Michael Nagler offers a personal reflection on Pittsburgh, and how it is helping him to deepen his commitment to nonviolence.

We also have to liberate ourselves from the alienating climate of violence that has crept up on us to the point that it now pervades everything from our “entertainment” media to our foreign policy.  Wherever it has come in, we need to push it out: if it’s in movies, boycott them; if it’s guns flooding the nation, outlaw them; if it’s barbaric incarceration rates and death penalties, educate, lobby and protest – and if it’s pilotless drones, “secret renditions” and policies of endless war, never, never vote for candidates that support them.

A nation that dedicates itself to the use of violence for its foreign policy (and its entertainment forms, and its criminal justice system) can never expect to live free from violence in its own social fabric.