QUOTES
The
way we usually define pacifism is in a negative way: “I will not participate in…”
usually a war. Whereas the real, principled nonviolence position starts from a
positive: “How can I make a creative, constructive, long-term impact on the situation
I’m in and, ultimately, on the world I’m in?”
Terrorism
cannot be condoned—least of all by those of us who favor nonviolence. But it can
be understood. There are reasons we were attacked that day, and may be again.
While the actions of the September 11 attackers were deplorable, and while al
Qaeda and its fundamentalist supporters are religious extremists, they represent
only the extreme edge of a widespread resentment against our nation’s policies
and attitudes. To understand these things is not weakness; it’s wisdom.
Violence
does not bring security; if history teaches anything, it teaches us that.
Security
comes from well-ordered human relationships.
Nonviolence
begins with the struggle of an individual with his or her own negative state and
then converting it into its corresponding positive. Let’s say something happens
and you get angry. You “want” to lash out. If you do, you will be doing violence.
And if you swallow the anger and run away, you will also be doing violence...
But if you struggle with that anger, and treat it not so much as the emotion—anger—but
as a raw energy, and you find a way to express it as work, as a creative intervention
in the situation, then that is nonviolence.
In
my mind, the purpose of education is to enable human beings to develop to their
full potential, intellectually and spiritually. That means that students have
to be empowered to pursue self-knowledge and the skills that will help them be
of service to their fellow human beings. Education should encourage people to
develop their curiosity about life; above all, it should not trivialize either
the students or their lives.
St.
Augustine said, in Book 19 of The City of God, that peace is the deepest aspiration
of the human spirit; that peace is a good that does not have to be described in
terms of another good. The very name of peace, he said, falls so sweetly on the
ear that you do not need to give it any other value.
