If we forget, in our movements, to treat each other as human beings we may succeed to dislodge a bad regime but will lack secure foundations for a better one.

For an action to become a campaign and a campaign a movement (thanks to thoughtful activist George Lakey for those terms) it must have a credible path forward from the “effervescence of the crowd,” as we call it, step after step, to victory.

After a roaring start, the Occupy movement hit a wall in the form of rough-handling and evictions by the police. Occupiers could have given up on nonviolence—as a small faction will always try to get us to do—or just given up; but instead we have gone back to the drawing board, while continuing to occupy select spaces, this time with advance training. This is exactly the right response.

While the Occupy movement today seems to be just a continuation of the style that is “dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with.” Can #Occupy provide the framework that will pull these far-flung but inwardly resonant energies together—and in so doing become a force that could, in Gandhi’s terms, “o’ersweep the world”?

The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part. Now it is time to overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together

We who follow nonviolence have to point out what the mainstream media are missing in this "saffron revolution," as in many of the nonviolent episodes that have been accumulating with increasing frequency.