Mainstreaming Nonviolence Toolbox:
Building a World Where Everyone Matters
This blog by Ken Butigan highlights ideas, books, videos, websites, projects, campaigns, organizations and individuals offering new directions for mainstreaming the power of nonviolent change. Click here for more about mainstreaming nonviolence.
The power of nonviolence is rooted in the body
A nonviolent social movement is a conversation — with oneself, with one’s community, with the larger world. The language it uses in this intermittent, rushed, troubled yet sometimes lyrical dialogue is the language of bodies.
Bodies bleeding — but also bodies gathered, poised, moving. Bodies not content to allow bodies simply to disappear.
This is the most powerful vernacular we have at our disposal: our own vulnerable, achy, cranky, beautiful bodies. They speak in their ineffable richness and complexity to the right brain — the heart and soul of others and, at times, an entire culture — in a way that no other can.
The first reality of nonviolent action is its sheer bodiliness.
Bodies active and huddled. Singing. Fanning out into the street. Bodies floating across non-ordinary space — gradually opening, possessing, momentarily transforming that space, using the only means available, our own bodies. Bodies deployed: some in clusters, some haphazardly. A field, a climate, a net of invisible threads linking bodies together. A striking range of gestures. A glimpse of the grammar and syntax of the body’s language.
Bodies irreducibly present.
But also bodies slowly disappearing, as bodies do. Being taken. Being handled. Plucked, like poppies. Led. Led away. The bodies melt into air. The center, for one long moment, remains empty.
In The Trumpet of Conscience, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. evokes the image of a world on fire. This catastrophic violence and injustice will, he suggests, require brigades of ambulance drivers running the red lights of the existing order until the emergency is over.
His image conjures up two sets of bodies. Bodies bleeding — but also bodies gathered, poised, moving. Bodies not content to allow bodies simply to disappear. Bodies not satisfied with the ordinary rules that take precedent over those at risk.
King offers the clattering image of the ambulance. The swiftly moving vehicle, determined and a bit reckless. But he also seems to invoke with this metaphor throbbing bodies in sync, bodies joined — like a brigade, like a troupe of volunteers swarming toward a fire that must be doused — and moving.
Running the red lights of an order based on violence and injustice.
These are bodies in their unutteable singularity, but also the heaving social body — the saving body of the world.
Photo: Ken Butigan.
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