Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
On November 26, 2012, a remarkable thing happened.
For an entire 24-hour period,
no violent crime was reported in the entire city of New York.
Now, that's not to say that there was no violence in New York,
but it is to say
that the police department in New York recorded no violent crime
in any of the five boroughs in the largest city in the United States
for an entire 24-hour period.
The police in New York were baffled and amazed.
And so was I when I heard about this.
In fact, it gave me a little surge of hope.
I'd been an activist for justice and peace
for three decades,
working on lots of different issues around violence and war,
organizing lots of campaigns and movements,
but my roots as an activist
go back to long before these campaigns and these movements.
It goes back to my relationship with my brother Larry.
Larry and I were very close growing up.
But everything changed at 13
when he was arrested for stealing a six-pack of beer
and was tossed into the criminal justice system.
And he was never quite right after that.
And all of us in our family offered him as much love and support as we could,
but then he found himself drifting into a life on the streets,
where he faced a huge amount of violence.
He saw a lot of police retaliation and a lot of incarceration
and lots and lots of violence.
And 15 years ago, he died on the streets.
Now, I became an activist
because I wanted to grapple with the great challenges that our world faces.
But I've come to see that I actually wanted to change the world
because I don't want anybody to face the treatment
that my brother Larry faced.
I don't want anybody to be treated the way he was treated.
I want a world where everyone counts;
I want a world
where the infinite worth of every person
is upheld and honored and defended.
And I want a world where any kind of violence,
any kind of violence we respond to,
anything that dehumanizes, diminishes, dominates or destroys
ourselves, anybody else and the planet.
And my experience tells me that most of us also want this.
Most of us have a secret history of violence
in our own lives, in our own families and in our societies,
and it's so hard,
and we want to lift the burden of violence and injustice
from our shoulders and everyone else's shoulders,
and that's why I was so thrilled
when I learned that there was a day without violence in New York.
It was this amazing sense that maybe someday
we can lift that burden of violence and injustice off our shoulders.
And when I say that, I don't mean
that we're going to create a fairy-tale world of Utopia and idealism,
but what I do mean is that we can create a world
where each one of us gets the vision and the toolbox
to grapple with and transform the violence and injustice that's all around us.
And I call that "mainstreaming nonviolence."
So when I say mainstreaming nonviolence,
I'm thinking about other things that we humans have mainstreamed.
For example, literacy.
So in the 19th century, somebody had this great idea:
everyone is going to learn how to read.
Up till then, it was, basically, people who were powerful or wealthy
who had access to the written word.
But somebody in the 19th century said we're all going to read,
and they created this infrastructure for mainstreaming literacy,
for getting the infrastructure of literacy out there.
And it unleashed this huge amount of power and possibility and potential.
And that's what I want to see for active and creative nonviolence -
that we have a power at our disposal and we can get that power out there,
the kind of power that Dr. King talked about when he called nonviolence
"The love that does justice."
Or the kind of power
that the late feminist writer Barbara Deming talked about
when she talked about the two hands of nonviolence:
"I will not cooperate with this violence,
with your violence.
I'm going to pit my very being against this violence.
But I'm open to you as a human being."
We have this power.
And great news - we actually are in a time when this power is accelerating
in spite of all the violence.
And there are three ways we know this.
First of all,
we are in the midst of a proliferation of nonviolent action for change.
Secondly, we have at our disposal - which they didn't have 50 years ago -
what I call "technologies of everyday nonviolence."
And third, we're actually beginning the process
of building cultures of peace and nonviolence
in this country and around the world.
First - nonviolent action.
As an activist, I've had an opportunity
to actually spend a lot of time doing nonviolent action.
One of those actions took place in San Francisco, California,
where I lived a few years ago.
In San Francisco, this beautiful city by the Bay,
when I lived there,
there were 16,000 homeless people on the streets of San Francisco
and only 1,400 shelter beds.
So consequently, a lot of people,
out of necessity,
were sleeping in doorways and in parks,
and at the same time,
the city responded not constructively but to criminalize homelessness.
So they said, "We're going to arrest people who are sleeping in doorways.
We're going to arrest people who eat in public.
We're even going to arrest people who offer food to people in public."
And so I thought about this, and I was thinking about Larry,
and I said, "I want to do something about that."
And I came to a group called Religious Witness with Homeless People.
We were 45 mosques, synagogues and Protestant and Catholic churches.
And we put our heads together,
and we said, "Well, we're just ordinary people.
How can we change this system?"
But the more we reflected on it and went deeply into it,
we realized if any one of our sisters and brothers
is being arrested for sleeping in public,
then we have to sleep in public.
And so we did.
Every night, we rolled out our sleeping bags
in the great parks of San Francisco,
and sometime about two o'clock,
the San Francisco Police would come in and arrest us
and haul us off to jail.
And we did this night after night after night.
And then we said,
"What about this eating in public business?
That seems very bizarre.
What are we going to do about that?"
And we said,
"Well, why don't we get some pails of soup and take them down to some of the parks
and ladle it out for our friends who are hungry?"
And then somebody said,
"No. Let's have a banquet."
And that's what we did.
We organized 45 tables
with linen tablecloths and cut flowers and china dishware
and the most succulent food
being served in any restaurant in San Francisco that afternoon.
And we decided to stage this banquet
for our 800 homeless sisters and brothers and their children
in the most forbidden place in San Francisco,
where homeless people were being arrested systematically,
which was in the Civic Center Park,
which was directly in front of the ornate City Hall of San Francisco,
and we pulled up,
and we were about to take the tables off,
and we saw hundreds of police wanting to stop us.
We sent some clergy over to explain what we were doing,
and while they were talking, we pulled the tables off,
and in 90 seconds, we had established this banquet.
And we had this experience, which we all need,
which was, all of us should be able to eat till we're full
and hang out and be together
and not standing and getting soup in a line
but everybody at a beautiful table.
It was a little touch, a little taste, of the nonviolent world we want to have.
And the police were poised to move us out of that area,
but there was a contrast
between the violence that they wanted to do
and the nonviolent living that we were doing.
Plus, we had a lot of media who watched this.
And because we had media, we had huge press,
and within a couple of weeks,
we had these amazing conversations with the mayor and the city officials,
which led to the dismantling of this program
of discrimination against homeless people
and opened the doors for real, constructive solutions in the city.
So, what did we learn?
We learned that ordinary people
can take a nonviolent stand for justice
and do it in a way that's both peaceful and confrontational,
that's loving and publicly resistant
and can have impact.
We also learned that by thinking outside the box,
we could be led outside of our comfort zone.
And finally, we learned something about those two hands of nonviolence:
to say no to the violence and yes to the human person,
including the police and including the city
but especially our sisters and brothers on the street.
What I've learned,
having been part of a lot of nonviolent action over the last 30 years,
is this:
that we have more power than we think.
Everybody in this room, anyone watching -
we have more power than we think,
and when we pool that power,
magic happens.
When we pool that power, magic happens.
And besides, we have a huge agenda, a big job description, going forward.
We have a world that needs to be transformed and rebuilt,
a world without war, without poverty, without racism,
without environmental destruction
and all the forms of violence that are plaguing us
that we want to get off our shoulders.
And what I've learned is we actually can make a difference.
It may take us years and years and years,
but we need to start now and go deeply into that.
We also learned that we're part of a movement
that's been going on for thousands of years
that accelerated 100 years ago,
where now thousands of campaigns,
like the one that we did in San Francisco,
have been happening in this country and around the world,
of ordinary people
using the most powerful language they have at their disposal -
their own vulnerable bodies -
to make this kind of change.
And so we had this banquet,
and we ate together and hung out together.
But in addition to that,
the great news is
there's also amazing innovations for everyday nonviolence.
So we're living in the golden age of resources for dealing with ourselves,
dealing with our families, dealing with one another,
dealing with those people down the street you don't like very much.
There are conflict-resolution trainings.
There are anti-racism trainings.
There's trauma healing.
And one of the great innovations in the last couple of years
has been restorative justice peace circles,
where perpetrators of violence and survivors of violence
sit down in safe space and sort out what went wrong,
and then, how can we heal the damage,
mend the damage,
and create an alternative going forward?
We have nonviolent action,
we've got these great resources for everyday nonviolence,
but to help support all of that,
we have a growing movement in this country and around the world
building a culture of peace and nonviolence,
which will help sustain and move us forward.
So, for example, I just heard that in the Philippines
after the Marcos regime was brought down by people power
in the mid 1980s,
the government institutionalized peace education in every school
across the Philippines,
and that's begun, now, to impact civil society.
And in this country,
we have a new movement called "Nonviolent Cities."
Think about that for a second.
What would it be like to live in a nonviolent city?
And this is the question I posed
to some of my students in some of my classes.
I say, "Envision, if you can believe it, a nonviolent Chicago."
So what we do is I ask the students to map what is violent Chicago -
all the different things that help create
such the welter of violence in our society here in Chicago.
And then I ask, "Now you flip it.
Take those things you've identified and find the nonviolent solutions."
And we map nonviolent Chicago.
And so, one of the things that one of the students who's done this -
they got together and they created the "spare-room project"
to deal with the violence that homeless people feel in Chicago.
So the spare-room project -
one of the features is an app
that connects people who have space in their homes
with homeless people on the street who need shelter.
My brother could have used an app like that.
So what are we going to do?
What must we do?
I'm going to invite us to do three things.
Each of us can be involved in this.
First of all, be nonviolent to yourself.
Secondly, be nonviolent to all others -
not almost all, but everyone.
As I say in my class,
"Can you regard anyone you meet
the way you regard the most beloved person in your life?"
And third, be nonviolent to the world by being part of a movement,
the global movement,
to create justice, to create peace and to create environmental healing.
If you want to stop a toxic-waste plant in your neighborhood,
use nonviolence.
If you want to restore a relationship or your city,
try nonviolence.
And if you want a day off from violence, the way they had in New York City,
go for it.
I mean, if it can work in New York
without any training or any kind of planning,
maybe it would work in New York City again,
maybe it would work in Mexico City,
maybe it would work in Delhi, India, or Kabul, Afghanistan,
or, perhaps, even in Chicago, Illinois.
A day off from violence won't solve all of our problems,
but it could help us see that violence is not inevitable,
and we might decide,
hey, why don't we take a week off from violence
or a month or a year or even longer?
So here's my big ask at the end of our time here:
I'm going to ask each one of us to seriously consider
help building a global day without violence
and a day for creative nonviolence
in every part of our planet in a few years.
I invite us to imagine this, dream it,
connect around it, organize around it
and help make it a reality.
It's going to feel good trying to build that,
even though it seems so impossible,
and it's going to feel great when it happens.
And I'm quite sure
that my brother Larry will be cheering us on.
Thank you.
(Applause)