Meeting Violence with Non-Violence

The Oc­cupy move­ment is under at­tack. It is fac­ing ag­gres­sive po­lice ac­tion in cities all over the coun­try while ar­rests con­tinue over the en­force­ment of mun­dane laws that pre­vent the es­tab­lish­ment of per­ma­nent en­camp­ments. Po­lice at­tacked Oc­cupy Oak­land with rub­ber bul­lets and tear gas in the wee hours of Tues­day morn­ing; there were at least a hun­dred ar­rests. 130 ac­tivists with Oc­cupy Chicago were ar­rested on Sat­ur­day dur­ing their sec­ond at­tempt at set­ting up a camp in Grant Park.

At­lanta’s Mayor, Kasim Reed, con­duct­ing what ap­pears to have been ne­go­ti­a­tions in bad faith, or­dered Oc­cupy At­lanta cleared of War­ren Park last night; 52 were ar­rested. Oc­cupy Or­lando has re­peat­edly been ha­rassed by chang­ing city pol­icy re­gard­ing their camp in Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth John­son Park, forc­ing them to va­cate the park and their be­long­ings be­tween 11pm and 6am. The Oc­cupy move­ment may not have it easy right now, but they are being no­ticed!

The course of so­cial change has often been boiled down to po­etic mantras-of-sorts. Utah Phillips and the Wob­blies—para­phras­ing Joe Hill—were found of say­ing “Don’t Mourn. Or­ga­nize!” Mar­garet Mead made it onto the backs of col­lege ser­vice trip t-shirts: “Never doubt that a small group of thought­ful, com­mit­ted cit­i­zens can change the world. In­deed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I re­peated to a col­lege class last night a quote about non­vi­o­lent so­cial change that I re­mem­ber a teacher telling me: “First they ig­nore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” The quote, often at­trib­uted to Gandhi, most likely orig­i­nated with the trade union­ist Nicholas Klein, of the Amal­ga­mated Cloth­ing Works of Amer­ica at their Third Bi­en­nial Con­ven­tion in 1918. As is often the case with such mis­at­tri­bu­tions (in­clud­ing the Mead quote), savvy or­ga­niz­ers and ac­tivists still rec­og­nize the grain of truth such folk­loric wis­dom has had over the decades; Oc­cupy Wall Street and the Oc­cupy move­ment are no dif­fer­ent.

First, Oc­cupy Wall Street was ig­nored. The call from Ad­busters in July 2011 for 20,000 peo­ple to camp out in Wall Street was barely no­ticed by the main­stream media—if at all. Wag­ing Non­vi­o­lence ed­i­tor Nathan Schnei­der was one of the few jour­nal­ists ded­i­cated to re­port­ing on the bur­geon­ing move­ment, but it wasn’t until... READ ON in Nation of Change

As Fred­er­ick Dou­glass said, “Power con­cedes noth­ing with­out a strug­gle. It never has and it never will.”

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