Apart and Together (part nine)

What would it take for everyone in the world to be able to participate in actual decision-making about the multiple, overlapping, existential global crises humanity is facing? Our commitment: a true win-win system, based on genuine willingness […].

Apart and Together (part five)

The overwhelming majority of the world’s population is doing work in the form of jobs that are insufficient for sustenance, assault workers’ dignity, and lack meaning. Even when the pay is sufficient, jobs are still lacking in dignity and meaning.

Apart and Together (part four)

The Coronavirus has brought new possibilities as it calls into question one of the deepest and most pervasive narratives of modern life: that every problem originates in an individual and can, and should, be fixed by individuals for themselves.

King’s Two Messages

There is a window now open for far more significant change than the single-issue focus on police brutality; a time when such brutality can be seen as merely a tragic symptom of much deeper causes.

Apart and Together (part three)

Our future depends on our ability to quickly align our policies and practices with the reality of our embeddedness within an interconnected web of life. The changes this calls for are sweeping and profound: restoring reverence for life, seeing all as kin, and seeing no one and nothing as “other.”

Is Nonviolent Use of Force an Oxymoron?

What do we actually mean by “use of force” and what counts as such? What makes it “necessary” to use force and how do we recognize that line? What, if anything, can we look at to have any sense of solidity that our use of force indeed stays on this side of an elusive line on the other side of which lies outright violence? In an attempt to answer these questions and more, I now have a template I will unpack in this article. Here it is:

“Use of force is consistent with nonviolence to the extent that we use the least amount of force possible, with the most love possible, aiming at (re)creating conditions for dialogue; that we make the choice using as much nonreactive discernment as possible, with as much support for the choice as possible, and while mourning not seeing another way to respond to a situation in which vital needs are at stake except to use force.”

Apart and Together (part two)

One of the things the coronavirus pandemic opened up is the possibility of exposing the incapacity of the market to attend to need. If the market were able to attend to needs, there wouldn’t have to be any governmental mobilization anywhere, because it would happen by itself through the mechanism of the “invisible hand.”