At the Crossroads
There are times we find ourselves at a crossroads.
This is one of those monumental times.
The impact of this week’s election promises to be far-ranging and potentially cataclysmic for people in this country and around the world. A forecast of the coming storms was rolled out in plain sight over the past several months. New suffering for millions may lay ahead. The historic challenges of our age—the climate crisis, white supremacy, global poverty, gender inequity, and systemic violence and injustice of all kinds—are on track to worsen.
It is precisely at such a moment that the power of active nonviolence beckons.
Pace e Bene has persistently doubled-down on the energy of creative and liberating nonviolence we all possess to forthrightly oppose the terror of violence—in our lives, our societies, and our world—and to boldly put love into action.
This power is great in good times, but it is especially important when we must deepen our resolve to confront the realities of violence and injustice.
In his recent journey to Palestine with Christians for Ceasefire in August, Ken Butigan saw this with bracing clarity.
Omar Haramy, a staff-person with the Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel, led what amounted to a nonviolence training in a rattling van as they crisscrossed the West Bank and spent time in many communities that were engaging in concerted nonviolent resistance to land confiscation and other attacks. Here is an excerpt from Butigan’s recent piece published in the Jesuit magazine, America:
Above the sound of the traffic, we were told that active nonviolence is a practice of love and justice. It is a path of change that includes refusing to be enemies with anyone else; being liberated from hate and animosity; shunning revenge and retaliation; pursuing the truth by confronting falsehood and deception; championing the oppressed, the poor and the marginalized; resisting violence; pursuing peace and reconciliation; and creating the condition where Muslims, Jews, and Christians can one day share this land. As one of the activists we met that week put it: “Evil does not defeat evil. Only good can do that.”
Haramy’s work reinforces for us the principles that will come in handy as we navigate the new challenges in this country.
But Butigan is also reminded of another situation echoing across the decades.
In the early 1990’s, he was part of a gathering of 40 Latin American and North American activists comparing notes at a retreat center in California. At one point two Chilean organizers stood up and shared. They recounted the harrowing days after General Augusto Pinochet carried out a violent coup against the democratically elected government in 1974. The new military dictatorship began systematically jailing, torturing, and disappearing thousands of progressive activists and others. In the midst of this catastrophe, a handful of organizers huddled clandestinely and vowed to build a nationwide, nonviolent movement to restore democracy.
For the next several years, they trained 200 people in the methods of strategic nonviolence. By the early 1980s, that number had leapt to over 30,000 people a year, who formed the backbone of a movement that helped the nation shuck off its fear and powerlessness to create a roadmap of nonviolent action and strategies that brought down the dictator. (See the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict’s video on this successful struggle here.)
These change-agents stood at a perilous crossroad. They show that it is possible to choose a way forward, even against steep odds. These and many other life-giving examples have fueled Pace e Bene’s work for over three decades.
Now, as we all stand at this new crossroad, we are invited, all of us, to tap this transforming power—once again.
Onward,
Ken, Erin, Rivera, Ryan, Shaina, Rosie, Alisha, Sophia, Mili, and the entire Pace e Bene community
PS – We highly recommend that you read Pace e Bene colleague Daniel Hunter’s important piece, “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” at Waging Nonviolence.