Nonviolence is high maintenance

Last night I went to the first Annual Genevieve Nelson Nonviolence and Economic Human Rights Award. I was inspired enough to purchase more decks of meal tickets to give to my students, but troubled by the tone of the performers, both Mic Crenshaw and Good Sista Bad Sista.

Genny Nelson founded Sisters of the Road Cafe more than 20 years ago on the principles and practices of nonviolence. This has informed and indeed provided the foundation for her personal, public, and political activism since the beginning, since before the founding of the Cafe, when she was a young Catholic Worker, living with the poorest Portlanders in her own house. The Catholic Worker philosophy was begun with Dorothy Day's adherence to the values of pacifism and working to serve the poor and concomitantly offer nonviolent resistance to militarism. Genny has always lived those ideals remarkably faithfully. She has lived her entire adult life as a person making an income that would be meager for a single person, but she also had two children. Sisters always decided to employ more people rather than pay a few well, a decision that many nonprofits do not make.

She created a place of nonviolence, where people would find safety, solace and respite from the harsh life of the street and a nutritious meal for very low price indeed. The 50 meal coupons I bought were just $2 each, a true bargain in our $5.50-cup-of-designer-coffee world. I give them to students, which opens space for us to discuss Sisters and its mission and how they might get involved. I tell them that if there is any Portland institution that is putting the principles of nonviolence into play, it's Sisters.

But now I'm worried about the need to maintain those principles. Calling them operant and living them are two radically different propositions. For her health, Genny had to retire and immediately the tendency to undermine the principles of nonviolence began to reverse the ethos she built for 30 years. Violent people began to edge closer to the Cafe and soon were doing drug deals right in front of the big plate glass windows. That atmosphere crept into the Cafe, with more threats, more blustering, than ever. Staff, lacking the charismatic and immensely respected presence that Genny provided, began to put out the word that they were not going to limit themselves to a nonviolent response to violence. Rather than an a priori assumption that leads to creative development of committed nonviolence, the new environment at Sisters is more of a debate about whether or not to maintain that value.

This was made evident in the entertainment choices for the ironically named Peaceroots ceremony. Good Sista Bad Sista did physical punching and chopping motions during their poetry to show their aggression and anger. Mic Crenshaw, at an event nominally dedicated to nonviolence, went out of his way to proclaim, "I'm not a pacifist," and then alluded to what he would do when his "back is against the wall."

These performers have all the rights in the world to call for violence. It's their performance. But who chose to line them up for this event? Who is deciding to send a mixed message about nonviolence on the one hand and using violence on the other? These are decisions that need review. As Genny lies in a hospital bed trying to outlive her heart attacks and diabetes, people are giving her awards and then breaking her heart with an increasing erosion of the core of her philosophy and practice.

Nonviolence isn't easy and it doesn't maintain itself. It takes an enormous amount of work, work that Genny did for decades. Who will take it up now at Sisters? The answer is either, a) everyone on the staff, from Executive Director to dishwasher, or b) not enough of them.

There is no more robust institution of structural nonviolence in Portland, Oregon than Sisters of the Road Cafe. Its future may be prosperous and program-heavy, but will it actually promote systemic change, as Genny always did? Or will it erode into just another nice social service organization? Or will it become more open to a so-called 'diversity of tactics,' welcoming those who struggle with violent rhetoric and the threat of violence? This is not known now, but there are troubling signs. Pacifist anarchist Ammon Hennacy had a great answer to Mic Crenshaw and the self-proclaimed radicals who proudly proclaim that they are ready to use violence when their backs are against the wall--which is exactly where the backs of those who use nonviolence have always been, from the struggle to get the British out of India to the nonviolent liberation movements in Zambia and Ghana, to the Civil Rights movement to the Filipinas up against the US-supported Marcos regime, to the Velvet Revolution facing the Soviet war machine to Serb kids up against the bloodiest European dictator since Hitler, and on and on. When your back is against the wall is when the nonviolence actually matters. Hennacy said being nonviolent between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals. We will see what the community and the Sisters leadership decide about Genny's legacy.

Left out: Back to the Gandhian basics

[Old photo from Sisters of the Road Cafe, 'Guitar Man' with Genny Nelson]
Many historians, countless analysts and most activists refer to the peace and justice movements as Leftists. But are we? What does that mean?

If Marx and Engels were the founders of the Left, and if Lenin and others carried the banner forward, then who did they exclude?

Pacifists were irrelevant, since the revolution was always envisioned as violent. Armed cadres, the vanguard of the revolution, were the privileged ones.

The poorest of the poor, the lumpen proletariat, were dismissed as unable to achieve the class consciousness required to matter. The beggars on the street, those who had been failed most miserably by the system, were deemed worthless in the quest for revolution.

Feminists who were not merely trying for humanization of women, but who were bringing forth a new model of flattened hierarchy instead of the male Marxist "supreme leader," were never going to advance much in the Old Left.

Which brings us to our case study in creating a Gandhian institution, a different sort of structural nonviolence social apparatus that features all the cast-off elements of the Left and the Right. In Portland, this case study is Sisters of the Road Cafe, and our friend Genny Nelson.

In the aftermath of the fissures, fractures, factionalizing and failures of the Left in America during the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, Genny Nelson turned to a different paradigm and created a synthesis of the best of the leadership of Dorothy Day, Gandhi, and her own brand of elicitive conflict transformation that presaged theorist-practitioners such as John Paul Lederach.

Dorothy and Mohandas both saw in the most disrespected, dismissed and disadvantaged the core of new consciousness, and Genny drew from both. Dorothy and Mohandas were contemporaries, more or less, although Dorothy was younger by almost 30 years. Still, they did some of their most germinal work in the same period of the 1930s, when Gandhi was maturing into a seasoned liberation leader and Day was founding the Catholic Worker movement in the US, a movement that has stayed minor but has gone global.

Gandhi worked extensively with the Dalit, the so-called Untouchables, and he lived with them several times as he organized in various Indian cities on different campaigns. He called them Harijan, Children of God, and was slow to develop his own consciousness about them--he still supported the caste system in the early 1920s--but by the last two decades of his life he worked as much on fighting the notion that an ethnic group should be born into a low status as he did for the independence of India. In guru-culture India, Gandhi was seen by many as a demigod, and by many more as a holy man. Many asked him to perform marriages. By the end of his life he would only officiate or bless marriages that were of a Dalit and a non-Dalit. In interviews with western journalists he declared that if he could set policy for a post-colonial free India he would end the caste system.

At the same time, in the US, Dorothy Day started her Catholic Worker, serving the poorest of the poor, feeding them and sheltering them. Like Gandhi, she responded to great need out of a genuine connection to humankind--her time, her love, her care and her devotion were to the remnants, the dregs, the left-out lumpens. She lived with them in her house and spent hours listening to them. Day's roots were leftist but she rejected those roots in part because she said the communists were all theory and no action, except the action of hate and violence. Her attraction to leftist thinking had to do with ending income and wealth disparity, not to the violent revolutionary bombast. There were no communist houses of hospitality for those ruined by the capitalist war system. Dorothy also felt strongly that the Catholic church had no class analysis and no tendency to do systemic change, only a charity model. She took what she identified as the strongest components of the leftist thinking and the church's actions and left the rest on the cutting room floor.

Genny Nelson jumped into that harness in her young adult life and has been doing it ever since. She is not a national leader for two reasons. One, she doesn't have that desire nor style. Two, she can't travel much and is often in trouble when she does because of her lifelong struggle against the most debilitating form of diabetes. Indeed, she is in the cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit in an Indiana hospital as I write this, in recovery from her second heart attack, suffered as she visited her mother. She had hoped to then spend time with her children in Chicago. I've only known Genny since 2002, but it seems that when she travels she is so vulnerable that she is likely to end up in the hospital at some point, though this is the most serious bout to date.

So Genny was working in the streets in Portland as a young Catholic Worker and asked the skid row lumpen what might be a good thing. They said they wanted some community gathering place, someplace to eat a meal together that wasn't charity but wasn't capitalist--that didn't charge much and that wasn't concerned with quick turnover of the tables to make more money. They didn't want to get any religious proselytizing. She listened and acted and thus birthed Sisters of the Road Cafe. It never had a supreme leader, ran on a pacifist philosophy, and produced two generations of lumpen proletariat in Portland who have a distinct class consciousness and the organizational ability to struggle with nonviolent means for more justice, more equality, more opportunity and more community collective security through creating a culture of peace.

Genny has never sold herself as a Dorothy Day or a Gandhi--indeed, I think she cusses just to throw us off the scent. But she flattened the hierarchy of Sisters and that movement in the streets of Portland more than either Gandhi or Day did with their movements--for all their love and vision and brilliance, Mohandas Gandhi and Dorothy Day were both supreme leaders in their own ways. Genny has always spread the authority around and has formed a community of leadership at Sisters. Any movement founded upon listening to those rejected by left and right, by paying attention to and serving and working with those disenfranchised by our war system, will have some very interesting leadership. Nonviolent power works in mysterious ways, but I believe those interested in it will study Genny Nelson's model for its many lessons. And I hope when she emerges from her current health crisis she will set down those lessons for us to learn from.

Bless your heart, Genny. We send love.

An angel of nonviolence

Genny Nelson is the Dorothy Day of Portland, Oregon, beloved by thousands hereabouts. She and I had dinner a few weeks ago and discussed many things, as we often do, but one was her planned trip to Indiana to visit her mother and then to Chicago to visit her children.

We met in August, 2002, introduced by a former student of mine, a brilliant schizophrenic whose periodic bouts with mental illness landed her in the street, homeless and wandering. We were all crying, not because our meet-up was sentimental, but because we were all tear-gassed by the Portland police, who were protecting the Hilton Hotel from us, since there were a couple thousand of us and George W. Bush was in the Hilton. It was the perfect place to meet Genny and to begin a sweet friendship.
Genny is the matron saint of all those in Portland who are in trouble. Like Dorothy Day, she connects to people at a human level of profound respect and care for each person. Indeed, Genny Nelson typifies the soul of charisma, which, contrary to popular opinion, is not about fiery oratory or defiant leadership. The center of charisma is the near magical ability of some gifted humans to actually care about you and transmit the authenticity of that care to you, even speaking to a large crowd.

Genny is charismatic. The genuine connection she makes with everyone who crosses her path is rare, remarkable, and game-changing. Leadership like hers comes seldom. It was tough to see her retire this year.

And it's even tougher at this moment. She's had a heart attack and is in the Intensive Care Unit at Lutheran Hospital of Indiana in Fort Wayne. Genny is younger than I am--she was born in 1952--and that is always hard to take. She's not yet 60 and I want her to be in good health as she works on her writing and enjoys retirement.

To learn much more about Genny's work, visit the website of Sisters of the Road Cafe, which she started more than 30 years ago, and watch the Get Well video posted there.

In all her talks and trainings, Genny's primary grounding was nonviolence, a word she used to bring the tone of the group to a centeredness around what she called 'a place of nonviolence.' The last time we had dinner, on July 28, we envisioned doing some trainings together at Sisters, of establishing her emeritus status there, and we discussed co-teaching a class at Portland State University, using some of the materials she had developed over the years in her work.

Genny Nelson, get better now so we can move all those plans forward. You are one of the most precious people I've ever met, beloved and rightly so. I've never seen anyone more capable of calming the troubled waters so overwhelming to so many. Aside from Dorothy Day, I doubt anyone in the US has given more of the lumpenproletariat a more accurate, understandable and usable structural analysis--the grassroots-organized initiatives that have sprung from Sisters, such as Dignity Village, speak to that. She was joined annually by Utah Phillips in this--he would come perform in a benefit for Sisters every year while he was alive (pictured here with Genny and Jack Tafari of Dignity Village) You've fed their bodies, their minds, their spirits and their hearts for decades. Now we want your heart to heal and your beautiful spirit and healthy body back here in Portland, your town.