The entire system of war and militarism will have to be replaced by nonviolent equivalents—and they do exist—if we want our democracy to be real.

It is a struggle to liberate all of us from the humiliating image of the human being—one that’s sustained by the endless propaganda of our powerful mass media—and replace it with something more beautiful and much more true, something that will help us accomplish the “great turning” from revenge to reconciliation, from fear to generosity and compassion.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

Hope is still there, but we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s not to be found in a politician elected to high office, for however good a person he (or she—God forbid!) may be. That person will be constrained by an extremely corrupt and even vicious system. It is hidden inside the box of human potentials where we have not been able to see it through the crowd of troubles fluttering around the lid.

There is a way out of this dehumanizing dilemma, and that is to rise up and say, “No!” War is not a necessary evil, nor indispensable activity. It is a horror and a travesty on human nature.

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

The real purpose of an economic system is to guarantee to every person in its circle the fundamentals of physical existence (food, clothing, shelter) and the tools of meaningful work so that they can get on with the business of living together and working out our common destiny.

Terrorism, as basically an extreme form of violence, follows the dynamics of violence anywhere: if you fight it with your own violence it gets worse (thought there might be some “successes” in the short run); if you respond to it with nonviolence not only do you keep from falling into the debilitating mindset of fear and anger yourself, history shows that you also tend to inhibit the repetition of such disasters.

Why aren’t we asking, “Who or what is creating an atmosphere of egotism and hate in our culture?” Unfortunately, because we already know the answer, and do not want to hear it.

Some praise the likes of Manning and Julian Assange for their courage, while others hate and fear them. Both reactions are understandable. But if, as a society, we scapegoat them, we are only trying to shift our own burden of guilt onto their shoulders, and to think we can get away with that for very long is a dangerous delusion.

We are faced with not a neighborhood but a stricken world.  We cannot go on simply rebuilding cities or factories after every setback; we are at a limit.  There is no such thing as a ‘clean’ war with no collateral damage (all damage damages all, on some level); there’s no such thing as a ‘well-built’ nuclear reactor that won’t turn into an environmental monster in the next quake or leave behind unspeakable poisons that endure ten thousand years.

The nonviolent revolution in Egypt has spread across the Mideast, but in Libya, unfortunately, the “revolution” was picked up without the “nonviolent.”

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.

Deeply concerned individuals are doing very cogent work on environmental issues, yet somehow the same energies are not as clearly brought to bear on the war system, which we note does as much as or more than any other single human activity to destroy the environment.

Today we are reaching a similar crisis with the institution of war; despite appearances, people are becoming more aware that we cannot solve problems by waging war on them.  If you are not aware that this is happening, you are not alone; watch any news or “entertainment” program and you’ll see that competition, violence, and war are still considered “normal.” It’s rare to spot nonviolent alternative methods, since they are so rarely featured in mainstream media.

Those who call their use of violence a “job” are keeping themselves and all of us from carrying out the real job of every person alive: discovering how to live in peace by creative, nonviolent ways of dealing with one another and our difficulties. From Winston Churchill to four-star General Petraeus, we need to question and confront the overconfident leaders who seem to be oblivious to any other form of power than militarized empire.

We can only use means that themselves bring back to light the meaning of the person as they work toward ends with the same purpose. Those are the means of nonviolence. They alone allow us to resist the actions of our opponents, even to point out their follies, without diminishing them as persons. Nonviolence dignifies and humanizes as it works: it humanizes those who offer it, those to whom it is offered and the “reference publics” looking on.

There is a lot more to learn from Gandhi and other successful practitioners of nonviolent struggle, but this principle of humanity has to be in place for anything else to work.

We always have a choice. The cost for each year that we maintain one soldier in Afghanistan is twenty times greater than the cost of building a school.

This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That’s important, because we don’t want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower.  We want the killing to stop.