There will always be people with extreme ideas. But for those extreme ideas to prosper, grow, and become wars, kidnappings, beheadings and torture they have to fall on fertile ground. That fertile ground is provided by the system in which we all live. By injustice. By inequality. By dehumanisation. By materialist emptiness. By individualism. By a lack of future. By fear. ISIS recruits amongst the disaffected. The Neocons amongst the terrified.
There are many options for those who experience the full weight of today’s violent system, or for those who without seeing themselves as victims of it act in solidarity with those who are. Some options reinforce the system, some aim to change profoundly its dynamics and ourselves in the process.
When violence erupts in its most visible form, physical violence, we want someone or something to come and just make it stop. With more violence, of course. Which creates more victims of violence, that will eventually come back to take more violent revenge, and so on. An endless vicious circle going nowhere except to the progressive brutalisation of the human race. Behind physical violence come the other forms, the surreptitious ones, equally damaging but more difficult to identify as violence.
A child who dies of Malaria in Africa does not die of natural causes, dies of Economic violence, because Malaria can be treated, if the parents have the money. And so on with psychological, religious, racial, ecological and moral violence. They all kill; they all create the fertile ground for the fanatics to offer revenge, catharsis, something, but always a dead end.
But, how do we stop violence that is already unleashed and killing innocents? How do we bring back the fanatics and the extremists, even if we recognise that they are the product of poverty and injustice? There may be no option sometimes but to exercise minimum force containment, at the same time that a radical process begins to isolate the most irretrievably committed to violence by offering those around them, the followers, those who in their despair turn to the fanatics for solutions they cannot find in the world at large, the possibility of constructing a different world.
October 2nd is International Nonviolence Day, to commemorate Gandhi’s birthday.
A great day to begin Humanising the Earth
First let us show our commitment to a nonviolent world. Send a selfie/message to Facebook, Tweet #nonviolenceday and #diadelanoviolencia
1- Share your message for nonviolence day through a social network that you use (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Facepopular, etc.), e.g. a photo, a picture, a video, a reflection, etc.
2- When you upload the message you should add the following text (known as a hashtag): #diadelanoviolencia #nonviolenceday (in both of these languages so that the effect multiplies and goes viral).
3- Use all of your creativity when making your message (photo, picture, text, video, etc.) and share everything you like always using the text: #diadelanoviolencia #nonviolenceday.
On the 2nd of October, go back and share your message, again with the hashtags #diadelanoviolencia #nonviolenceday, together with all the photos, pictures, messages and videos that you can so that nonviolence becomes a global trend in social networks.
Once people state categorically their purpose of creating a world without violence the networking begins: connecting all the good proposals for a different economic system, putting pressure on governments to stop militarist “solutions” to the problem of violent groups and approaching the disenfranchised with compassion and generosity. It is not a matter of “giving money” but to share knowledge, training, resources, allowing for self-organisation rather than imposing the values, culture and the systems that only favour the “developed world”.
This Revolution is social, personal and spiritual. For more inspiration download (free) Silo’s “Humanise the Earth” here.
