Tag Archives: nonviolence

Choose Kindness

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If choosing kindness over aggression is believed by some to be weak, then what makes it so hard for so many to be kind? After all, if kindness is weakness, shouldn’t it be easy?

I believe reality teaches us that acts of kindness, responding with nonviolence rather than violence, talking rather than shouting, takes strength. Pure, unadorned, strength.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been one of my heroes since I was a little boy. Our family’s pastor, Reverend Wilbur O. Daniel, marched with Dr. King. I don’t know anyone who thinks Dr. King was weak.

The question is, what makes it hard for so many of us to choose kindness over aggression? The answer, I believe, is vulnerability. When we’re aggressive whether mildly or not-mildly expressed, no one can be emotionally close to in a healthy way.

Aggression builds a moat around us that makes it all but impossible for anyone to get close to us. Aggression can be an armor that prevents intimacy.

Lastly, there is this. If you look around you at the world we are all in right now, the words from various leaders of all walks of life, wouldn’t it be healing for us all to see kindness and communication and problem solving rather than cruelty, verbal battle, and problem making?

I say, choose kindness.

We Shall Overcome

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Not for the first time I find myself thinking about the strength of character displayed by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr and others who rejected all forms of violence and embraced nonviolence. And did so in the face of those who, unlike the Trump-McConnell White Power Movement, openly admitted that, Hell yeah, blacks have no business mixing with whites. Jews and Puerto Ricans and any black or brown folk, Native Americans, have no place mixing with the White Race. 

The White race. Please. There is only one race. Humanity. The human race. And in the human race, there are all kinds of hair color and skin color and eye color, and there are freckles and those with no freckles. Bestowing decision-making power on skin pigmentation (color), is like sitting in front of a large rock, waiting for it to give you guidance on how best to manage your life. Rocks aren’t in the guidance business anymore than color is in the decision-making business.

Think of the human race as a library. No two books are alike, but they’re all books!

Dr. King said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”

We cannot remain silent when others are having their rights (including their voting rights) threatened or denied. We must all speak up in our own way, and do so nonviolently.

We shall overcome.

***

For MIR

Violence

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I am sick of violence. All kinds.

Physical. Emotional. Spiritual.

Financial. Environmental. Bigoted.

Your capacity to inflict violence

is not a measure of your strength.

Rubbish. Violence and strength,

nothing synonymous

about them.