Overcoming violence

We have to acknowledge that the help that comes after the violence has been done, though it undeniably helps, is not a solution to violence. The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth. Actually to help our suffering of one man-made horror after another, we would have to revise radically our understanding of economic life, of community life, of work, and of pleasure. We employ thousands of scientists and spend billions of dollars to reduce matter to its smallest particles and to search for farther stars. How many scientists and how many dollars are devoted to harmony between economy and ecology, or to amity and lenity in the face of hatred and killing? To learn to meet our needs without continuous violence against one another and our only world would require an immense intellectual and practical effort, requiring the help of every human being perhaps to the end of human time. This would be work worthy of the name "human." It would be fascinating and lovely.

Wendell Berry

"The Commerce of Violence" in Our Only World

It's not all about guns...

A police officer will have an admirable career if he or she never uses a gun -- except if that officer is a character on a television drama or movie. Given the popularity of violence, we might ask, "Doesn't the police officer's work depend upon the threat of force?" The answer is plainly no. If the officer's authority depends upon the use of a gun, then we are truly an uncivilized people who are in a constant state of civil war. In a world of strife and violence, additional use of force actually undermines police work (although television and movies claim the contrary). Undoubtedly, the peaceable officer will be dependent, not self-sufficient and invulnerable. He or she will not be a hero in Hollywood, but this peaceful officer will be an integral part of community life.... Communities are sustained not by the imposition of force but by cooperative, nonviolent means of confrontation and hope. Violence is a response to hopelessness. Christians are called to live with hope.

David Matzko McCarthy

The Good Life

Non-violent gardening

We live in a world that has practiced violence for generations -- violence to other creatures, violence to the planet, violence to ourselves.  Yet in my garden, where I have nurtured a healthy soil-plant community, I see a model of a highly successful, non-violent system where I participate in gentle biological diplomacy rather than war.  The garden has more to teach us than just how to grow food.

Eliot ColemanFour-Season Harvest

I'm not sure the weeds would agree about the non-violence...

Transforming violence

Given the levels of violence in the world today, it is hard to imagine a world in which the energies fueling militarism have been transformed into peace-building energies. Yet it is also true that it is impossible to work for something one can't even imagine. That is why the prophetic voice proclaiming the earthly peaceable kingdom is so important in each religious tradition, even though the details of the prophecy may vary. The religious imagination has suffered in the secular atmosphere of the twentieth century. Even the basic hope for a better future is jeered at as being "unrealistic." Yet that prophecy and that hope are the most precious resource of humankind, and the very capacity to imagine the other and better is ... our most completely human capacity.

Elise Boulding"Cultures of Peace and Communities of Faith" in Transforming Violence

Violence is immoral

Violence as a way of achieving ... justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. A voice echoes through time saying to every potential Peter, "Put up your sword." History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that failed to follow this command.

Martin Luther King, Jr.Stride Toward Freedom

Destroying the narratives

Violence tries to destroy the narratives that sustain people's identities and substitute narratives of its own. These might be called narratives of the lie, precisely because they are intended to negate the truth of a people's own narratives.

Robert J. Schreiter
Reconciliation

Violence and NonViolence

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I See the Promised Land" in A Testament of Hope