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PHILA. INQUIRER, METRO COMMENTARY (appeared January
17, 2005) (excerpted)
On Nonviolence
Sit-ins, picketing, prayer meetings. These nonviolent, passive techniques
were hallmarks of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s
campaign for civil rights. Over the years, others have adopted civil
disobedience as a means of gaining social change. Here, two area residents
discuss the impact of civil disobedience on their work in our region.
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By Robert M. Smith
My first experiences with civil disobedience were during the late 1960s and
the Vietnam War. Just as for many young, white Americans at the time, my
first reckoning of violence and death was domestic racism and the war in Vietnam. Though I practiced civil disobedience, was
arrested, and even went to jail in resistance of the war, at the time, I
didn't fully appreciate its theory, organizing discipline, and the deeply
spiritual roots it held.
I attended King's speech against the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside
Church on April 4, 1967 (exactly one year before he was shot down in Memphis,
Tenn.) and heard his call for nonviolent resistance to the war and what he
termed "the giant triplets of
American society: racism, materialism, and militarism." My activism,
however, preceded a fuller understanding of what I was doing to end that
awful war and its claim on a generation.
After the Vietnam War, there were still a few of us who believed that
militarism and war held a deep and fundamental hold on the United States: our
culture and perception of ourselves as supreme, our war-based economy at the
expense of human needs and a justly caring order, and a chillingly risqúe attitude toward doomsday weaponry as a basis for security.
Moreover, we recognized that warmaking was
ensconced in law, protected and legitimized by the weight of legal
enforcement. Hence, we realized that just as King and his supporters had to
violate segregationist laws in order to realize the human potential of freedom, that we would need to violate the laws that protect
corporations that build weapons, missile silos, and military bases
from the power of conscience and the light of peacemaking. To end the
crime of war and seek peace, we would need to engage in nonviolent civil
disobedience.
As a peacemaker over the last three decades, I have continued to practice
civil disobedience, to be arrested repeatedly year in and year out, and to go
to jail. Since its beginning in 1977, the Brandywine Peace Community, which I
helped to found 28 years
ago, has placed nonviolent civil disobedience at the very center of our
peace-action campaigns, including our current campaign of nonviolent
resistance to Lockheed Martin, the world's largest weapons corporation and
the Iraq war's chief profiteer.
For each of the last 28 years (and long before King Day became a national
holiday) we have begun our yearly calendar of demonstrations and nonviolent
resistance with a Martin Luther King Day observance in order to walk in the
historical steps of nonviolent
civil disobedience and its continuing path of struggle for justice and peace.
Robert M. Smith is staff coordinator for the Brandywine Peace Community
(brandywine@juno.com) in Swarthmore.
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By Patricia Pearce
Last April, I, along with several others, served a seven-day sentence in a
maximum-security federal prison for participating in a nonviolent protest in
Philadelphia on the day the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. The nonviolent
witness that I and others made that day came out of our conviction that the
war our country was embarking upon was a tragic error and would intensify
hatred, violence and suffering in the world, and escalate the danger for us
all.
As our weaponry grows more and more sophisticated and the global political
climate grows increasingly volatile, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words sound increasingly prophetic: "It is no
longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either
nonviolence or nonexistence." We find ourselves living in a time in
which war has become naive, and nonviolence is emerging as the only pragmatic
option for our survival.
The transforming power of nonviolence has its seeds in the understanding that
we are all one, and that in honoring the humanity of our opponents, we open
the way for lasting and peaceful change. The more we embrace a nonviolent
worldview, the more we come to see that our "enemy" isn't a person
or a group of people. It is the script of violence itself, a script that
Jesus so succinctly summarized when he said: "Those who live by the
sword will die by the sword."
Philosopher Mohandas Gandhi, who inspired King's nonviolent strategies, once
said: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." If we
wish to see a world free of weapons of mass destruction, then we must become
a nation free of weapons of mass destruction. If we wish to see a world at
peace, then we must be peace.
The Rev. Patricia Pearce is pastor of Tabernacle
United Church
in Philadelphia.
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