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.

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 at this point he makes a fatal mistake, and it is essential to recognize that mistake and to correct it

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.

We could be doing three things to fix the economy and the rest of the picture

We private citizens of progressive communities have a greater role to play in the direction of our country than we have had for many dismal years — probably greater in proportion to our numbers than many other locations across the land.  How shall we play it?

There are many ways to peace through peaceful means that harmonize with and reinforce it.

Our job is to weigh the choice we have made as a culture to so exaggerate the power of things and the buying of things to make us happy that we forget the only thing that can actually do that, which is relationships of love and compassion for one another.

The economic meltdown should be telling progressive-minded people that the time has come, not to shore up the old, top-heavy system that turned the wealth of the country into a vast gambling operation and exploited people and planet alike, but to create an economy that endures.

We should be reaching out to our Republican friends now more than ever, and in a spirit of reconciliation. This was not a ‘victory,’ but a successful change. And an opportunity; and a responsibility.  Gandhi would probably say that the second worst thing would be complacency.

Our job as leaders of the Progressive revolution is to create a secure, dry, inviting stepping stone for people in the middle of a raging stream. The world is tottering, like a person trying to reach safety on stones that are far apart, under the surface, and slippery. We need to build one for them that is close (i.e. non-scary), secure (convincing), broad (visible) and free from slime!

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.

We who follow nonviolence have to point out what the mainstream media are missing in this “saffron revolution,” as they have missed in most episodes of nonviolence that have been accumulating with increasing frequency in this post-Gandhian world.

The compassionate and sensible but also very difficult answer, is to stop exploiting sex.

The absurdity of the scapegoat charge only becomes clear after the spasm of unanimous violence has passed. A kind of dense ignorance protects the dynamic from exposure while it is going on, and given the inability of groups to learn from history, the denial is rarely dispelled until it’s too late.

No one likes suffering, but there are times when we must choose between the kind of suffering that just happens and the kind that the brave undergo voluntarily to create a better world.

In the kind of spiritual progressive movement we seem to be groping for, we would be “joined at the heart” not only by our sense of common purpose, not only by the overview that we would be able to articulate, but by our rootedness in a new spiritual vision (which we could also articulate) of what it means to be human and alive on this planet. 

The new sciences support insights of the ancient mystics-that we are fundamentally interconnected, that the diversity of cultures provides "unlimited richness," and that each of us contain the seeds of the whole world order.