To Stand Against the Violence

Hunger Strike

To Stand Against the Violence
Of US Domestic and International Policy
&
To Initiate a Nationwide
Nonviolent Democracy Campaign


This Thursday, April 6, on the anniversary of Gandhi’s initiation of the All-India Satyagraha campaign in 1919, I will begin a hunger strike to call the people of the United States to begin to build a nation-wide campaign of resistance and transformation directed against those policies of the US government that are leading the world into a twenty-first century nightmare of accelerating violence, impoverishment, and environmental devastation. I cannot any longer remain sane and pretend to live normally under a governmental regime that is leading us all into such a terrible future.

As responsible citizens of the United States, WE cannot continue to live “normal” lives without being complicit in the policies that the US government is promoting in the name of its war against terrorism. If we continue to allow our government to sacrifice the values that once made this country stand for something positive in the eyes of the rest of the world, not only have the terrorists already won, but WE will have allowed our own government to sell us out to terrorism. Unfortunately our current government, with its policy of military violence as the first and best solution to most problems, is already well on the way to delivering us over to a perpetual war of terror in this century—one in which the terrorists on all sides of government, including our own, control the future—much like Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.

But because in a democracy we the people are ultimately responsible for what our government does, it is we who must dramatically transform the nature of our governmental policies if this nation is to stop leading the world into a terrible century of increasing poverty, terror, and environmental devastation. We must therefore call each other, as fellow citizens of this country to engage—before it grows too late—a nonviolent democratic spiritual/political struggle to resist and transform the policies of this country contributing to global warming, growing poverty, and the war on terror.

To maintain any sense of sanity and spiritual integrity, I must begin to struggle against our government’s march into oblivion with all my powers of body and soul. But as one person alone, I realize I can do little to change the force of US policy. Gandhi developed Satyagraha into a soulful political technique to draw together the powers of individual bodies, minds, and souls into a collective struggle capable of overcoming the British empire. He refused to believe that the unarmed Indian people were powerless to overthrow the military and economic might of empire. And by unifying the spiritual and political force of the people of India, Satyagraha brought British dominance over India to an end without the use of military force.

Because both our major political parties have proven unable to resist the corrupting powers of wealth and the seductions of military force, it is time for the people of the United States to rise up and call each other and their politicians to account. It is time for Americans to begin to build together the spiritual force of a new kind of politics and policy that will allow the people of the US to break the political stranglehold of the addiction to violence and oil, which has come to dominate us. We cannot afford to allow ourselves to continue to feel powerless before the foreign and domestic policies that have made the United States a symbol of arbitrary, undemocratic, and unjust power to the rest of the world.

The struggle against these policies will not be easy. But the alternative for our futures, and that of generations to come—in the absence of this struggle—is too bleak to endure. Through nonviolent struggle, hope may survive. And more than this—we may change the policy of the world.