Indigenous alliance

While I am from one nation of indigenous peoples, there are an estimated 500 million indigenous peoples or some 5,000 nations of indigenous peoples worldwide. We are in the Cordilleras, East Timor, New Zealand, Australia, Tibet, New Caledonia, Hawaii, North America, South America, and beyond. We are not populations nor minority groups. We are peoples and nations of peoples. Under international law we meet the criteria of nation states with each having a common economic system, language, territory, history, culture, and governing institutions—conditions under which indicate nations of peoples.
—Winona LaDuke (LaDuke, 2002: 211)

The alliance with indigenous peoples worldwide will vastly assist Native Americans in their ongoing nonviolent assertion of their sovereignty, their treaty rights and their ethnic and human rights. An essential element of the theory and practice of nonviolence is to alter the asymmetry of power relations through coalitions internally and externally. Thus, even though the US is the largest military the world has ever seen, victories can be won in opposition to the US government, and those victories are much more likely when the smaller groups—bands, tribes, or even nations of Native Americans—join with other indigenous peoples in whatever ways they can transnationally. People like Winona LaDuke make that happen on an ongoing, systemic basis. The results are sometimes quick, sometimes long in coming, but are amongst the most fruitful organizational work in the trend toward Native nonviolent power.

Nonviolent warriors

It looked bad for us. Then I heard voices crying in our language: “Take courage! This is a good day to die! Think of the children and the helpless at home!” So we all yelled “Hoka hey!” and charged the cavalrymen.

—Iron Hawk, quoted in Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk: 101)

Many suspect that the real reason we admire warriors is not so much that they will kill enemies, but rather more that they are prepared to die. Indeed, the fallen warriors on the losing side are remembered longer than the victors, oftentimes. It is telling, however, that some Native American tribes taught that war means warriors experiencing suffering and pain as much, or more, than inflicting that on others. In her germinal study Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich recounts the practices of the Taulipang Indians of South America, who, when victorious, sat on biting ants, passing a cord covered with such ants through the mouth and nose. (Ehrenreich: 12) This is far closer to the empathy with victims so notably absent in, for example, pilot training for air force bombers and fighters, where the officers are trained to make sorties that may inflict flaming death on hundreds of people and come back to base for beer and pizza, laughing together about the rush a good bombing run can provide. Which is the advanced culture?

Nonviolence is largely about the willingness to sacrifice and the unwillingness to sully that sacrifice by shedding someone else’s blood. At the heart, then, of the warrior cultures both violent and nonviolent, is the concept of selfless sacrifice. This is why Gandhi was so excited about the nonviolent Muslim movement coming out of the warlike Pashtuns under Badshah Khan and it is why Native Americans can make some of the most powerful nonviolent warriors. Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., in his germinal God Is Red, noted, “Death merely marks a passage from one form of experience to another. Rather than fearing death, tribal religions see it as an affirmation of life’s reality.” (Deloria: 177) Whether using violent or nonviolent means to fight, the willingness to die while protecting the vulnerable ones is a mark of the warrior and is understandable across most cultures. Sadly for the violent warrior, he is usually hated by the other side, while the nonviolent warrior can gradually win respect and even love from the people—if not the leadership—on the other side.

We can see the power of the nonviolent warrior transformation across the globe, from the history of the Badshah Khan in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the indigenous nonviolent struggles for their lifeways throughout the Americas. Gandhi always felt that one ought to learn to be a warrior and then one might be ready to learn to elevate the method of struggle to that of a nonviolent warrior. He stressed purification and self-discipline, two qualities valued by combat troops in their most proud moments. Indeed, Gandhi was very excited upon meeting the huge Abdul Ghaffar Khan—upon whom his Pashtun warrior people had bestowed the honorific Badshah Khan. Khan was a hereditary leader, a natural leader, and a nonviolent leader. He was Gandhi’s most stalwart ally even in the most fractious days of the Indian National Congress and he showed again and again the courage and self-sacrifice it takes to wage nonviolent liberatory struggle.

Sociologist Al Gedicks examines the Native struggles against transnational extractive industry corporations and recounts the story of the natural heirs to the nonviolent campaign of rainforest indigenous lifeways protection led by Chico Mendes. A military dictatorship, in power from 1964-1985 was supported by the US administrations, and indigenous opposition grew steadily as mining and timber extraction corporations ruined vast sections of the Amazon rainforest that provided Native peoples with everything. On one occasion, 400 indigenous Kayapo leaders in warpaint converged on a federal courthouse. One of their leaders, Paiakan, said to the assembled press, “my people were great warriors. We were afraid of nothing. We are still not afraid of anything. But now, instead of war clubs, we are using words.” (Gedicks: 10)

The Native trends have always competed as tensions over injustices grew; while some tribes were drifting toward final showdowns with the invading US settlers and armed forces in the last half of the 19th century, various chiefs were desperately singing death songs as they led warriors into generally suicidal battles with vast armies equipped with mechanized tools of genocide, including machine guns. Others—known only locally nowadays because they weren’t as dramatic as the arrow-shooting suicide squads—were on the peacepath. Chief Sarah Winnemucca of the Piutes, for example, learned the language of the invader, and methodically outreached to the common whites from coast to coast in speaking tours, telling the stories of bloodshed and robbery, stories of the peaceful Native ways, and insisting on justice. She wooed and wowed audiences in San Francisco and Boston, laboriously wrote a book documenting the facts of the invasion as she understood it, and appealed passionately to the sense of justice amongst the whites—just as Dr. King would do thousands of times 80 years later. Indeed, one of her biographers, in describing that portion of her life, calls it “A different kind of battle.” (Morrison: 145)

References
Arnold, Ellen L., and Darcy C. Plymire, “The Cherokee Indians and the internet,” in: Dines, Gail, and Jean M. Humez, eds., Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader, 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 2003.

Black Elk, online: http://msnbc.com/onair/msnbc/TimeandAgain/archive/wknee/1890.asp?cp1=1.

Deloria, Jr., Vine, God Is Red. NYC: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. NYC: Metropolitan Books, 1997.

Gedicks, Al, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2001.

LaDuke, Winona, The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings. Stillwater MN: Voyageur Press, 2002.

Morrison, Dorothy Nafus, Chief Sarah: Sarah Winnemucca’s Fight for Indian Rights. Portland OR: Oregon Historical Society Press.

Slade, JD, Lynn S., “The Federal Trust Responsibility In A Self-Determination Era,” online: http://library.lp.findlaw.com/articles/file/00312/009042/title/Subject/topic/Indian%20%20Native%20Populations%20Law_Treaties/filename/indiannativepopulationslaw_1_210#N_7_.

Ken Brown, friend and peace educator

My friend Ken Brown just crossed over this week and we lit a candle for him at Whitefeather Peace House to symbolize the light he brought to all of us for his 77 years. That light burns on in the hearts and minds he touched for decades as he taught peace and the values of nonviolence and compassion at Manchester College in Indiana, who have an excellent remembrance of Ken on their site.

The notice came from Abby Fuller, Manchester sociologist:

Our beloved Ken Brown, retired professor and long-time director of our peace studies program here at Manchester, died early yesterday of complications from an auto-immune disorder that had been diagnosed this summer. A link to the press release from Manchester College is at http://www.manchester.edu/OCA/PR/Files/News/KenBrownDies.htm.

Viona, Chris, Katy (current director of our peace studies program), and Michael have indicated that they can be reached at KenBrownStories@gmail.com or 702 East Ninth St., North Manchester, IN 46962. There is also a web site at which you can sign a guestbook and read the moving tributes from Ken's devoted current and former students and colleagues and friends (www.caringbridge.org/visit/kenbrown2).

On a personal note, I recall learning about Ken Brown's discussions with his students that extended beyond the classroom and into his home, every week, for decades, even after he retired four years ago. That touched me because I had been doing the same thing at Northland College back in Wisconsin, but I had wondered about the ethics of that. I had Northland College kids involved in the peace communities I lived in beginning many years before I started teaching, when I held peace and justice meetings at my cabin. Ken was the first to really validate that for me as a good thing to do within our field of Peace and Conflict Studies. While Ken's discipline of doing this weekly was too much for me (I tried for a year and his practice was too hard, too unsustainable for me), I felt validated by Ken.

I think that is one of the great gifts that Ken brought to his students and colleagues. We felt validated by Ken, and he was so solid in his scholarship, his philosophy and his activism for a better world, that we felt bolstered by Ken. In turn, I know that Ken passed along that trait. Even an old curmudgeon like me can learn to nurture students. I'll never come close to Ken's lifetime of students-into-leaders that Ken achieved, but his inspiration lights my way.

It becomes even more personal when I recall how nervous I was upon the publication of my second book, Meek Ain't Weak: Nonviolent Power and People of Color. I wrote it out of love and anger, bringing my own experience to my analysis of how strategic nonviolence came to the world. I began the book by asserting that it wasn't from the historic peace churches; it was from people of color--Gandhi, King, Kaunda, Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Sutherland, Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hahn, and so forth. Ken, who was a minister in one of those peace churches, who was a professor at a peace church college, and who directed the peace studies program there more focused on nonviolence than any of the other peace church colleges, gave me a very supportive review. As someone who operates in the peace world but who struggles to learn and practice nonviolent communication (just ask all those with whom I've fought), Ken's gracious words about a book that was also a strong call back to Gandhian nonviolent roots and away from the masked rockthrower element that has so eroded our movements, his words meant a great deal to me. Others, including Arun Gandhi, didn't like the book and it got poor reviews except for Ken, who was gracious enough to overlook its drawbacks and picked out the pieces of value.

While I met Ken through the Consortium of Peace Reserch, Education and Development, and we honored him through our successor association, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, I really got to know him a bit better via the Concerned Philosophers for Peace when he invited me to come be a keynote speaker and workshop leader where he hosted it just a couple of years ago at Manchester. He did that to express support for PeaceVoice, an effort to strengthen our peace and nonviolence outreach to regular folks across the country by encouraging and enabling peace and nonviolence intellectuals to write for the mainstream media. Ken's analysis and mine, once again, were so close that he wanted to help a colleague spread the word. Mostly, I just really enjoyed visiting Ken, his home institution, and his tribe of peace philosophers, which include his family.

Ken Brown's candle has burned down in our Whitefeather Peace House common meal room. But Ken Brown's innumerable candles burn on in the hearts and minds of the entire peace world. We will keep the flame alive, Ken. Thank you for a life well and truly lived. Thank you for a generosity of intellect and compassion that will help us see our next steps.

Security forces

When Oscar Grant III was murdered by an Oakland, California white policeman, the community's explosive reaction was understandable and justifiable. Grant was unarmed and on the ground. Indeed, he was shot in the back. How blatant is that?

Now that his killer has been sentenced to far less--two years--than many of us are sentenced to when we symbolically disarm weapons (my last sentence for cutting down poles that supported a thermonuclear command system was three years in prison and many received longer sentences), the black community and its allies in Oakland are angry indeed. There were 152 arrests when the outraged mob confronted the police on the streets following the sentencing. With "protectors" like the Oakland police, who needs murdering gangs?

Meanwhile, in Congo, more than 600 women and girls were "gang-raped by security forces" for the crime of being refugees in flight from "security forces."

Security? Do armed thugs deserve the term "security" forces? If so, the word security has an oxymoronic definitional issue these days.

It is time to stop relying on police and soldiers to handle conflict, but this would mean taking civil society responsibility for that and doing it nonviolently. The methods of nonviolence are there if civil society is ever interested enough to give it a try. We have learned enough to at least engage in pilot projects--neighborhoods that use civil society de-escalation, mediation, counseling, and other nonviolent sanctions--both positive and negative--and professional relational workers. This is way past warm fuzzy and deeply practical.

How much insecurity do the 'security forces' have to inflict before we are ready to try something innovative, even if only on a small scale experimentally? I would challenge the folks who don't like violence on the part of police and soldiers to think about this. If we see Oakland, California, with a black mayor and black police chief, unable to stop this kind of white cop violence, perhaps the problem goes beyond just race. Perhaps it's the reliance upon others to handle our conflict for us. Perhaps it's giving weapons to people and telling them it's somehow honorable to shoot others or threaten to shoot them. We give away far too much to these people when we do that.

Happy Birthday, Ven. Rinpoche

He arrived with a small retinue and was almost to the front door of the Native American Center when a woman walked past with a fat little dachshund on a leash. He placed his hands together, facing the dog, and bowed deeply, head tilted to the same listening degree as the dog's. The dog's human looked bewildered but the dog seemed to be communing with the robed monk. It was one of those special intercultural, interspecies moments.

The Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile of the Dalai Lama spoke recently where I teach, at Portland State University. He was hosted by Dr. Cornel Pewewardy, Director of the Native American Studies program, at the Native American Student and Community Center on campus. The Prime Minister, the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche, who was born Lobsang Tenzin on November 5, 1939 in Tibet, is believed by Tibetan Buddhists to be the fifth reincarnation of the Samdhong Rinpoche.

At age 20, in 1959, Ven. Rinpoche fled for his life along with the Dalai Lama, as the invading Red Chinese Army was killing monks, nuns and targeting the religious leadership in particular. They have been based out of Dharamsala, India ever since, and advocating for nonviolence and at least autonomy, if not freedom, for Tibet. Ven. Rinpoche has taught both Tibetan Buddhism and Gandhian philosophy at several universities in India and is fluent in Tibetan--his mother language--Hindi and English.

He is a gracious man. He moves slowly, talks carefully, and smiles big as he finishes his points. This is either a result of his personality or his training, and the meta-message is nonverbal but clear, "I'm saying something that some people may regard as controversial, but I mean the very best for all of humankind even as I struggle for the good of my people, who have suffered under occupation for decades. Wouldn't you like to agree and be my friend and ally?"

Cornel Pewewardy is Kiowa and Comanche. He sang a Welcome song to all--the crowd was mixed Tibetans, PSU students and interested community members. Dr. Pewewardy made everyone welcome and set the mood as honoring the Original People. The ties with the occupation of America by Europeans and then others were not stated but were obvious to the Tibetans' plight as a tiny unarmed population overwhelmed by a massive violent occupying and colonizing neighbor. In the moment, the struggles look hopeless.

Pewewardy and Ven. Rinpoche take the longer view. You can see their confidence in what Dr. King called the long moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. It reminded me also of the story of the Singing Revolution in Estonia, a tiny country trampled by Germany and Russia as they rampaged toward each other in war after war for centuries. "Patience is a weapon," says the narrator in the film by that name.

The Chinese will eventually retreat and Tibet will be independent. That was not the question; the question was how to make it happen the soonest with the fewest costs. Ven. Rinpoche described some of the forces and strategies, helping situate us all in that struggle.

Happy Birthday, Ven. Rinpoche, and many more before you again reincarnate!

I have spoken

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone.
I have spoken.
—dying words of Crazy Horse

Hot war between the tribes and the US was never going to end well for the tribes, and never did. Even the greatest military coalition-builder of all the Native nations, a Shawnee named Tecumseh, born in the middle of the so-called French and Indian War, in 1768, was weaned on the advantages of coalition, since his tribe was in league with the French against the English. Tecumseh took the concept instead to all the Native nations he could, arguing that their primary identity was not tribal, but Native. He had watched as the English betrayed their solemn words of peace and killed his father, Puckeshinwa, as well as his hero and mentor, the war chief Cornstalk. He was eventually a holdout from amongst Native leaders, many of whom signed peace treaties after defeat in battle. Tecumseh refused and warriors of many tribes eventually flocked to him as the Revolutionary War years altered the treaty relationships on the one hand, but kept the armed forces of England and the colonists busy elsewhere on the other. Tecumseh and his spiritual charismatic brother Tenskwatawa recruited warriors from as far away as Minnesota and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. (Josephy: 157) It was, by far, the greatest Native coalition ever. Nonetheless, in the end, the sheer firepower and overwhelming numbers of EuroAmericans overran all Native lands. Tecumseh had many warriors from many tribes but his numbers and arsenals were puny alongside what whites had with cities full of recruits and boatloads of European immigrants arriving constantly.

One can only speculate on the likelihood of doing better through negotiation, and that speculation is more logical when one does examine the results of the tribes who did negotiate and never went to war. Those tribes did better in the end and still suffered, but didn’t lose as many of their people to war.

Genocide or ethnic cleansing?

There is an easy contrast of images that illustrates the difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide. Both happened to Native Americans, either as a whole people or as nations, as tribes, as bands and as villages, in their nested identities.

Ethnic cleansing image: All of you Jews, out of the room right now.

Genocide image: Soldiers, lock the doors and begin firing at all the Jews.
Of course, the one can shade into the other as behavior degenerates. Certainly, as armed conflict continues, behavior worsens on all sides, generally. From wishing the inconvenient tribes would go west, or north, or up into the mountains, the European invaders who experienced armed resistance from justifiably outraged tribal members began to fear Native Americans so much that the expression, the only good Indian is a dead Indian began to replace a much more nuanced view of tribes and tribal members. Like the shift in Kosovo in 1999 by the dominant Serb oppressors, prejudice turned to ethnic cleansing of some Native American tribespeople in the US, which then turned to genocide at various points.

This is very hard for dominant culture US historians to admit, because even retroactively, genocide is a much more serious international crime against humanity than is ethnic cleansing. The term is avoided unless rationale for invasion is being sought, even in the face of obvious genocide, as in Rwanda in 1994, for example, or, as in the rape, mass murder and torture committed by Bosnian Serbs against Muslims while George H.W. Bush was president. (Power: 288) If the language implies obligation, it is studiously avoided until it coincides with national interest, all too often.

Identity conflict praxis: traditions revisited

Conflict experts tend to lean toward specific theories in attempts to understand and explain group behavior. My bias is toward the complexity models, which make generalizations more problematic, but which account for more elements of good thinking by scholars and practitioners who perceive themselves in disagreement. Indeed, those who prefer single causative theories of conflict hold a measure of the truth, just as those who adhere to a single method of conflict resolution also possess a part of the picture.

More specifically, there are those who classify Native American-dominant culture conflict as ethnic. Some hold that these are largely class conflicts and others point to resource capture and subsequent conflict as the true source. In addition, there are those who define such struggles as race-based. Coming from the interdiscipline, the field, of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, I would assert that each analysis offers a legitimate piece of the whole, and that no one can presume to tell us exactly how to classify the wide range of Native American struggles, campaigns, movements, insurgencies, reform efforts, local leadership battles, treaty rights contests and sovereignty claims. Race, class, ethnicity, resource scarcity, and perhaps most importantly, face (dignity, respect, group self-esteem and standing), are all valid components of the conflict picture, and of the process that continuously evokes and changes the perception of each element. Latin Studies professor Amalia Pallares, a Native Ecuadorian, writes of this praxis in her study of the evolution of grassroots assertion of basic rights in her country:

In contrast to previous analyses that see indigenous struggle as either a class or an ethnic struggle, or see it as both a class and an ethnic struggle, my thesis is that class, race, and ethnicity are remade by the activists in the process of political struggle. (Pallares: 34)

This is the principle of understanding that a system operates in relationship to itself and invariably causes changes throughout the system for each change in a subsystem. When my discussions about nonviolence proceeded with Anishinabe leader Walter Bresette, I changed his perceptions of the power of nonviolence and he changed my views on, and understanding of, warrior cultures. Our co-evolution joined with that of many others and produced systemic changes in the struggle to reaffirm treaty rights—even as that co-evolution wrought changes, however small, in several other struggles for social liberation, environmental protection or peace.

Is identity helpful or harmful? Both. Each tiny element, from the scalplock to the earlock, from the body piercings to the flesh excising, creates another level of identity, of separateness. (Isaacs: 50) And that can create an unthinking group xenophobia, or it can also create unity in the face of oppression. Most would agree that Native Americans have been dramatically oppressed; the tribal identities are generally, then, a point of strength and perseverance, a social good. Nonviolent Native American activists have used that identity in many innovative, positive ways. To the extent that each identity is properly acknowledged and validated, better communication is facilitated. Tribal people almost always get that context clear and correct, generally making intertribal communication and cooperation much better. Non-natives frequently miss the cues and questions that might help them work in better support of tribal people, but those who learn good nonviolent communication skills overcome that deficit quickly.

References
Isaacs, Harold R., Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change. NYC: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

Josephy Jr., Alvin M., The Patriot Chiefs: A Chronicle of American Indian Resistance. 1958. Reprint, NYC: Penguin, 1976.

Pallares, Amalia, From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: The Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Power, Samantha, “A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide. NYC: Basic Books, 2002.

Why the Ds are losers

The Republicans were the party of war under Bush. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis and Afghans died thanks to the Bush regime. War budgets were passed that hollowed out the economy, false puffed-up Wall Street notwithstanding. Finally, Americans chose differently in 2008 and they got different--rhetoric.

Obama could have met Bush's economic disaster with a jobs program that put all Americans to work. He and the Democrats failed to do that. Instead of bailing out the people, they bailed out the wealthy just as blatantly as did Bush.

Obama and the Ds could have radically dialed back military spending--the kind of spending that produces the fewest jobs and the most moral offenses per $billion spent--but they actually increased it, starting with a surge into Afghanistan's doomed occupation. They actually spent MORE on nukes, which is way beyond belief.

Failing to create a peace economy that is sustainable and offers full employment and a lower Gini index of economic inequality made the Democrats losers. Somehow believing that if they just went along with the hawks that they could create more equality in health care was a doomed notion that provided the Rs with all the ammo they needed.

Yes, the fearmongers have been working overtime at Fox News and across the land. Americans are deathly afraid of their own shadows, which ironically and tragically has them buying guns willy-nilly and using them on each other. The frightened ones, rather than really opening up to ideas about how to get along in our world, are building fortified walls, sending troops out to conquer others, and stomping the heads of domestic dissenters.

The Democrats have shown themselves to be Republican-Lite rather than a true alternative, and the country is afraid, so they want the Real Thing. This will be tragic for Americans and everyone else, but the Democrats simply failed to provide a real alternative. Thus, they lost.

Compassion, culture and curricula

Compassion is at the core of the character of Greg Mortenson, founder of an educational movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As told to David Oliver Relin in Three Cups of Tea, that compassion coupled with just enough cultural communication orientation is what saved his projects--mostly schools for village children, especially girls--and probably saved his life a few times too.

Even violent fundamentalist zealots love a humble compassionate fool, and Mortenson--if we believe his book--is clearly a man with an abundance of compassion and a great deal of humility. He also made many cultural errors and recounts some of those errors--at least some of which he became aware and was willing to share--in Three Cups of Tea.

The story: Mortenson, raised in Tanzania and Minnesota by Lutheran missionary parents, becomes a nurse and a mountain climber, using the former to support the latter. When he joins a 1993 expedition to attempt the world's second tallest peak, K2--on the China-Pakistan border--he becomes lost, nearly perishes, and wanders into the tiny village of Korphe, in Baltisan, Pakistan. The villagers nurse him back to health and he swears to Haji Ali, the elder village headman, that he will build a school for the children. He is serious and, after enormous struggle and setbacks (including building a decent bridge over the rampaging mountain river that hems the village uphill from the valley), he raises the funds, gets the materials, and the men from the village literally carry those materials to the village and build the school.

Along the way, circumstances conspired to make his project his life's work.

The mountaineering community more or less got behind his work, led by Jean Hoerni, an inventor and scientist and mountaineer. Hoerni, born in Switzerland in 1924, discovered that transistors could be made from silicon; hence, Silicon Valley. He was, naturally, wealthy, and gave Mortenson the funds for the Korphe School. Once the school was built, he and Mortenson founded the Central Asia Institute, devoted to such projects. Mortenson provided the work and Hoerni endowed CAI with $1 million just before he died.

This work of building schools for rural Muslim children in the wild reaches of Pakistan has been subjected to many massive pressures, including corrupt mullahs who are little more than religious mafiosa dons, demanding a cut of all economic traffic--even schools for impoverished villages in their purview. Mortenson had to seek Sharia law approval twice to override these fatwas against him in the region.

Second, the ongoing war between Pakistan and India over Kashmir erupted for the third time (1947, 1965, and then 1999) a year after the first Islam Bomb--Pakistan tested their first nuke in 1998, which emboldened them, and the Kargil War of May-June 1999 drove thousands of internally displaced refugees straight into the area where Mortenson was working.

Third, events in Afghanistan also sent refugees flooding that part of Pakistan and Mortenson was asked by some of the anti-Taliban warriors to come build schools in the most remote part of Afghanistan. He promised to try. His story in Afghanistan was immediately challenged by the events of 9.11.01 and that gave rise to Mortenson's relationship to the US military.

This is where his work enters a weird nexus of making it easier for the US military to win hearts and minds and thus make the US occupation of Afghanistan more successful by US standards--but also possibly produces more rural schools. After all, Mortenson and his CAI have built more than 130 of them in the two countries, in very fundamentalist regions, where everything revolves around Islam.

Will his projects survive the eventual evacuation of US troops from the region? This is unknown, of course, since most humanitarian workers know the risks of working with any armed forces. Once you hook up it's very hard to survive without them. There are excellent reasons that a few NGOs--e.g. Mercy Corps--never develop that dependency. However, Mortenson has a long and proven record of not trying to control curricula in his schools, never ever missionizing--indeed, he often prays along with other Muslims and dresses in modest local clothing. He is known for fiscal integrity, suffering privations in his early years in order to save his personal funds for building the first school and watching every penny of donated money to make sure he wasted none of it. Mostly, his relationships with locals and his role as the only outsider on staff, makes him and CAI far more respected on the ground and gives him a different orientation than some NGOs who are seen as outsiders attempting to missionize in some fashion. His work is not seen as lots of honkies descending to enlighten the savages, but rather as one guy who fell in love with a people and is working for their benefit.

We will see how that ends. While he is clearly promoting peace, he is not a pacifist, nor does he shy away from any military connections. Indeed, he is a US military veteran and routinely advises the US military and the Pakistan military. His partners in and out of that region are often former military. This means his notion of peace is somewhat skewed toward the negative peace, the imposed peace by threat of violence for infractions of the peace, but he is also doing so in a harsh, violent region of throat-slitting sacrificial rams, lambs and fatwa 'justice'. So far, so good. Will his schools actually bring peace some day? He says that educating the children, especially the girls, will provide part of that process, and of course this is correct, though a part of me wonders if protecting all this with the guns of the US empire or the Northern Alliance or the Pakistan military is sustainable.

Despite this sort of nonrelationship to nonviolence, I hope his basic program of school-building continues to succeed and I hope it survives Brand USA because that militarized logo is going down, worldwide. We shall see what rises in its place. A generation of women educated for peace would be ideal, and perhaps it will come to pass despite the contamination of assault rifles and air force menacing. Mortenson was critical of the US military bombing in Afghanistan, but seems fine with much of the rest of what the US military is doing there. A kinder, gentler empire, however, is not a likely path to peace. I worry for Mortenson's sustainable safety and for the ongoing protection of his schools, especially now that the Taliban is coming back to power.

Back to power? Yes, as predicted by many of us in the grassroots side of conflict forensics, that handwriting was on the wall from the day Bush chose bombs over bargaining. It may be a circuitous power-sharing route, but the harsh fundies are baaaaaack and I worry for the children who have benefited from the work Mortenson has done.

References
Mortenson, Greg, & Relin, David Oliver (2006). Three cups of tea: One man’s mission to promote peace…one school at a time. New York: Penguin.

What is conflict resolution?

Conflict resolution is problem solving.

One problem is emotion. Each human involved in the conflict brings a series of emotional problems. Insofar as they block all other problem solving efforts, they outrank all the other problems. The emotional problems arise alongside the presentation of all other problems. Solving one emotional problem does not solve the next one.

Then the problems are in three basic categories.

First, de-escalation. Escalation of the aspects of any conflict is what makes it progressively more destructive. Stopping the escalation is key to starting transformation.

Second, substance. How can each aspect of the stated content of the conflict be worked out to everyone's satisfaction? This is the nominal conflict over land, rights, freedom, property, ownership, liberty, etc.

Third, communication and process. How do we talk about this? Are there more functional ways we can treat each other throughout this relationship? Are there systems we can design to handle conflict now and in the future?

All of these conflict transformation considerations are vital in the creation of civil society movements as well as inside families. Variants of these elements of conflict management should inform efforts to plan, to recruit, to confront, to negotiate and to move forward together. Each human enterprise down to the most libertarian individualistic activity immediately or eventually needs to transform conflict from destructive to constructive. This is how we work with each other, friend or foe, and we can do it in ways that either keep us spinning our wheels, stuck in the ditch, or that get us moving forward.

When extremism is reasonable

There is nothing moderate about real nonviolence.

Nonviolence is a lifestyle that would be moderate indeed in a culture that practiced the values of nonviolence amongst its members and toward others. Nonviolence in the US and many other places in the world is quite radical, quite immoderate, and usually some form of challenge to the status quo.

The essence of nonviolence invites extreme positions, since the consequences of disagreeing with someone who is nonviolent will not be a broken nose or gunshot wound--it's seen as just fine to engage in robust argument with such a person. So nonviolent activists fight amongst each other all the time, sometimes failing to practice the excellent communication skills that best protect them when they take their most cantankerous, contrarian selves out into the wider world of non-pacifists. Listening to pacifists argue about vegetarianism or public policy or strategies is not always a model of nonviolent communication as we could best practice it, though sometimes it is.

Dr. King famously noted in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail that we who proclaim some nonviolent or justice value publicly are often labeled as extremists, and he welcomed that label, noting that "Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

Five years later, just a month after King's assassination, the most radical nonviolent faction of the antiwar movement went into a Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland on May 17, and took the files of young men who were all likely headed to Vietnam and burned those files in the parking lot outside. They stayed to publicly witness this and pronounce that war so immoral and so extreme that it was best challenged by acts of extreme nonviolence, extreme love. Their action was so extremely challenging in an extreme time that it created a nonviolent firestorm of copycat actions, at least three dozen of them across the US, jamming the Selective Service system enough to help slow the war machine.

Like the extreme act of Rosa Parks sitting down on a bus in contravention of decades of Jim Crow segregation, like the sit-ins at lunch counters that were extreme statements made publicly by up to 600 young nonviolent resisters at a time in the South, like the extreme act of black people attempting to register to vote in Selma, Alabama and elsewhere in the head-stomping South, these extremists who burned draft records of young men classified 1-A effectively did something both quite real and quite symbolic. Because it was nonviolent, it was not viewed by most Americans as terrorism that needed to be stamped out by any means, which gave it a window of dialog opportunity. That act of burning draft files and remaining on the scene to be accountable for their actions created a powerful and complex message. Dan Berrigan, one of the Catonsville Nine, finally did with one phrase in a court statement to their critics what King had done with his famous letter, reframing the perspective and cracking open conversation that led to widespread movement:

"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children."

Like the best of all nonviolent actions, it both heightened the confrontation and deepened the invitation. Of course this is not reasonable when we are discussing routine civil society public policy matters such as how the city park budget is spent (unless there are really mortal issues at stake, presumably). Staging a big noisy action with a sit-in to try to force a city council to put in more swing-sets is going to be regarded as counter-productive by most rational citizens. But when a draft is sweeping away hundreds of thousands of young men to fight a war of unprovoked invasion and occupation in a land across the world that never threatened us in any way, interfering with that machinery of death can be a way to call the question, to bring the public into the conversation where there had been so little conversation previously. The so-called Catonsville Nine did just that.

“Seven men and two women, all but forgotten by a new generation, had raised the ante and posed thorny questions that are far from resolved. When is military intervention, governmental deceit, a nuclear first strike, or the overwhelming power of the state over individual rights justified, if at all?” (Polner & O’Grady, 1997, p. 216). A wonderful interview of one of the Catonsville Nine, the late Tom Lewis, and a scholar of nonviolence, Michael True, includes some of the original film footage of the action.

The acts of nonviolence that do the most to help us create and develop much needed national discourse are almost always greeted initially by dismissive claims of extremism. One of the strategic questions posed to all who try to work for peace and justice is, "How can my actions spur the kind of public awareness that creates critical truth-seeking conversation where little has existed?"

References
Polner, Murray, and Jim O’Grady (1997). Disarmed and dangerous: The radical lives and times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. New York: HarperCollins.

Grassroots nonviolence is conflict resolution

One wonders if we are ever going to experience a change of consciousness in this nation that will enable civil society to draw upon its latent power for good, for assertion, for really engaging well in constructive conflict. How many lessons do Americans need before they stop leaning on the crutch, the dysfunctional and inappropriate weapon of violence?

The world was taught another method of waging conflict by Gandhi, though every time the best of his methods were ignored in favor of something deemed faster or more convenient or easier--that is, violence--then all bets were off. Kriesberg (2009, p. 19) noted:

“The Satyagraha campaigns and related negotiations influentially modeled methods of constructive escalation. The strategies of nonviolent action and associated negotiations were further developed in the civil rights struggles in the United States during the 1960s. For many academic analysts, the value of conflicts to bring about desirable social change was evident, but the dangers of failure and counterproductive consequences also became evident."

Unlike conflict scholar Kriesberg, too few other conflict scholars have paid attention to conflict waged from the grassroots, from civil society. Too few conflict practitioners have learned to wage it in an integrated fashion, weaving back and forth from negotiation to civil resistance to implementation to civil resistance to negotiation and so forth. Joan Bondurant analyzed Gandhian nonviolence campaign by campaign--when are we going to get a solid, grounded theory that explains how this works in broad brushstrokes?

My hypothetical is that the difference between nonviolent reformer and nonviolent revolutionary is that the reformer picks a winnable goal and strives for it without a vision for much beyond that. The nonviolent revolutionary envisions a different system, one of egalitarian, nonviolent, liberation of all, sustainable relationships, conflict management systems that don't include retributive justice or war. Then the nonviolent revolutionary works with value-affinity kith and kin to construct one winnable campaign after the next, all toward the vision. It is a lifetime effort and thus must be sustainable for the revolutionary over decades. One must learn to handle and defeat frustration and savor victories, even if one must learn the art of reframing in order to declare them.

The violent revolutionary, however, has it far worse. If, as does happen some 26 percent of the time, he succeeds, he is then in power and must defend that revolution by force of arms against enemies internal and external. There is no end to the violence and it becomes a lifetime of bloodshed without cessation until death. If, as is the case in 74 percent of the cases, he fails, then he lives in ignominy or in more bloodshed as he mounts another war. Either way, it's a life of carnage and killing, never knowing if you've just killed another innocent as collateral damage or if you've just killed a better human than yourself.

The failure of nonviolence often produces counterproductive consequences. So does the failure of violence. So does the failure of apathy and conflict avoidance. While Kriesberg (pictured) is correct that we learn to choose our battles and our methods carefully or risk failure, our chances for success with nonviolence are best, are greatest, and can win without causing massive losses for anyone. It is long past time to end war. It's a stupid problem and humanity needs a nonviolent intifada to shake off war.

References
Kriesberg, Louis (2009). The evolution of conflict resolution. In Bercovitch, Jacob; Kremenyuk, Victor; & Zartman, I. William (Eds.). The Sage handbook of conflict resolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p.p. 15-32.

Head stomping gene?

Do you enjoy learning? Do you like making friends? Are you the kind of person who enjoys learning about different people and seeing if they might be new friends of yours?

If you are, don't feel like you are to blame. Turns out that you are not only genetically programmed toward checking out different cultures, but you are likely a flaming liberal too.

The logical follow-up is to track the genetic predisposition toward getting a smaller, vulnerable creature surrounded, down on the ground, and then bravely stomp on her head--and later tell an interviewer that it would never have happened if the police had been doing their job (wasn't that Eichmann's defense?). I think that gene is far more ancient, reptilian, and manifests itself in the most lizardy part of our central nervous system. I like to call it the Rush Limbic gene.

These porcine southern white males who can actually justify this kind of atrocity to themselves apparently have no clue as to how horrific their behavior is to folks. There was a reason the rest of us told them in 1964 that they weren't brave, they have no excuse, that we were in fact now passing the Civil Rights Act that, we hoped, would let them gracefully grow up and stop their bullying. We tried to affirm those victims the next year further with the Voting Rights Act, which again rewarded nonviolence with legal protections.

Was the young woman blameless? No, she was beyond assertive as she moved aggressively toward Rand Paul with her sign; Fox News was fast to point out that aggressive protester behavior. Did that justify a head stomp? Even Fox News affirmed it did not. What is a fact is that if the head stomper had been black he would have been cuffed and stuffed at best, shot dead instantly possibly, by the Kentucky police. But the courageous head stomper was free to go on television later, on his own terms. Mr. Plucky Defender of the Free World would not allow the cameraperson to film his face, so all you saw was his piously folded hands with his wedding ring prominently displayed.

Imagine who gets to benefit from that marriage. One wonders how often his wife and children have been down with their heads on the (hopefully metaphorical) curb? The Louisville Stomper (actually from Paris, Kentucky) is quite an example of the Tea Party manly political movement--he's unemployed with a working wife and somehow found $2,500 to donate to Rand Paul. What a mistake, Mr. Lincoln. You know you should have let them secede. They could have ethnically cleansed all the African Americans and anyone with the compassion gene and we in the North and West would have been so much better off.