{"quotes":[{"text":"Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there are illuminating comparisons to be made between these two otherwise very different places.In the New Orleans Black community, death is commemorated as a public ritual (it's often an occasion for a street party), and the deceased are often also memorialized on t-shirts featuring their photos embellished with designs that celebrate their lives. Worn by most of the deceased's friends and family, these t-shirts remind me of the martyr posters in Palestine, which also feature a photo and design to memorialize the person who has passed on. In Palestine, the poster's subjects are anyone who has been killed by the occupation, whether a sick child who died at a checkpoint or an armed fighter killed in combat. In New Orleans, anyone with family and friends can be memorialized on a t-shift. But a sad truth of life in poor communities is that too many of those celebrate on t-shirts lost their lives to violence. For both New Orleans and Palestine, outsiders often think that people have become so accustomed to death by violence that it has become trivialized by t-shirts and posters.While it's true that these traditions wouldn't manifest in these particular ways if either population had more opportunities for long lives and death from natural causes, it's also far from trivial to find ways to celebrate a life. Outsiders tend to demonize those killed--especially the young men--in both cultures as thugs, killers, or terrorists whose lives shouldn't be memorialized in this way, or at all. But the people carrying on these traditions emphasize that every person is a son or daughter of someone, and every death should be mourned, every life celebrated.","author":"Jordan Flaherty","tags":["celebration","civil-disobedience","community","death","funeral","life","martyr","new-orleans","non-violence","palestine","resistance","second-line","struggle"],"id":4691,"author_id":"Jordan+Flaherty"},{"text":"At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.","author":"Martin Luther King","tags":["non-violence","center "],"id":8769,"author_id":"Martin+Luther+King"},{"text":"The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.","author":"Krista Tippett","tags":["art-of-living","black-lives-matter","color-line","diversity","history","humanity","implicit-bias","inclusion","john-powell","love","nature","non-violence","on-being","race","racism"],"id":12513,"author_id":"Krista+Tippett"},{"text":"In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. P. 21.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["evil","non-violence"],"id":18609,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.","author":"Mahatma Gandhi","tags":["civil-disobedience","justice","non-violence","war"],"id":30314,"author_id":"Mahatma+Gandhi"},{"text":"As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth.","author":"Fakeer Ishavardas","tags":["afterlife-hereafter","animal-rights","animals-and-man","animals-love","good-and-evil","good-life-goodness","good-life","goodness","happiness-advice","karma-law","karma","karmic-debt","karmic-effects","life-and-living","life-lessons","living-your-best-life","metaphysical","metaphysical-truth-reality","non-violence","peace-of-mind","people-nature","philosophical-reflection","rebirth","spiritual-development","spiritual","spirituality","vegetarian","vegetarian-lifestyle","vegetarianism","wellness-evaluation-of-lifestyle","wellness-guru"],"id":38529,"author_id":"Fakeer+Ishavardas"},{"text":"I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more.","author":"Chief Joseph","tags":["love","native-american-wisdom","non-violence","wisdom"],"id":41836,"author_id":"Chief+Joseph"},{"text":"We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.","author":"Mother Teresa","tags":["bombs","compassion","guns","love","non-violence","peace","violence"],"id":45808,"author_id":"Mother+Teresa"},{"text":"Those who have chosen to provide for the health and well being of others. Call them homoeopaths, allopaths and whatever one may, they must remember, they have been called and have chosen to serve. Dr. Ron Harris - 1965.","author":"Dr. Ron Harris","tags":["health","history","holistic","homeopathy","life","medicine","non-violence","peace","society","wealth"],"id":72699,"author_id":"Dr.+Ron+Harris"},{"text":"...If we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by force of suffering, I.E., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting.' (MLK)'...If given a choice between violent resistance and passive acceptance, King and Gandhi both accepted violence...' '...Like violence, it [non-violent resistance] was aggressive, but it was spiritually, bot physically, so.' '...At the same time the mind and the emotions are active, actively trying to persuade the opponent to change his ways and convince him that he is mistaken and to lift him to a higher level of existence.","author":"S. Nassir Ghaemi","tags":["empathy","gandhi","mlk","non-violence"],"id":81959,"author_id":"S.+Nassir+Ghaemi"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":49,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}