The hidden benefit of nonviolence: Down with bosses and up with democracy

In the birthing days of the Soviet Union, the evils of the elites were obvious--pampered royals lived in opulence while workers and peasants lived in squalor. Hard work was rewarded with poverty and repression (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000). The bloody revolution, however, replaced one set of royal bosses with a different set of communist bosses. Dissent was tolerated by neither czarist Russia nor Marxist Leninist USSR. Freedom was a concept unknown to most living under either regime.

How could this be? The overlords were overthrown in the name of the workers, of the farmers, of the peasants who worked the land to give everyone sustenance.

Ah, but who claimed all the credit for the revolution? The violent vanguard. They took the power by gun and kept it by gun--helped by a state apparatus of spies, servile law enforcement, brutal interrogators, corrupt judges, and harsh gulags. Workers were anything but free, were emphatically not running any dictatorship of the proletariat, as claimed.

Lucky that never happened in the US, where the revolution was also violent, right?

Well, we are still talking about rich white men, mostly slaveowners, so let's not get all that gooey, please. It is true that American white men did a reasonably good job of freeing white men from King George. It is not true that the American Revolution did a single thing for African Americans (even though the first one shot dead, Crispus Attucks, of Boston Massacre fame, was free black, certainly doing little for him). Indeed, the Constitution defined them as 60 percent human. Tell me that's not shameful.

Similarly, the American Revolution did nothing but grease the Bad News Skids for Native Americans. If anything, it hastened the loss of land and rights for the original people. In fact, those first ones were the last ones to gain rights that white Americans have taken for granted for more than 220 years. I mean, it wasn't until 11 August 1978 that Native Americans were legally able to practice their own religion. So much for the separation of church and state applying to all.

So in many ways the liberation by gun of the United States was not entirely the shining example of freedom it might have been if the revolution had been nonviolent, but that is a moot historical question in most ways. It was what it was and it is what it is. The primary point is that even the most well intentioned and noble violent insurrections leave the power with the elites who take credit for waging the war. When a revolution is nonviolent, there is no guarantee of blissful perfection but the claim of power by the gun=freedom is missing.

I don't want to honor a Washington, a Ho Chi Minh, a Vladimir Lenin, a Fidel Castro, or any other violent power-grabber. Give me instead the people of Chile, rising up to nonviolently overthrow Augusto Pinochet, or the people of India evicting the British empire and Gandhi refusing all political position. These are the imperfect but far more egalitarian revolutions (Tell it, Sinead!).

Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence. (Joan Baez)

The stats gathered by Freedom House researchers (hardly a lefty or pacifist group!) bear this out. Wage your revolution with nonviolence and your chances for democracy, human rights, and civil rights improve dramatically.


References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Karatnycky, Adrian; Ackerman, Peter (2005). How freedom is won: From civic resistance to durable democracy. New York: Freedom House.

Thrash blindly! Bang head! Real action!

One major misconception--one of many--about nonviolent activists is that they must be willing to risk their lives and freedom to achieve any change. Indeed, goes the myth, the ones who fling themselves willy-nilly at the system are the ones who can win and who are the heroes.

Actually, it is usually the prudent ones who are victorious in the end (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000). Yes, they are often hurt and imprisoned, but the greater the strategic approach, the less, generally, they are treated with raging brutality.

For too long, and far too often, some critics of nonviolence have associated careful actions with a principled approach involving religious mandate or philosophical stance (Coy, 2013). However, it is simply untrue in many cases over a fair amount of time and learning these histories can assist in any strategic planning.

One of the primary core causes of conflict is face, or respect, or dignity (Kriesberg & Dayton, 2012). In turn, many nonviolent activists have a strong sense of dignity when offering nonviolent action of any sort. You have your nuns and priests who solemnly bring hammers to weapons and engage in Swords into Plowshares actions, usually accompanied before and after by prayer. You had Dr. King and his fellow ministers leading the Civil Rights movement from churches and all their actions were quite dignified. So this association of a moral, or religious, approach with deliberate, even prayerful, action is natural.

But there are many other careful and dignified actions that are purely strategic, without a great deal of nonviolent philosophy. These are simply adaptive; police, soldiers, and thugs both hired and ideologically driven are far less likely to attack and hurt or even kill nonviolent activists who are balanced, stable, serious, transparent, dignified, and calm. This calm method is thus quite strategic if by strategy we mean the most gain for the least pain--that is, the best choices in a cost-benefit analysis.

So when the Anishinabe practiced their treaty rights despite death threats from racist white opponents, and when they practiced those rights with perfect nonviolent discipline, they were doing so from a strategic standpoint. They were warriors and philosophically not nonviolent. They decided, simply, to use the most pragmatic approach possible and it was victorious.

This is not to say that a strategic approach might not yield over time to a new philosophy. That is my story. I began as a young activist with an unformed philosophy, only attracted to fighting for racial justice and against the stupid war in Vietnam. Over time, as I engaged in nonviolent action and both took and gave nonviolence trainings, my faith in nonviolence became my philosophy.

So the strategic value of careful actions sometimes overlaps with the philosophy of nonviolence but sometimes does not. No assumptions should be made in this regard, except that more investigation is usually a good idea.

References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Coy, P. G. (2013). Whither Nonviolent Studies? Peace Review, 25(2), 257-265. doi:10.1080/10402659.2013.785331

Kriesberg, Louis, & Dayton, Bruce W. (2012). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. (4^th ed.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Finding the cleavage, applying the leverage

In 1968 in Czechoslovakia, ushering in Prague Spring, Alexander Dubček famously called for "Socialism with a human face." Faceless tanks from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact ran down democracy activists in the streets of Prague and rolled Dubček out to pasture. So much for the humanity of that brand of socialism.

In 1980 the democracy activists in Poland took a different approach. They made only "industrial" demands, not political ones (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000). They saw more clearly from the disastrous results in 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Prague that calling for the reform of the political system would be interpreted as revolution and would be summarily and remorselessy crushed.

What was so perfect about the Polish experiment was that they stuck to their primary demand for collective bargaining rights--only wanting an independent union in a satellite country to an empire that built its rhetoric around union rights, workers as heroes, and the mighty power of the working class. This harnessed the trumpeted values of the oppressor, even a codeword for leftist action--"Solidarity"--creating an opening, however small, that we see again and again in successful nonviolent struggles.

This approach can also reveal the hidden cleavages between ideologues who really intend to slaughter all opponents and more realistic, pragmatic members of the ruling class who just want to maintain their enjoyable lives of privilege. Once those cleavages are found, the best nonviolent movements find the wedge issues and pointed tactics that exploit that heretofore masked fault line and they drive the wedge hard.

Poles were philosophical about it all. Supposedly, in the 1950s, the joke there was "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite" (quoted by John Kenneth Galbraith). It took trial and error to find the wedge issue and exploit that in order to stop the system from exploiting them.

Some day, we hope, humankind will study nonviolence more than violence and will prepare for nonviolent struggle more than for war. When we see that we will see these strategies applied much faster, much more often, with greater, quicker, less costly and more frequent success. The Solidarity activists reinvented some of what Gandhi did in several of his struggles, beginning in South Africa in 1906. They recreated the dynamics that the US Civil Rights movement created in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1960 Nashville sit-in movement.

These methods are not rocket science, but for them to overtake and surpass the methods of violence it will take education, investment, and much more ongoing preparation. Anything less is a disservice to humanity.

References

Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2000). A force more powerful: A century of nonviolent conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

From retributive to rehabilitative to restorative to transformative: Arc of justice

Review: Schenwar, Maya (2014), Locked down, locked out: Why prison doesn't work and how we can do better. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Maya Schenwar is a writer and editor who made prisons and justice models her "beat" when her sister kept getting locked up, held for a period in a sort of social cryogenesis, spit out, and without any change in her coping abilities, cycled straight back in. It was all related to drugs, not to violence, and Maya began to question the entire justice system. This book is the culmination of years of researching and writing about the justice system in America.

Schenwar's exploration over time has included many friendships with inmates and former inmates, and family members of inmates. The first part of her book is an examination of the problems of the entire prison system, the rippling effects through families and communities, and the general failure of law enforcement to seriously address the overwhelming connection to what scholars in my field of Peace and Conflict Studies call structural violence. In other words, the drivers to incarceration that exist outside the inmate herself--poverty, racism, unemployment, drug laws, proliferation of weaponry, gentrification, failing schools, and a shredded social safety net.

For those (such as I) familiar with prisons and jails, her recounting of visits, of interviews, of her penpal relationships, all ring of pure authenticity. She sugarcoats nothing--not the inmates themselves, their families, their neighborhoods, and certainly not the penal institutions that warehouse vast numbers of Americans, especially people of color, and that tend to produce recidivists.

Just when we are beaten down by the enormity of the problems, in the final quarter of her book, Schenwar begins to produce evidence of pieces of transformative solutions, a few from within institutions but most of them are initiatives from the nongovernmental sector of our society.

She looks at a peace room in a dangerous school prone to outbreaks of violence and how that peace room has changed the school culture and draws students to the peace room before violence erupts, not just as a mop-up subsequent to violence.

She spends time in a cafe that works with young people to keep them out of trouble and learning conflict transformation skills.

She interviews many people who are at the innovative edge of alternatives to violent policing and caged incarceration. This is the part of the book I found most intriguing and directly valuable. It begins to help the reader get past the "OK, prisons are a problem but what do you do about all those who need to be kept from harming others?"

I finished her book with the mental fantasy image of a map of the US with little peace flags where these sorts of initiatives are working on a piece of this vast problem. I want to see those peace flags cover the country and connect in ways that obviate the need for most, if not all, prison walls. Perhaps there will always be a need to keep some people locked away from little girls or other vulnerable humans, but none of those places should be retributive; transformative justice is how we can truly generate hope for the freedom of all of us.

Homage to a beheading royal--really?

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs--the military sworn to defend democracy and the same military currently bombing the snot out of ISIS thugs who have been rightly vilified for beheadings--now wants his members to honor a Saudi royal whose regime beheaded countless dissidents and allowed flogging women for flirting.

Seriously.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz passed away at age 90 this January 23. His people were never citizens; they were all subjects. With his oil riches he maintained the occasional illusion of tiny reforms, all of which really strengthened his grip on power. He usually ran the most misogynistic regime on Earth (OK, the Taliban in Afghanistan had him beat for a few years), and he made sure the common Saudis did not share in the fabulous oil wealth he reserved for his extended royal family. 

Honestly.

The honor comes in the form of an essay contest and research initiative into the future of US-Arab security. "Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the essay competition is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of the Saudi Arabian monarch." The contest will be conducted through the National Defense University.

The New Surrealpolitik

How is a monarch who owned slaves a suitable subject for honor, a suitable partner for an alliance, and an acceptable recipient of massive amounts of US military hardware and training? The war profiteers in the US have shoveled in the funds from this arrangement for decades. The fluid dynamics are these: 

• The US wants Saudi oil.
• Saudi royals need US guns, planes, bombs and materiel to control their own people.
• US war profiteer corporations don't care if they sell to terrorists, democracies, military juntas, or kings. They don't care if innocent people are repressed with their products and they don't care if journalists are jailed for writing the truth. They care about one thing: making blood money hand over fist. They lobby Congress, they lobby the Pentagon, and they get their way. 
• Everybody wins (everyone in the elites, never mind everyone else). 

Congratulations, Dempsey. You have shared that big vat of Ghoul-Aid with your students and researchers. No wonder the average Saudi loathes his rulers and tends to believe in the Wahabi radicalism borne of decades of violent repression made possible by US military collaborators like you. Another proud moment for the US in the Arab world.

Ten reasons to repeal the stupid Second Amendment

I wrote a short opinion piece on Christmas day, 2014, about repealing the Second Amendment. It attracted the attention of the National Rifle Association and was featured in at least two places on their vast and interesting website.

I received more hate mail in the days following that NRA attention than I have received in the first 64 years of my life--combined. Luckily for me, I have an emotional carapace made of Kevlar.

For the most part, the quality of the reactions was quite low--it is instructive when someone misspells imbecile.

Many engaged in kneejerk character attack, seemingly buoyed by three factors. One, I'm a self-described pacifist. Two, they generally bragged about owning many guns and apparently they are prepared to use them because they are not hesitant to slander anyone with whom they disagree. Three, this is the Internet and they have no intention of actually coming to discuss anything with me and regard our personal meeting as highly unlikely.

Those sorts of reactions merit no response.

A small handful were in honest and respectful disagreement with me and we exchanged mutually respectful views, agreeing to disagree and no hard feelings. That is the essence of a robust democracy; we value the First Amendment because it protects discourse that can expand our knowledge and sharpen our pencils.

We say we value the First Amendment because it protects loathesome or vile speech but that is generally simply rhetoric. Very few who worry about the sanctity of the First Amendment want to offer a forum to those who issue slurs against anyone's color, culture, national origin, sexual orientation, religion or other identity components. And let's be clear; offering a pulpit to someone who speaks with hateful ignorance about another person's tribe or gender is radically different than offering to kill them. Protecting the life of a cartoonist who draws insulting cartoons about everyone's religions is quite different from buying those cartoons.

So why repeal the stupid Second Amendment? Doing so wouldn't outlaw a single gun. Indeed, it would actually take away federal power. Here are ten reasons. Add your own:

1. It would give power back to states and local governments to control lethal weaponry that they frequently cannot control now because upon passing a gun law in a city, the NRA trots to the Supremes and gets them to vacate the law as unConstitutional. 
2. It would mean that the federal government would not be able to tell a city, county, or state what to do about gun laws. Maybe some states want to be the wild west and operate like Tombstone Territory and maybe some towns want no guns. It would then be up to them.
3. It would make teen suicide numbers decrease, probably quite dramatically. 
4. It would eventually nearly end school shootings in some places with tougher laws and pull more toward the "Tuff Response Method" of nonviolent inquiry and empathy.
5. It would make it possible for some states or cities to institute tough laws on gun mechanisms so toddlers would not be finding a gun in Mom's purse and hurting themselves or Mom.
6. It would drive the overall homicide rate down as some places cleaned guns out of their areas.
7. It would drive the overall suicide rate down as more towns got rid of more guns. 
8. It would drive down the accidental death rates as gun laws made guns both safer or nonexistent.
9. It would make the police less jumpy and less likely to continue their killing spree against unarmed people of color.
10. It would make increasing disarmament of police possible as they faced fewer and fewer weapons that now are polluting our entire society.

Gun lovers wrote me quite a lot about how Hitler and Kim Jung Un and other dictators love it when their people are not armed. 

There are some countries with far more restrictive gun laws than the US that are also regarded as robust democracies, some with equal metrics of civil rights and minority protection to the US. There is simply no causal factor between getting rid of guns and inviting a dictatorship. The correlatives work both ways and cannot be regarded as good evidence.

More importantly, the weapon of choice nowadays for deposing dictators is nonviolence. It succeeds at about twice the rate that violent insurrection does, it is faster, and obviously far fewer people die in that struggle. Please, my fellow Americans, learn this. They know this in Serbia, in the Philippines, in Hungary, in the former East Germany, in Estonia, in Zambia, and in many of the other places where brutal dictators were swept away by unarmed but aroused civil society. 

The Second Amendment is anti-democratic, anti-life, anti-dialog, and antiquated. It is a negative in our world. Time to ditch it.

Shoot down the stupid Second Amendment

What country fetishizes, lionizes, valorizes, idolizes, and sacralizes guns as much as does our United States? OK, possibly Mozambique--the only country with an AK47 on its flag, but really, it's long past time to end this obsessive "My Precious" attachment of Americans to instruments of death.

This morning, December 25, 2014, of the nine top stories from US Reuters, six were about shootings--four new ones and two about the national movement against shootings of citizens by police. This pandemic of sick violence, punctuated by mass killings of children, has gone on far far too long. It is long past time to repeal the stupid Second Amendment.

The fate of the Second Amendment should have been sealed when the US Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that past rulings by their predecessors were wrong, that in fact the amendment that provided for a "well regulated militia" really guaranteed every individual the right to own a gun. Wow. That is an interesting reading of the English language. What the Supremes have done is to not only warp the meaning and make it into twisted law, but to further prohibit states and local governments from declaring their places free of legal guns. The conservative court once again rules against the power of states, a principle that used to be associated with darn liberals who wanted to make sure everyone had the right to vote, for example, even though they weren't properly white enough. Now when a city or state wants to outlaw firearms, too bad. The conservatives took away their powers and rights in favor of Big Brother.

The only logical path, given the clearly decided role of the Second Amendment, is to repeal it. American people are tired of mass shootings and police shootings and family fued shootings and sibling shootings and accidental toddler shootings and teen suicide by gun (highly popular).We are exhausted by the proliferation of death, of threats, of bloodshed, and by the NRA/gun industry moral garbage spewing forth every time someone challenges the ubiquity of guns.

Repeal the Stupid Second Amendment. Surround it, grab it, bring it in the back room, pull down the shades, and end it. OK, petition for it, get it on the ballot, and get it done by enough of the US populace, by enough people in enough states, to get it consigned to the dustbin of history.  Merry Christmas, people. Peace.

Leadership and a collective culture: How America polices against movements, even from within

I've been with the peacekeepers, witness for peace, vibeswatchers, march marshals, or whatever you might want to call us, in several movements for a few decades. I'm used to the abuse.

We are scornfully called "peace police." Well, if a movement wants to succeed, it had better police itself or the armed government police will do it for them. Those of us on peace teams are there to help movements keep from embarrassing themselves and from being misrepresented to mainstream America as favoring violence. Nota bene: I have never ever TOLD anyone to do anything when acting as a peace team member; we ask that movement participants respect the code of conduct to which the organizers (aka leaders) have committed.

Oh, that's right, in America, since we are such an individualistic culture, we are not supposed to respect leadership; in fact, we should deny that it ever exists in any proper movement. We should allow any and all behavior because we deeply respect the diversity of opinion and no one represents the movement; everyone speaks for himself or herself, in any moment.

Yelling? Great.

Cursing at others? Fine.

Tossing blocks through windows and looting? Free expression.

Punching a few folks out? Diversity of tactics.

In fact, if you want to chant loudly, "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" that is just tickety-boo.  Land of the free...who frankly are confusing freedom with license, but no one seems able to either stop them nor to effectively put them in a separate status as NOT part of the current movement against police murder of unarmed civilians, mostly African American.

Lucky thing it wasn't like that in Gandhi's struggle to liberate India or it might never have succeeded. Lucky thing that wasn't the way the (Dirty Word Alert!) leadership (gasp!) ran the Civil Rights movement from 1955-1965 or it would never have achieved so many gains. Good thing that Kwame Nkrumah and his friends led the Gold Coast out of colonial occupation to become Ghana using his nonviolent discipline. And Kenneth Kaunda and a few others certainly were in the leadership of the nonviolent decolonization and nation-creating movement that tore Zambia from Rhodesia. The list goes on and on and on. Show me a nonviolent struggle that won and I'll show you leadership.

So what happens when there is no leadership? Anything goes. Valiant efforts may be made to claim that a movement is really nonviolent, but that claim needs to be solid, steady, and made early and often. Just happening to mention it is not enough. Indeed, my very favorite Occupy was the one in Salem, Oregon, when each morning General Assembly began with a collective read-out of their Code of Nonviolence, stating what they would do and would not do. This reaffirmation is key if mainstream media, the public, and police and even judges are to get it. Every event should feature that in all publicity in writing, from the stage, podium, or megaphone, and police should be told in no uncertain terms that they should trust the group to patrol itself and that, in fact, it will go much better if the police stand down and stand back.

See the thing is, with absolute nonviolence, you can do a lot. Indeed, after causing many thousands of dollars of damage to a nuclear weapons command facility (and shutting it down for an unknown period of time), in an appearance before a quite hostile rightwing Republican judge, my co-felon and I explained nonviolence and why that act was nonviolent. The judge finally said, Oh stop telling us about nonviolence. We all know that your activities were nonviolent. Wow. We had caused a series of huge poles strung with thick cable antenna to come crashing to Earth, breaking the system. He understood it was nonviolent! It's in the transcript. We had explained that our actions were carefully planned for many months, involved no fire or explosives or anything that could have gotten out of our control, and that we knew no one would get hurt.

Movements have agents provocateurs, whether they are actual police members or sometimes will infiltrate as a part of the rat system, which brings street-cred criminals into the ranks of a movement in order to push and promote and provoke violence and violent imagery. Earth First! had them. Black Panthers had them. Animal rights groups have had them. Ferguson protests had them. We in the Honeywell Project in Minneapolis had them--they shut down our movement in the 60s and two smart young staffers FOIAed records that proved it and that movement won $30,000 in damages, helping to fund that movement again in the 1980s. It's something we can expect. The goals of such provocateurs (or their handlers):

• get impressionable ones to also call for "self-defense" or "shut it down" or "burn it down" 
• make the public more afraid of the protesters and grateful for the police
• justify further police violence
• create apathy amongst the public who begin to see the fight as violence v violence, not their fight

And so, in the end, if we want to destroy a movement, be sure to hang back and not criticize those who want to use violence and still call themselves part of the movement. The struggle for this frame is crucial. It is strategic. Reveal the gap between innocent unarmed nonthreatening people on one side and armed brutal ones on the other and you begin to win. Allow hijacking like those who call for tossing bottles or stones at the cops and you reverse all wins and head to loss. A culture that can produce the astonishing tech that we produce but which cannot manage to figure out these basic human emotional pieces will continue to feel the tragedy of police violence and other disasters for a long time.

Violent ones! You got your wish--and it will hurt the movement tragically

Since the terrible gunning down of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, I've been arguing against those who increasingly call for "armed self defense" against police violence and for similar strands of argument for justified retaliatory violence when cops act like thugs and murder African Americans. At each occasion, I have been scorned by those who equate nonviolence with passivity. Often, but not always, those heaping ridicule have been young white males. I believe that they believe themselves to be superior allies to African Americans who have suffered so much injustice for so long.

I also believe they don't have a strategic thought in their heads. I get the emotional flare up when we can watch the thugs calling themselves NYPD choke an unarmed family man to death, on film, no indictment. The compound crimes beg for justice.

Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley

Was the benighted man who just executed two NYPD officers and then took his own life acting in the belief that he would be lionized by the movement that has been in the streets of virtually all American cities in the past weeks and months? Did he think he was acting in their name? Apparently.

The slain police officers: Rafael Ramos, 40, left, and Wenjian Liu, 32. CreditNew York Police Department

Brinsley, the shooter, sent out an Instgram message, “I’m putting wings on pigs today … They take 1 of ours. Let’s take 2 of theirs.”

Knowing what this will do, Al Sharpton, the families of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown all denounced the murder.

So, those who have been calling for such violence against police have their wish now. Last evening I was out with many hundreds of others first in an African American church and then in the rain on a long walk to the site where Kendra James, a young unarmed African American mother of two was mercilessly shot down and allowed to bleed to death by Portland police 11 years ago. The national movement has fed into the local movement and now I wonder what will happen.

Certainly the cops nationwide now have far more sympathy from the public, who are instantly made grateful for the cops who protect them, by the cops who come to work prepared to risk their lives, and now in the fresh memory of two cops--neither of them white--who have been slaughtered while sitting in their patrol car. Cops in New York city have already declared war and the consequences will be predictably nasty for regular folks, including those who have been demonstrating against police violence. It is going to get ugly fast there, much more violent, and the public will allow it much more than they have. These murders, done in the name of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, may destroy a movement. We shall see.

Those who have been calling for this now have their wish. I wonder if they are well satisfied? If they never actually cared whether a movement succeeded or not, I suppose this feels thrilling to them--their rhetoric, no doubt, inspired the killer. As someone with two African American sons and as someone who has been working on these issues for a long time, I remain deeply opposed to violence on any and all sides for any and all reasons. All violence backfires. The backfire against a largely nonviolent movement is commencing and those who have advocated for violence have much to answer for.

Give the campus cops de-escalation training, not guns

Should the campus cops be armed?

As a pacifist, I Just Say No.

As a member of a peace team, I oppose all violence and all threats of violence. Carrying a gun is a threat of violence.

Where I teach, Portland State University, has just decided to arm up the campus cops. These 'security officers' can't even manage to handle their current duties, which include unlocking doors. For more than a year I've been unable to walk into the stairwell that is closest to my office. I have to take the long way around, often several times per day, because suddenly they stopped opening those doors. And when I teach weekend classes, it's totally dysfunctional. These folks can't manage to open buildings or the connecting walkways between them for the whole weekend, even though students are paying full tuition for weekend classes, same as any other class day, and deserve a functioning campus, or at least unlocked doors to buildings and classrooms. It's pathetic.

Give 'em guns? So when I argue with them, as I frequently do, about unlocking doors, they can bark an order and, when I'm not compliant, take me down or tase me or just shoot me? A (now retired) cop running buddy of mine told me years ago, "You know what the two favorite words are for any cop? Resisting arrest. Then we get to do whatever we want to you." Of course, no actual resistance is necessary; just irritate the sworn officer and they do what they want, say what they want, and usually get away with murder, if that's what they feel like doing.

"Sworn" should mean that everything they say or write in the course of their employment should be tantamount to sworn testimony, thus punishable like perjury would be if it's false, which is fairly common. Beat 'em, lie about it, and you are good to go if you are a 'sworn' officer.

Oh, come on. Campus cops wouldn't be like that. Actually, they would. My university's Board of Trustees, without the benefit of a great deal of germane data and research, voted last night to make them "sworn officers." This makes them actual cops, not friendly campus security any more. Strapped with big guns and big attitudes. Dominating. Racial profiling with serious and potentially lethal consequences at the other end of the very different process. Hands up, don't shoot. I can't breathe.

As the US convulses in the wake of more and more murders of unarmed people of color and people with diagnosed mental health issues, my university ignores the facts, the trends, and just decides to join the bad guys. It is shameful. The intersection of armed cops, escalation of crime classification, racist cop aggression, and Grand Jury malfunction is a tragedy-producing confluence.

What I tell my students is that during my years as a community organizer I learned a number of life lessons, many having to do with resiliency and persistence. Never. Give. Up.

We were defeated year in and year out in our efforts to shut down a military base. We had legal defeats in both civil and criminal courts. I was in the first group to get arrested in nonviolent civil resistance, I was the first one to commit a nonviolent felony in civil resistance to it, I was the only one to repeat that and earned a three-year prison sentence my second time around. Lose-lose-lose-lose, with more than 100 years incarceration amongst dozens of nonviolent resisters. Senator Feingold and Congressman Obey tried for years to get the base closed and failed. How many losses do you swallow before you give up?

As many as it takes. We won. That base is shut down and dismantled, even though the US thermonuclear Navy said very publicly that they intended to keep it open until at least 2030. Never. Give. Up.

We may see our campus cops sporting heavy lethal firepower, but if we never quit challenging it, and if we get enough creativity and nonviolent persistence on our side, we will disarm them again.

Never. Give. Up.

NOPE--Not On Planet Earth

Help the rural folks in southern Indiana who face contamination from depleted uranium--lots of it.

The editorial board of the rural paper the Madison Courier, serving southern Indiana and northern Kentucky, is urging citizens to make public comments on the US Army's request to basically abandon 2,000 acres of the Jefferson Proving Ground where, from 1984-1994, depleted uranium rounds were tested. Millions of unexploded rounds, in addition to 162,000 pounds of DU in the soil, remain on that acreage and the Army wants the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to allow them to just keep it fenced off and not only leave it dirty but stop monitoring it.

With defenders of our country like these, who needs ISIS?

Cancers, birth defects, and other consequences are certain. DU remains radioactive for geologic time spans.

Fallujah baby, born to mother exposed to DU

The radiation from DU causes these health problems and literally kills people even if the UXO is never exploded. Unexploded ordnance that sits leaching its ionizing radiation into the soil means into the groundwater and surface water. It is mobile. It will get into the food chain.

The US has wasted enormous amounts of people and money developing, testing, producing, and shooting this godawful material, totally illegal under the basic rules of international law on war if we believe that outlawing poisonous weapons applies. As it stands, some nations have banned DU and many international organizations have urged very specific international law doing so.

The public has until Dec. 18 to provide input on the NRC study. Send email comments to - http: www.regulations.gov and search for Docket ID NRC-2014-0097 (click on Comment Now) or by regular mail to: Cindy Bladey, Office of Administration, Mail Stop: 3WFN-06-A44M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001. Put Docket ID NRC-2014-0097 in the subject line.

The days of divide and conquer should end. We should stand with those who are being mistreated, from Ferguson to Madison County, Indiana, from Staten Island to Camp Lejune.

Activist lottery

Apathy. What could it hurt? So we don't vote; voting is such a bother. So we skip the public hearing, even though we sort of have opinions on the policy that is being considered. Who has time for such tedium? Letters to the editor? To politicians? Ugh. In the famous phraseology of Dick Cheney, we have other priorities.

What happens when enough of us say, oh please, with more than 300 million Americans, why bother to vote or speak out or act on injustice, environmental protection or peace? What good is my little bit? And when I do finally write a letter to a politician he answers with a form letter basically saying Dear Occupant, Thank you for your views, which I shall certainly keep in mind when I next vote (against them). Why bother?

Bother because this apathy is producing a corporatocracy, an oligarchy. Democracy is increasingly a 'use it or lose it' proposition. Discouraged? Join the ranks. But please continue to show that you can jump in there to help create momentum when it needs to happen.

Pretend each time you vote, you speak out at a public hearing, you hold a sign, you write a letter to either the editor or an elected representative, that you are buying an Activist Lottery Ticket. You could win big this time, who can say? Remember those times you favored one candidate a great deal over another candidate and you actually voted and your person actually won? OK, for the just, environmentally conscious, and peaceful those times are generally rare. But it happens. Think of those times, not all the times you voted or wrote or demonstrated or attended a hearing and your side lost. Those are disempowering memories, unless they are analyzed to reveal correctable problems.

It is not your place to solve all the problems, to paraphrase just about every wise sage who ever pronounced, but it is your responsibility to do your part. Don't be wedded to outcomes for your emotional state. We seem to lose a lot. Rather, analyze for errors, correct your approach, and try again. Eventually, you get good at it and you begin to win more often.

Try today. Could be your lucky number.

Taking war profiteering to new depths

Barack Obama has named his successor to Chuck Hagel, the lackluster Secretary of Defense. Now Obama wants Ashton Carter, a clear indication that he means to do absolutely nothing to curb the obscene, obese, offensive military budget in his final two years in office.

Reassuring everyone that these high-profit big-ticket weapons systems are very important for everyone who matters*
*rich elite owners who want to grab fat hunks of your federal taxes yet again

Carter's specialty is spending as much as possible on as many capital-intensive projects as he can remotely justify. This is nothing new, however, his expertise in procurement is not an expertise in saving taxpayer money, but rather an expertise in draining the military budget away from labor-intensive expenses and pouring it massively into big-ticket private enterprise war profiteering boondoggles. Lies to justify that seem Just Fine to him.

In a classic case of corrupt revolving door phenomenon, Carter went from private enterprise weaponry investment advisor (for Global Technology Partners) to the big buyer role for DoD, starting in 2009. He has been the overseer of well more than a $trillion in spending. Your money, Pentagon weaponry, war profiteering at its most brazen.

This would be a great time for Republicans to show how much they really oppose waste, fraud, and abuse. Halt the nomination. Of course the Conflict Industry (those who profit in money, status or power from destructive conflict) need someone like Carter in the driver's seat at the Pentagon in order to maximize milking the American taxpayer, even if it means that driver risks plunging the US economy straight over the next fiscal cliff. Where there are profits to be made, why worry?

We the People are really busy. We are trying to finally put a halt to police murdering unarmed people. We are trying to stop climate chaos. We are trying to end the fracking that is ruining enormous riches of pure groundwater across the country. We are sort of overwhelmed and we don't need this. We are hoping for some relief, so it is especially disturbing in this moment to see Obama usher in another bloody war profiteer into the agency that wastes more money every year than the GDP of many a nation.