Dark predictions still abound in these areas. To assert that peace is impossible in any human society is a common pseudo-intellectual error. Understanding that peace is possible is the logical and practical first step in peace-building. Conversion from violence to nonviolence for our culture and for us as individuals is a long process, but we can learn it. It is not easy, but the world is learning it.
John Townsend Looney (1916-2005) told those of us who were privileged to be his students that after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in 1968, he was amazed that Dr. King’s methods were not being taught in the schools. Because Dr. King’s nonviolent methods obviously worked, John thought everyone should be trained to use what we now call Ghandian-Kingian nonviolence, and not just in crisis, but at work, at home, every day.
As John did all his adult life, if we study and work toward peace, we will get there: John himself worked toward and lived to see the disintegration of the greatest threat ever to face humanity and the earth. The American-Soviet nuclear stand-down came after John and thousands of other peace activists here and in Europe worked toward it for nearly 40 years, John himself having personally organized 200 groups for Ohio Nuclear Freeze.
In 1970, when John looked for instructional materials on peacemaking, he found Fran Schmidt’s books for children, but none for adults. He worked with The Society of Friends and several northeastern Ohio churches to develop and test a nonviolence training course for adults called Alternatives to Violence. The result of team effort over several years, the first Alternatives to Violence Workbook: A Manual for Teaching Peacemaking to Youth and Adults compiled by John, Prill Goldthwait, and Kathy Bickmore, was published in 1984.
In 1985, John and Danene Bender started a new nonprofit in Akron, Peace GROWS, Inc., to support and promulgate the course. An expanded new edition of the Alternatives to Violence Workbook followed in 1986. John spent the last twenty years of his life using the course to “spread nonviolence” as far as possible. After his death, his colleague Danene Bender funded a Memorial Internship in John’s name at the Northeast Ohio Office of the American Friends Service Committee. Danene and the five John Looney Memorial Interns she has mentored have created the website alternativestoviolencecourse.org. The complete course is thus available free of charge worldwide. The website also enables users to form groups to study the course together. The Alternatives to Violence course is designed to teach the principles, skills, strategies and techniques of nonviolence. Teachers and students work interactively. They role-play conflict situations and create ways to apply nonviolence theory to many types of common problems.
At his passing in 2005, John was working on a “how to” book for the general public that followed the general structure of the Alternatives to Violence course manual. John outlined this book and drafted four chapters. His widow Adele asked me to complete it. Beginning Nonviolence is not a substitute for the Alternatives to Violence course, but an introduction. As John often pointed out, each of the course sessions could be a life’s work; indeed, his nickname for the course was “Nonviolence 101.” Like many other worthy human endeavors, nonviolence is a lifetime study, never perfected but highly rewarding in the pursuit.
Interaction with other people, preferably those with very different backgrounds and experience, is crucial to developing skill and confidence in creating and applying nonviolent strategies. For that reason, the exercises in this book are designed for groups. Working together, we discover each other, drop our fears of difference, and build confidence and trust. We cannot effectively teach the Alternatives to Violence course to people whom we cannot literally see and hear and touch.
So why offer a book? Our immediate and practical purpose is to show readers that both a broad and a particular peace is not the stuff of remote dreams. John analyzed and identified ways to find viable, practical “how-to” alternatives to violence. A resurgence of the Alternatives to Violence movement in schools, churches, and colleges may prevent some of the endemic bullying in many areas of American culture, perhaps most notably in mass communications and in schools. We can heal the fear-based interactions that lead to violence. If we know and look for practical alternatives to violence, and honor and celebrate them in everyday life, we too are likely to understand, as John did, that nonviolence is far more efficient than violence in addressing human problems. Nonviolence is, in the words of Richard Gregg, “moral jiu-jitsu,” a way to re-direct and maximize energy.
When the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in January 2011, I was visiting my family in Egypt. I stayed in Giza until March and witnessed the generally nonviolent Egyptian Revolution at reasonably close hand, albeit mostly via television. Some of the young leaders of the Egyptian Revolution were students of the American nonviolence expert, Gene Sharp, whose book, From Dictatorship to Democracy, published by the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, is now available for download in 27 languages. Other publications by Gene Sharp and his associates at the Albert Einstein Institution may be found at http://www.aeinstein.org. The website, Waging Nonviolence (http://wagingnonviolence.org/), offers almost daily updates on nonviolent national defense around the world.
The Alternatives to Violence course emphasizes that the same basic nonviolence skills can be applied on the personal, family, community, national, and international levels. In this book, I have omitted the national defense sections because the subject is now well-covered elsewhere. Here we focus on personal action.
Nonviolence is powerful but not necessarily easy. Most humans already have many nonviolence skills, but we need to shine them up. If we redirect our minds away from revenge and go confidently in nonviolence toward a more open life, we too can sow peace and grow still more peace.
Kezia Vanmeter Sproat
Highbank Farm Peace Education Center
Chillicothe, Ohio
