Pace e Bene

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.For more about mainstreaming nonviolence, click here.

March 20, 2010

The Creative Tension of No and Yes — Loving, Determined, and Relentlessly Persistent

In her book Revolution and Equilibrium, the late writer and activist Barbara Deming presents the metaphor of the two hands of nonviolence, underscoring the creative tension that fuels both interpersonal transformation and social change:

“With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, “Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play.  I refuse to obey you.  I refuse to cooperate with your demands.  I refuse to build the walls and the bombs.  I refuse to pay for the guns.  With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing.  I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.” 

Active nonviolence is a process that holds these two realities in tension

But then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand.  It is raised out-stretched – maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not – but always outstretched… With this hand we say, “I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race.  I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready.  Like it or not, we are part of one another.”

Active nonviolence is a process that holds these two realities – of noncooperation with violence but open to the humanity of the violator —in tension.  It is like saying to our opponent:

“On the one hand (symbolized by a hand firmly stretched out and signaling, “Stop!”) I will not cooperate with your violence or injustice; I will resist it with every fiber of my being. And, on the other hand (symbolized by the hand with its palm turned open and stretched toward the other) I am open to you as a human being.”

To see stories, principles and essays dramatizing the two hands of nonviolence, see Pace e Bene’s Nonviolent Change 101.

See the Mainsteaming Nonviolence Toolbox.

See all of Ken Butigan’s blogs.