Nonviolence can take many forms, and there is an appropriate way to apply it in providing non-military interventions for intrastate conflict.

The most restorative, and effective, practice I have heard of arose among the Babemba in South Africa (and other sub-saharan regions), where an offender sits in the middle of a circle with the entire village around him and every person in the village in turn says something positive about him.

Human beings can choose, at any moment, to be and to act in ways that are either violent or nonviolent, each with profoundly different consequences.

We do know something about paradigm shifts, their tipping points, and the techniques of advertising, some of which—why not?—could be used for good ends as well as bad.

Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), a form of PTSD that affects not only combat soldiers but police officers, prison guards who carry out “legal” executions, and many others. In any of these people, the cognitive dissonance can lead to suicide. This inhibition is arguably what makes us human; we cannot violate it without serious consequences, no matter what society or our conscious minds tell us about it’s being necessary, or even glorious.

Today in particular we have drifted dangerously far indeed, and because we have for the first time the raw power to destroy life on Planet Earth the return to perennial truth could not possibly be more urgent. King, like Gandhi, was fully aware that ultimately he was engaged in this very struggle.

Our compassion may be numb but is never beyond the possibility of revival. Unfortunately, it is hard to predict what exactly it will take to revive it. If we understood this we could perhaps awaken ourselves deliberately instead of waiting for just the right event to break through.

No act of violence occurs in a vacuum; it occurs in an atmosphere, a climate, a culture.  In the Beyond Vietnam speach King connected the dots between the racism of our northern or southern ghettos and the violence that pervaded our “policy and values.”  We can specify today that the way we’re supporting wrong policies and wrong values is very largely with the dehumanization, what he called the “thing-orientation” of our commercial media. 

Metta’s Roadmap is an attempt to facilitate both cohesion and strategy. It uses the formation of a long-term strategy as the mechanism to pull together diverse strands of activity into what’s come to be called a ‘movement of movements.’ We offer this in the spirit of Arnold Toynbee: “Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm [like the ‘Great Turning’], and second, a definite, intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”

The critical aspect to human security is what’s called common security, where one sees that her or his real security comes when the other is equally secure, not a threat held in check. How long can the Israelis rely on intercepting missiles and blowing up fighters the minute they emerge from their tunnels? To have any meaning, “security” can only mean a state where there are no rockets or tunnels – and thoughtful people can surely understand this, especially as the failure of military “security” becomes more evident.

Humor is a time-honored strategy in the repertoire of nonviolence, but we must learn to use it properly. Poke fun at the problem not the person.

It is common knowledge, I think, that King had an unusually deep grasp of nonviolence. What this means may not be so commonly acknowledged, namely that it lead him into a profound understanding of and optimism about the nature of reality itself. When he says that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hatred cannot drive out hatred; only love can do that,” he is pointing out a simple, polar difference between the two forces that determine the quality and direction of our life.

The lesson is that we cannot go on relying on violence to defend us from violence. There is no such thing as a clean, sanitized military that can take over the job of protecting us. People have to protect themselves with the robustness of their institutions and integrity of their values. And there is no such thing as a “civil” violence that can shield us from criminal depredations.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — often called the “Frontier Gandhi” — has remained a sadly obscure figure in the West. But a courageous Pakistani teenager brought his name to light at the UN.

Some suggestions for seizing the opportunity presented by the widespread revulsion against this one corporation’s practices to not only humanize some of those practices but turn the tide of corporatization and de-democratization of which they have become an emblem.

If we had had peace teams ready to deploy in Boston we would not have had to subject the city to the inconvenience of a lockdown at all. Much more than that: We would have protected ourselves from another shock designed, or used, to tighten the constraints on our freedoms. And even more: It would have pointed a way to a nonviolent future worthy of a free people.

If we want these tragedies to stop we must open our eyes to the connection, not always obvious but not that obscure once you know what you’re looking for, between our cultural disposition to choose hate over love and the actions resulting from such an unwise choice.

There were many noble thoughts resounding throughout President Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. The knowledge he revealed of some of his great predecessors, particularly Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi, was astounding for someone in his position; but then he made a fatal mistake, and it is essential to recognize that mistake and to correct it—to make sure that it does not happen again. Obama said, “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.” He is wrong.

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.

The big picture is this: we live in a violent system. Overriding the unquenchable yearning for peace and unity in every one of us, and which is arguably much closer to our actual nature, is a distorting culture that possesses the world of our thoughts and emotions.