Tag: Peace Voice

by Rivera Sun A few weeks ago, my mother and I sat down at a shared table in a popular and crowded restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our brunch partners were total strangers. As the husband and wife introduced themselves as US Air Force veterans, my mother shot me a look. The last time […]

Review by Tom Hastings. The Roots of Resistance is now available on this website and in ebook and print formats on Amazon and all major online bookstores! Rivera Sun caused quite a big stir in the relatively small but passionate world of nonviolent resistance with her 2013 extrapolative fiction, The Dandelion Insurrection and again with […]

I used to think of love as a side dish to social political change – the green beans next to the meat and potatoes of power and struggle. But, the more I live in the gritty world of honest humanity, the more I suspect that love is the essential mineral lacking in our nation’s veins. […]

I am an old millennial, one who just barely squeezes into the age category.  I graduated high school in 2000. My first presidential election was Bush vs. Gore – a rigged election with widespread allegations of electoral voting machine manipulation and a dubiously-legal intervention of the Supreme Court to stop the pivotal Florida vote count, […]

Caring for the health and safety of our children and families is common ground where Americans on the left and the right meet. Yet, during this election cycle, few candidates seem willing to talk about the health and safety risks caused by toxic industries. Instead, the false split between environment and jobs is used to […]

Recently, I traveled by train across the US in a swaying, creeping journey that took me through the backyards and forgotten corners of our country. Here, you see the America that doesn’t make it into the slogans of presidential campaigns. These back alleys are not evoked by the statistics and demographical jargon politicians use to […]

by Rivera Sun, author of The Dandelion Insurrection The word you’re looking for is swarming. The people are rising, resisting, changing, growing, evolving . . . and as they do, they’re swarming like bees or birds in the hundreds, thousands, millions. They’re coming together to stop pipelines, then dispersing and reassembling in a different configuration […]

Automation isn’t coming. It’s here. At the airport, the public library, the grocery store, and dozens of other places, touch screens are rapidly replacing human bodies, especially in basic service industry positions. In a time when service industry jobs represent 80 percent of all employment in the United States, and when a presidential report on […]

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” said Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. Decades of invasions, airstrikes, occupations, and conflict have left Americans staring at a disastrous rubble of our own making. War is an earthquake – a violent, destructive force unleashed. The aftershocks bring our […]

If our cars fatally malfunctioned as often as police officers shoot citizens, there would be a massive recall, pulling vehicles off the road, overhauling the engineering design, firing culpable employees, and paying out settlements to consumers for injuries and deaths of family members. The problem of a complete lack of accountability within the police system […]

On August 23rd, 1989, two million people joined hands to form a human chain crossing the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in protest against the Soviet Union, and in support of each nation’s independence. The Baltic Way, as the human chain was called, spanned 420 miles, engaging people of all ages in […]

On August 1st, 1976, the first nonviolent mass demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance took place at the proposed site of the Seabrook Nuclear Energy Facility in New Hampshire. The Clamshell Alliance was a group of anti-nuclear activists who worked to stop nuclear power plant construction at a time when President Nixon’s “Project Independence” had proposed […]

This week in nonviolent history commemorates a turning point in the long struggle to demand justice for the residents of Love Canal, a residential community in upstate New York that was situated on top of a leaking toxic waste dump. On August 2nd, 1978, State Health Commissioner Robert Whalen issued a state of emergency ordering […]

On August 20, 2013, Antoinette Tuff (right) nonviolently disarmed a school shooter, saving the lives of hundreds of school children. Antoinette was a bookkeeper. She wasn’t supposed to be at the school that day. She was just filling in as a front desk receptionist as a favor to a friend. That morning, during her prayer […]

During election years, pent-up frustrations, simmering animosities, and the toxic legacy of countless hours of hate talk radio erupt from the seething volcano of the American public. Injustice left festering explodes into anger and hatred. Defensive arrogance and condescension drips down the pyramid of privilege. What should – and perhaps someday could – be a […]

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” ~ Dr. King From the left and the right, policy proposals are flying fast and furious. It is an election year, after all.  But one topic is completely off the agenda […]

The forest sways in ripples of green. Wind sends the dappled sunlight sparkling through the branches. These are the things we forget in the heat of the political season. There are few politicians who will speak on behalf of all people . . . and even fewer who will speak for the beings that comprise […]

Watching the electoral cycle this year is like watching an old movie from a warped film reel with the sound out of sync. The puppet figures of politicians go through the meaningless gestures. The familiar slogans and catch phrases groan from twisted mouths, distorted and odd. A maniacal fervor pulses in the expressions of the […]

Independence Day is commemorated with fireworks and flag-waving, gun salutes and military parades . . . however, one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, wrote, “A history of military operations . . . is not a history of the American Revolution.” Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a […]

The name Helen Keller conjures up, for many people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It is a scene straight out of “The Miracle Worker,” the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. However, the amazing part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to […]

For too long, the women of this nation have been complacent while our brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers are sent to kill, maim, brutalize, destroy and even die in defense of our alleged liberty. But now, the Senate has passed a $602 billion defense bill that includes an amendment for drafting women. If this bill […]

On June 27, 1915, Grace Lee Boggs was born in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father’s restaurant.  Grace later said, “because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.” Over her 100 years of life, Grace would, indeed, change the world […]

On June 15th, 1955, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in the civilian defense drills scheduled on that day. These drills were to prepare the citizenry in the event of a nuclear attack, and involved evacuations of city centers, taking shelter in subway tunnels, and, for schoolchildren, […]

Every year in May, peace activists circulate Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation. But, Howe did not commemorate Mother’s Day in May . . . for thirty years Americans celebrated Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2nd. It was Julia Ward Howe’s contemporary, Anna Jarvis, who established the May celebration of mothers, and even […]