Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 30

Nonviolence: As Old As the Hills

“The Parthenon in Athens” by Steve Swayne – File:O Partenon de Atenas.jpg, originally posted to Flickr as The Parthenon Athens. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This piece was written for Campaign Nonviolence‘s email series, This Nonviolent Life. Sign up to receive these “inspirations in your inbox” here. 

Nonviolence is as old as the hills – well, at least as old as the Parthenon and older than some of the pyramids. It forms a lineage of human beings that stretches around the world and throughout all time. The Lineage of Nonviolence includes women, children, men, elders, people of all religions, world views, cultures, races, sexualities, and creeds. Nonviolence is the most remarkable achievement of humankind to date, and we’re only just getting started! This week, let’s look at the earliest known examples of nonviolent action . . .

Egyptian Workers Launch World’s First Labor Strike – 1170 BCE

The first known labor strike occurred in 1170 BCE. According the record set down on papyrus by Ammenakht, an artisan and scribe, artisans tasked with building the necropolis (burial chambers) of King Ramses III repeatedly struck, complaining of insufficient rations.

“One day, all the workers simply lay down their tools and marched out of the necropolis they were building. According to Ammenakht, their supervisors had no idea where they had gone – they had never seen anything like this before. They marched to their local government officials, and demanded that they be paid their food rations. Though the local elders agreed that they should be paid, they were unable to provide the rations. The next day, the workers marched towards the temple of Ramses II, and were able to speak with the Visier (Mayor), who was finally able to secure a ration payment for the workers (though it was not a full payment). Satisfied, the workers returned to their labor.” – Nonviolent Action Data Base

Plebeians of Rome Invent General Strike – 484 BC

The first recorded General Strike occurred in 484 BC, when the plebeians rose up against the Roman patricians. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) After a long series of noncooperation, parallel institutions, demonstrations, disruption tactics, and other actions, the plebeians quit Rome en masse, shut down farms, shops, and production centers, and climbed up the Sacred Mount, setting up camp until their demands of political power, and protection from debt and enslavement were met. The patricians, unable to live without the workforce of the plebeians, gave in after a few days.

Learn more about the First General Strike in Rome 484 BC here.

Learn more about the First Labor Strike in Egypt 1170 BCE here.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

 

 

Old Grandmother Soul

Photo by Rivera Sun, Taos, New Mexico

If you want me,

wait.

My soul is speaking

like an old grandmother,

taking her time,

rolling pearls of wisdom

around in her mouth,

then slowly releasing them

off the tip of her tongue.

Her voice rasps and gravels

run ragged with time,

lean in to listen

or her message

sweeps past your ears

like the wind.

She refuses to shout

above the chatter-madness

these days.

Instead, she waits

in the old hut of my heart,

poking the fire

with the patience of rain

eroding the huge rock of my nonsense

with persistence.

The soul,

old grandmother,

can’t be interrupted,

not for presidents,

promotions,

promises,

or pride.

The dew bead of knowledge

hanging from her lips,

was formed over the last eon, or more.

She has called me to listen

at this pivotal moment

to catch this concept

the moment it drops.

If you want me,

wait.

My soul is speaking,

and if I turn away for an instant,

I’ll miss it.

“Old Grandmother Soul” by Rivera Sun is the first of ten poems she wrote for the days between winter solstice and new year’s day.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Solstice Poem – Ancient Times

Ancient times ago,

before the birth

of written words

the world hunkered down

between the grip

of winter

and waited,

humans half-hibernating,

sleepwalking

through long frigid nights,

and brittle glass days,

curling into woolens

like corkscrews,

conserving energy

for the great burst of spring.

All winter,

we rested,

pulled in tight

to our cores,

replenishing wells

run dry,

filling up our souls

with rest

stillness,

and silence.

– by Rivera Sun

Got Fascism? The 1942 Norwegian Teachers’ Nonviolent Resistance to Nazis Has Answers

(This essay was originally part of a longer essay addressing five stories of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis and the parallels that can be applied to current events in the United States.) 

With bigotry and hatred on the rise in the United States and politicians like Donald Trump giving everyone the nightmares of an American Hitler and Nazi Party, revisiting history offers us kernels of wisdom in resisting such extremism.

In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway and occupied the country. In 1942, as part of an attempt to implement a fascist curriculum in the schools, Minister-President Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, disbanded the existing teachers’ union and required all teachers to register with the new Norwegian Teachers’ Union by February 5. Between 8,000-10,000 of Norway’s 12,000 teachers responded by signing a letter of refusal to cooperate. The Quisling government panicked and closed the schools, sending the children home to their parents. 200,000 of these annoyed parents wrote letters of protest to the government. Norwegian teachers began to hold classes in secret, in defiance of orders. The government ordered the arrest of a thousand teachers, five hundred of whom were sent to a prison camp in the Arctic.

As the trainloads of teachers were shipped north, students and families gathered along the tracks, singing and offering food to the teachers as they passed. Once in prison, the teachers formed choirs and offered lectures to one another. The government tried numerous intimidation tactics, but the strike continued. On November 4th, 1942, the Quisling government released all the teachers and abandoned their earlier plans. The Norwegian teachers, through nonviolent resistance, had defended their youth from being subjected to fascist curriculum and protected Norway from sliding into a fascist state.

The Norwegian Teachers’ Defense of Education offers pearls of strategic wisdom for us as we see a rise of bigotry and hatred in the United States. Resist and organize amongst your professional colleagues. It was not an individual’s action that produced such a successful campaign, but rather collective action through an entire profession, supported by students and parents. As we see a rise of fear and hatred, look carefully at the intersection of your profession and cultural indoctrination. Perhaps this is a place where a line of resistance can form. Churches, schools, media, universities, and large institutions are all places to stand and halt this degrading and dangerous slide down a slippery slope toward fear-based bigotry and hatred. Talk with one another, initiate conversations, prepare strategies, share stories like this one, and ideas for how your profession might take a stand for America together. Like the Norwegian teachers, each of us – in our profession and personal lives – forms a line of defense in the heart of our culture. Here we can wage a nonviolent struggle for compassion, respect, equality, and dignity.

Learn more about the Norwegian Teachers’ Defense of Education here.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

What the Women of Berlin’s Rosenstrasse Protest Can Teach Us About Trump

“Rosenstrasse Denkmal 1” by Manfred Brückels – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

(This essay was originally part of a longer essay addressing five stories of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis and the parallels that can be applied to current events in the United States.)

Many United States citizens are appalled at recent remarks by Donald Trump and other bigoted politicians advocating policies against Muslims that are eerily reminiscent of Nazi policies toward the Jews. The parallels between the 1930s-40s in Germany and the United States in 2015 are frightening. It is clear to many citizens that the rise of bigotry and fascism in our nation cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged. Organized resistance is essential. In this effort, revisiting the history of resistance to the Nazis offers us some tantalizing concepts.

Those of us who choose nonviolent action as a form of making change are often challenged with the question, “But what about the Nazis?” The stories of nonviolent resistance are far more numerous than most people suspect. One of the most interesting successful stories comes from the heart of Germany itself when the women of Berlin rose up to demand the return of their Jewish husbands.

In 1943, Joseph Goebbels promised Adolf Hitler that Berlin would be Judenfrei – Jew-free – in time for Hitler’s birthday. On February 27, without warning, Jews were snatched off the streets and from workplaces and held in buildings temporarily before they were loaded onto trains to be sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. This was the fate of nearly 6,000 Jews from Berlin. Another group, the 1,800 Jews with non-Jewish German wives, were rounded up according to a separate list and held in a building on Rosenstrasse, Rose Street. The German women, upon discovering their husbands were gone, raced to the location and began an impromptu unarmed, nonviolent demonstration demanding the release of their husbands.

For a full week, as many as a thousand women protested night and day, defying orders to disperse, withstanding threats of being shot to death. The German Gestapo office sat within earshot; the women persisted despite the danger. On March 6, as thousands of other Jews were being sent to Auschwitz, the husbands of these Berlin women were released. Even the 38 Jewish husbands who had already been sent to the camps were returned to Berlin. It is said that the Rosenstrasse protest also halted the plans to round up the intermarried Jews in France, a change that likely saved thousands of lives. The German government felt that the dissent and visible signs of resistance would be detrimental to morale at that time and that releasing the men was easier than risking more uprisings.

Today, as Islamophobia and anti-refugee rhetoric are whipping the American populace into a frenzy of fear, we need not wait until the eleventh hour to see where this type of discrimination leads. Before politicians allow bigots to require Muslims to register (like the Jews in the 1940s), or wear a symbol (like the yellow star), or be deported to concentration camps, let us take a chapter out of German history – the Rosenstrasse women’s episode – and learn from it. If the threatened registry appears, let us protest it, or sign it en masse as an act of protest. If the parallel to the yellow star occurs, let us all, as citizens, resist the labels unanimously. Let us never forget the words of Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—

and there was no one left to speak for me.

And if they come for any of us, let us be prepared to use nonviolent action, as the women of Berlin, to rescue not just our loved ones, but all of our human brothers and sisters, so that the tragedy of the Holocaust can never be repeated. With courage, preparation, and knowledge, we can stop the dangerous cycle of history from repeating in the context of our contemporary lives.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

 

Trump vs. Sophie Scholl: Lessons in Courageous Resistance

“Stamps of Germany (DDR) 1961, MiNr 0852” by Hochgeladen von –Nightflyer (talk) 19:12, 10 October 2009 (UTC). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

(This essay was originally part of a longer essay addressing five stories of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis and the parallels that can be applied to current events in the United States.) 

US politics are enough to give everyone nightmares of Donald Trump as Hitler minus the mustache. He’d drop a nuke on ISIS. He wants a registry of all Muslims. He decries economic inequality while profiting from, and being the epitome of, the problem.  He’s white, male, inherited his fortune, and millions of prejudiced, mass media-skewed Americans seem to adore him.

Although the report that “Trump does not mind being compared to Hitler” is rather, well, trumped up, it rang true for many United States citizens after his numerous racist and bigoted remarks. Many people are wondering, what can we do? In Nazi-era Germany, a young student was asking herself the very same question, and her story offers some suggestions for us today.

In 1942, a young German woman, Sophie Scholl, joined the White Rose, a group dedicated to nonviolent resistance of the Nazis, particularly through spreading forbidden literature about nonviolent resistance. As a child, she, like all of her school friends, had joined the girl’s wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. However, she grew alarmed at the political views and the dangerous rise of Nazi ideology. Over the next 10 years, she consistently chose to dissent from her peers. In university, she discovered her brother Hans and friends had started the White Rose and quickly joined. On February 18th, 1943, Sophie and Hans were spotted doing a leaflet drop from the top of a university tower, arrested, brutally interrogated by the Gestapo, put on trial without lawyers, and executed by guillotine on February 22nd. Sophie Scholl was 22 years old.

The point of Sophie’s story is not her death . . . it is her life of conviction and courage that offers inspiration for our own lives. If we live in a time when one of our presidential candidates does not seem to mind being compared to Hitler, then we must organize in such a way that we can be compared to Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. We must challenge the hatred and bigotry of our day, withdrawing from social clubs and institutions that support xenophobia and racism. We must consciously take the stance of respect and justice even if it runs contrary to the opinions of our peers or neighbors. We should share knowledge of how to nonviolently resist the injustices wrought by our nation. We should write, print, and distribute literature calling upon our shared human values of respect, peace, justice, equality, and kindness. We should use our new online technologies to do so, as well.

We, unlike, Sophie Scholl and her fellow students in Germany, have the Freedom of Speech. Her life, her death, her courage and sacrifice should serve as our reminder to use it, now, not tomorrow or next week, but today.

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” – Sophie Scholl

Learn more about Sophie Scholl here.

And don’t miss this excellent article on the White Rose. 

___________________________________

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Dandelions in Disguise

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here. (The novel can also be ordered from this link.)

Something is happening in the halls of power. Paperwork is not being completed by the deadline. Forms are not being filed correctly. Permit applications are vanishing.  It could be incompetence or . . .

. . . it could be the Dandelion Insurrection.

I suspect that a subtle resistance is being waged under the cover of ordinary incompetence. There are a thousand ways for civil servants and corporate employees to defy the corporate-political machine. Crucial meetings can be left off the schedule. The CEO’s airline tickets can be misplaced. The environmental review for pipelines can be bogged down for months. A single accountant alone could rewrite the course of human history by crunching the oil well numbers unflatteringly.

Many of us Dandelion Insurrectionists have been so long shunted from positions of power, marginalized, and ignored that we have forgotten how dependent the most powerful are on every single person who works for them. But, it seems that those inside the citadels of wealth and power remember . . . and they are starting to rebel.

The civil servants and corporate employees have chosen not to leave their jobs, but to turn the functions of their offices into impediments to the corporate-political machine. Quietly, using their positions and roles, they are bogging down the gears of normal operations.

We can help them in one very simple manner: be kind.

Anyone could be a Dandelion in disguise: the CEO in his armored car, the office worker on the subway, the lawyer filing a lawsuit against us, even the state spies that track us. Imagine yourself in their predicament, reviled by the very Dandelion Insurrectionists they are working to assist, unable to tell the truth, bound to silence as they wage subtle defiance from the inside. We may never know who these people are, but we can offer everyone kindness with great equanimity – as if they were all dandelions in disguise.

The Dandelion Insurrection risks nothing by conducting ourselves with kindness. Indeed, such a strategy works only in our favor. The corporate propaganda depicts us as angry rebels, but we know the truth: we are ordinary human beings, just like everyone else. Our public commitment to kindness, respect, civility and decency will contrast sharply against the violence of the State. It will reveal the lies of their propaganda. It will cast the avaricious greed of our opponents in a terrible light. Such kindness gives people a cause to believe in. It restores hope in humanity. It rebuilds our faith in our fellow citizens. Kindness is the greatest strength of the Dandelion Insurrection, for it will sway people to our cause.

Dandelions are everywhere, some blossoming, some dormant, and others hidden from our sight. We must water these seeds with kindness, fertilize them with connections, and help them blossom with our courage. Look out at the mass of humanity, rich and poor, young and old, asleep and awake; a golden soul lies inside each of them, hidden like the sun behind the clouds. And I can tell by the rumors of subtle resistance, that under the suits on Wall Street, inside the armored cars crawling through Washington D.C., and behind the glossy windows of corporate sky-rises . . .

. . . the Dandelion Insurrection is growing.

Originally published on Dandelion Salad.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Send Me Your Blessings, Oh Angels of People!

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here. (The novel can also be ordered from this link.)

There is a despair that grips the heart as I watch them fall around me: the too-thin young mother looking for work; the pain-ridden woman, ill, with no healthcare; the husband without answers to his wife’s worried questions; the preacher who weeps as he prays for God’s help; the youth sentenced harshly in a mockery of justice; the faces swollen from the beatings of cops . . .

My life is a bullet shot at the heart of their suffering.

Other people are angels, sent down to soothe, to assuage constant hunger, to keep off the chill, to provide houses for children, hope for the parents . . . but I have been fired from the cannon of justice and am hurtling full speed toward change. I have emptied my pockets to speed up my flight. My coins have fed children. My coat warms another. I spent my kind words as fast as I found them. Now, emptied and lightened, my whole self races faster, but despair is the wind that resists me.

It is hard to watch people cry out and not soothe them – it hurts to keep hurtling forward this way – but the thousands of soup kitchens, shelters, and charities are but Band-Aids without the arc of this flight.

Don’t resent me, oh angels, because I race past. Send me your blessings, instead. Point out my flight to the child you comfort. Tell them I’m heading to the root of their suffering and love is the force that propels me. Tell them I hear them, see them, and care. I’m not passing by without noticing their tears. I can’t feed them today, nor house them tonight. I can’t lift off their worries, or take away sorrows . . . but my life is a single-shot bullet that streams to the heart of the causes of suffering.

Tell them, oh angels, so they don’t misunderstand me. It is easy to love people who alleviate symptoms, but harder to love doctors who must speak the raw truth. Pain will not vanish without massive change. Hunger will continue, unchecked. If we don’t work hard at politics, we will work hard at poverty. Healthcare won’t fall from the sky. Justice is not made by rich judges in robes; justice is wrought by the people. Struggle lies before us – change never comes easily – but our other option is to lie down and die.

Our suffering is legion, our problems many; the causes abound and proliferate . . . but these conditions originate in cold, closed up hearts – human hearts that control, horde, and withhold; humans that write policies of greed; humans who order war, violence, and beatings as if they were dishes from the menu of hatred; humans with blind eyes, deaf ears, and stubborn minds; humans who have closed off their hearts.

My life is a bullet shot toward them all, but my impact will not bring them death . . . for love is the force that propels me. Love rips through their policies, tears up the rulebooks, kicks out corruption, and truncates their greed.

So send me your blessings, oh angels of people, for this is the change that I bring!

Originally published on Dandelion Salad.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

The Government Ain’t Your Daddy

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here. (The novel can also be ordered from this link.)

The government is not your father. The mega-corporations that monopolize your sustenance are not your mother. Obedience to their abuse is inappropriate … it is time to stop obeying. Imagine what you know is true: elections are a sham. Our politicians are not related to us by vote. They treat us all like bastards.  The corporations that we expect to feed us, cloth us, shelter us, provide for us, are not our mothers. We were adopted for a moment, when we had cash inside our pockets, but now we’re useless – worse than useless – we’re sick and weak and cannot do their work. The corporations are through with us. We’re being abandoned on the roadside.

It has been said many times that America is in its adolescence. We are immature, pimply, self-indulgent, egocentric creatures. We conceal our insecurity in arrogance. We cover cowardice with bravado. Responsibility is ignored as we indulge in video games, sex, drugs, alcohol, chips and soda pop.

Watch out, then, for time holds still for no one. Pain and suffering force rapid growth and the average American is crashing through folly toward maturity. As our country confronts rising rates of poverty (approaching nearly fifty percent by international standards), we are no longer the teenage inheritors of the earth with keys to shiny cars and proms and college educations, suburban houses with white picket fences. We are not the children of a dream, but young adults confronted with a harsh reality. Our national household contains our dying mothers riddled with cancer, our hungry baby sisters, our laid-off fathers, and ailing grandparents, our meth-addicted younger brothers, and our incarcerated cousins.

We are scrambling to keep ourselves alive.

And this government that claims to know what’s best is beating us in its drunken stupor. The profit-addicted corporations are feeding arsenic to the baby. We hear the slurred and senseless speeches of this government and a hot surge of resentment chokes us. We struggle to hold our family together while the corporations take the lunch money from the children to get high on the drug of war. We stare dumbfounded, as corporate government demands our obedience. These false parents are ordering us to get into the car that will drive us off the cliff of climate change.

Obedience to this abuse is not a virtue.

With the ferocious force of youthful rebelliousness burning in our chests, we must grab our little sister, sling the baby on our hip, and refuse to let these people order us around. A government that does not serve its people does not deserve allegiance. Authority that abuses its position forfeits its right to our obedience. Entities that rob and poison people, rape the land and plunder public money should no longer enjoy our cooperation with their destruction.

We cannot obey them and survive.

We must grow up rapidly and painfully. Our government does not watch over us. It takes our last remaining dollar and gives it to the thugs of the military-industrial complex. It convinces us to resent our feeble grandmothers and starving children while it parties with the good ole boys. We must confront these lies! We must say to them, do not try to make us hate our people. The poor are not the robbers of our hard-earned money. You are! You give a penny to the old people and drink the rest in subsidies to your corporate cronies! You buy million dollar drones while the children have no winter coats! Your gorge yourself on opulence while the people scrounge in dumpsters for their food!

And when the government punches you for your outburst, look up, young teenager; look up with your bloody nose and blackened eye!

“Don’t get fresh,” the government will say.

And with fire burning in your eyes, you’ll think … I’m not. I’m getting wise.

The government is still larger, stronger, more experienced and tougher than you … but you are getting wise. You won’t fight him with fists or knives or guns … he’ll always beat you at that game. Instead, you’ll learn his weaknesses: where he goes to drum up money, which of his thugs resents his brutal abuses, what groups he leans on for support, and who among your brothers and sisters won’t take his bullying anymore. One by one, you’ll gather allies, erode his support, and cut him off. No one will give him money. No one will include him in the deals. No one allows him to crash their parties, sleep with their wives, take their cars and crash them. One by one, you strengthen the people and remove their unwitting obedience to abuse. You strengthen their pride in themselves, their ability to care for one another, and the resilience of their communities. You tell them that real fathers and mothers are people who care for the weak and immature. Fathers and mothers are flesh-and-blood human beings with hearts and souls. Corporations cannot replace them. Tyrants cannot take their place. Governments should not expect the obedience we gave to our parents when we were young. Americans are not children. We are adults, equals among equals. As friends and neighbors, we can govern ourselves.

The abuses of the government and the corporations are unfortunate, but let us not bemoan the loss of hierarchical control. Whether the tyrants are benevolent or destructive, they still usurp the right to self-governance that exists in every human being. Respect demands that we cease treating full-grown adults as subordinates to be ruled over. The long arc of civil and equal rights that granted suffrage and liberty to women, African-Americans, and all classes must be carried further. America must leave its adolescent reliance on representative politicians who do nothing but abuse us. We must grow into fully functional adults who can work together to provide for our whole society.

We must look around at other nations, our neighbors on this planet, and instead of attacking them, we learn from them, strengthen them, support one another as we deal with catastrophic climate change, collapsing economies, and political instability. We are heaving in the agonies of coming of age on this planet, but beyond the pain of growing up is a long life for this human species … a long life that we won’t survive to enjoy if we obey our profit-addicted, abusive government and corporations. We must disobey, break the rules, and evoke the rebellion of the teenager to grow into the maturity of the adult. We must trust our innate sense of injustice. We must have faith in our ability to create something brighter from the ashes of the old. We must find the courage to change the course of our lives.

Come on, America! The time has come. Grow up!

Originally published on Dandelion Salad.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com

Liberty and Strategy for All

The Man From the North is a fictional writer in Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection. The novel takes place in the near future, in “a time that looms around the corner of today”, when a rising police state controlled by the corporate-political elite have plunged the nation into the grip of a hidden dictatorship. In spite of severe surveillance and repression, the Man From the North’s banned articles circulate through the American populace, reporting on resistance and fomenting nonviolent revolution. This article is one of a series written by The Man From the North, which are not included in the novel, but can be read here. (The novel can also be ordered from this link.)

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You must believe that pockets of resistance exist. As America plunges into darkness, some people burn with resistance like fires in the night, aglow with respect for the civil liberties that define the modern ideal of freedom. The quiet murmur of their impassioned voices will call to you as they discuss nonviolent strategy and struggle, but you will not be asked to join them until you strike the matchstick of your heart, build a fire of your determination, ignite the blaze of your courage, and reach out to others.

You must pull out those weathered, dog-eared books – the ones that you saved before the government banned them, the volumes that escaped the bonfires of the increasing authoritarianism of our corporate-controlled society. You must study them: Gene Sharp, Robert L. Helvey, and other scholars of strategic nonviolent struggle . . . and if you were not wise enough to collect these writers before the Freedom of Speech vanished without so much as a gasp of popular dissent, then you must take the pains to try and gather them now. Meanwhile, in these articles of The Man From the North, I will do my humble best to pass on the knowledge of how to topple tyranny from its throne.

I am not an expert like Gene Sharp, therefore, I ask you to weigh my suggestions on the scale of your own reason. Accept nothing without examining it with the knife of your own mind. Sharpen the edge of your intellect and dissect all strategies and proposals. By this, I do not mean the opinionated arrogance that rejects all notions but one’s own. (Indeed, one’s own strategies must be submitted to the sharpest critique of all.) What I ask of you is to be a good friend, one who values the thoughts of another and will acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of his or her friend’s proposal with determined compassion. The stakes are high and great wisdom is required.

We are not playing with toy soldiers or video games, my friend. Resistance is a word that encompasses human hearts, blood, sweat, tears, families with small children, the elderly, the frail, and the tender hopes and dreams of all. The fabric of society – woven from those we know and love – is on the operating table. We are surgeons with scalpels in hand, trying to remove the spreading cancer of injustice, corruption, and tyranny. Cut carefully. Casualties are not numbers; they are faces with names. People are not profits; they are the immeasurable potential of the future. This is why we must commit to struggle . . . and also proceed with great care. Be a good friend to me, and to all others: lend me your wisdom, and I will lend you mine.

Gather your good friends and pull out the books of those who detail the strategies of nonviolent struggle. Everything we have been taught about such struggles has been warped and twisted with falsehoods. Nonviolent struggle is not passive . . . nor is it ineffectual. It has toppled dictators around the world and succeeded more often than violent uprisings. The corporate regime that currently controls our textbooks, our newspapers, our popular media and entertainment perpetuates misinformation about such struggles. They would have you believe that Rosa Parks got tired one day and refused to give up her bus seat.

That is a lie.

Rosa Parks was deeply trained in strategic nonviolent struggle, as were the other Civil Rights activists who planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott long in advance of its eruption. But this is not taught in schools, for it would empower children to know the means to end oppression. The Rosa Parks story is just one example of the mountain of false perceptions that are perpetuated by the empowered elite. They fear strategic nonviolent struggle . . . and rightly so.

Strategic nonviolent struggle draws its strength from an undeniable truth: governments rule by the consent of the governed. Such cooperation may be willing or coerced, but without our support, the government cannot operate. We prop up injustice by complying with laws, providing our skills and services, showing up at our jobs, and giving tyranny the full benefit of our compliance. The American Declaration of Independence clearly outlines this, along with a call to moral responsibility:

” . . . Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

This time has come.

Gather your good friends, pull your dog-eared books from hiding, and begin to study and strategize. Tyranny can -and will be – toppled. Here is how it will be done.

– Let us remedy our ignorance of the tools of nonviolent strategy and learn the sensible application of these tools. Let us study diligently, as if we had been asked to build a skyscraper and, not knowing whether circumstance shall call upon us to lug concrete or draft the blueprints, let us prepare for whatever may be required.

– Since no blueprint for ending tyranny in our country has been shown to us, let us begin drafting many designs in small groups with our good friends, seeking out still others with whom we can compare notes. Acknowledging our own ignorance and lack of experience (for who among us has successfully removed tyrants from power?), let us use the assistance of others to rout out the weaknesses of our designs and revise them to increase their strength.

– Let us exercise caution, but not fear, as we reach out to others. Not all who profess to be good friends will be what they claim. Some will be agents of our opponents; others are bitter humans who would tear the joy from a child and trip elderly people out of spite; still others suffer from despair and in their despair would smother out all chances of success. But let us be open with our knowledge, unless, for strategic reasons, it is absolutely necessary to conceal it. Secrecy is a double-edged sword. It can suffocate resistance movements like ours that depend on broad support of the populace. Let us use anonymity before secrecy. Tack your strategies anonymously to telephone poles if you must, but do not withhold much needed knowledge from the people. They hunger for hope. They starve for solutions. As often as possible, we should reach out and remind others that resistance is not only possible, it is happening in our own communities.

-Let us use an ounce of patience and a pound of precaution to prevent a ton of foolhardy actions from causing losses of life and limb. Let us take the time to study and strategize now, so that when we move into action it can be with great certainty, commitment, and determination. All dictatorships have weaknesses. We must study the Achilles’ Heels of our corporate-political regime and strike wisely. They are strong and we are weak. We must use time and strategy to shift this distribution of power. Let us sway the social institutions and the populace to shift allegiance. Oppressive regimes can fall quickly, but only when their pillars of support have been eroded through persistent resistance.

-Let us plan for success by crafting not just a blueprint of strategy, but also a vision of what should follow. Such a vision for the future should evoke not just our long-buried, wild dreams, but also our nuts-and-bolts pragmatism. Without a well-crafted plan, the power vacuum opened by our struggle may be quickly filled by a coup d’état or an even harsher regime.

This last may prove equally – if not more – challenging than strategizing a plan of resistance. In a nation as diverse as our own, the desire to be free of tyrannical control may be widely shared, but the vision of a better world will take many shapes and forms. Compounding our differing views is a legacy of dispute. We, the people, carry many layers of prejudice and suspicion that the elite – both liberal and conservative – has fostered in us. But, since our arguments and dogmatism serve to their advantage, let us remove that source of their power by reviving the art of respectful discourse. If we seek our liberty from tyranny, we must exercise both the rights and the responsibilities of a civil, democratic society: the right to speak and the responsibility of listening; the right to our beliefs and the responsibility to allow others their views; the right to work toward our goals without fear of violent repression and the responsibility of ensuring that same freedom for even those we disagree with.

This list goes on. With liberties come responsibilities, for human beings are an interconnected species, and true freedom is found not in isolation, but in concert with others. At times such as these, the deep strands of our connections weigh heavily and tyranny binds cruelly with the weight of unjust laws and state-sanctioned violence. But, by working together to articulate a strategy for liberation and a vision that encompasses our rights and responsibilities to each other, we can lift the iron shackles of oppression and break free. Together, we can create a civil society that respects freedom for all without sacrificing the rights of the many for the privileges of the few. Such liberation has been achieved in other countries. It will be achieved in ours. So, get out your books, gather your good friends, and let’s get to work.

Originally published on Dandelion Salad.

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection, Billionaire Buddha and Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, the cohost of Occupy Radio and Love (and Revolution) Radio, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network. She is a trainer and social media coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence and Pace e Bene. Sun attended the James Lawson Institute on Strategic Nonviolent Resistance in 2014 and her essays on social justice movements appear in Truthout and Popular Resistance. www.riverasun.com