NONVIOLENCE OR NONEXISTENCE Witness of a Body in the Body of the World

By LeRoy Moore

The summary of this book is present in the title, Nonviolence or Nonexistence. I grew up knowing closely the violence of my father. He was violent with me and also with my stepmother (after my mother's early death). As a boy, I thought this was the life for men. I was living a lie. But I soon learned about nonviolence from Martin Luther King and, with much more detail, from Mohandas Gandhi of India. Later, I read the works of Gene Sharp of Harvard, who emphasized strongly that we must abandon violence. Early in my adult years, I became a devotee of nonviolence, especially after I learned that nuclear weapons were manufactured at the Rocky Flats Plant near Boulder, Colorado, where I lived. Achieving closure of Rocky Flats was a major accomplishment for devotees of nonviolence. In words I used as a visiting professor at the University of Denver, "I am a body in the body of the world." Drawing on a lifetime's experience of nonviolent thought and activism, this book emphasizes that to survive, we must end our devotion to violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685266998

Book preview

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Preface

The Personal Is Political

The Dessert Theory

Things Not Learned in School

Violence and Nonviolence

Survival

Political Economy of Structural Violence

Things Not Well Known

The Politics of Change

Transformation

From Conversation to Community

About the Author

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NONVIOLENCE OR NONEXISTENCE Witness of a Body in the Body of the World

LeRoy Moore

ISBN 978-1-68526-698-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-699-8 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 LeRoy Moore

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

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Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

We are children of our age,

it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,

all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—

are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,

your genes have a political past,

your skin, a political cast,

your eyes, a political slant.

—Wislawa Szymborska

My father "believed that

the revolution could not be

blustered in but must be built."

—Ta-Nahesi Coates

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Preface

In the fall of 1974, having arrived in Colorado to teach religion in US history at the University of Denver, I walked into a room to meet new colleagues. A man I'd not met asked, Who are you? I said, I am a body in the body of the world. He looked surprised. What follows are life stories from this ecological perspective. It describes experiences of the natural world that gave me insight—my journey out of a patriarchal White-male culture and a racist religious background to a larger world lived in accord with my inner power and community support, a world that can survive.

Looking into one's inner life opens a window into society. These pages contain stories from my life—an ordinary one for a person born in Nashville and raised in Dallas in a family of six children, with the Southern Baptist faith our daily reality. In college, I was intent on becoming a minister. I married a woman who shared my views, went to theological seminary and graduate school, and became the father of two girls, Jerri and Terri, and later Jeremiah, son of my second wife.

I was distracted by ambition, competition, and seduction. I worked hard for rewards, was hungry for bliss, and ended up with a broken marriage and derailed career. Like my father before me, I came to know well the bitterness of having lived a lie.

The heady cocktail of ambition, competition, and seduction fueled much of my young life. I spent my first professional career as a seminary and university teacher exploring how biblical and Greek traditions affected life in the US. I became increasingly politicized, trying to come to terms with religious nationalism. I was fired from academic positions twice, which sharpened my political edge. The first time was in 1966 from the Golden Gate (Southern) Baptist Seminary in Mill Valley, California, for supporting the Civil Rights Movement. The second time was in 1972 from a tenured job at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut when school authorities were determined to get rid of politically active faculty. These firings forced me to examine the power structure of higher education. I found it similar to the structure of corporations. So I write as a former academician and as an interpreter of religious nationalism and political reality.

As things changed, so did I. Encountering the social gospel, with its concern for the poor and disenfranchised, gave me a new understanding of religion, which led me into social action, which led me out of religion. In the ferment of the 1960s, I became convinced that mainline Western religious and political traditions fostered blind allegiance to authority and a disregard for nature. No wonder we had racism, sexism, authoritarian education, poverty, foreign intervention, nuclear weapons, and degradation of the environment. Human survival became my core concern. Eventually, I left academia for activism.

My years as a theologian and historian had turned me into a theorist. Engaging with religious nationalism and race relations made my theorizing political, and my concern for the survival of life itself made material existence a core issue. But the longest revolution of feminism, more than any other social movement, made me question all social patterns. Ecology and feminism prepared me for Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence.

I became convinced that the drastic changes envisioned by ecology and feminism must come by nonviolent means. Otherwise, we will surely self-destruct. My allegiance to nonviolence made me a student of violence. Examining personal and societal patterns of violence moved me to develop nonviolent alternatives. Nonviolence, I discovered, is an immensely creative form of political imagination. Its analysis of power is at once simple, profound, and energizing—and it is the key to freeing the world from the violence that plagues it. Thinking through such issues and acting on them made me an advocate of nonviolent revolution.

So I write as a child of evangelical culture; as a student of religion, nationalism, politics, and economics; as a social activist; and as a theorist of nonviolent personal and social transformation. I also write as a White male in a patriarchal society. Coming to terms with the violence of my father, my country, and my religion forced me to explore myself as a man in relation to women, other men, children, the family, society, and our home planet.

Political theory can often be out of touch with everyday life, which is why it has so often been inaccessible to advocates for social change. My approach to social change comes out of insights from my reflections on life. I start with stories that lie close to the sources of my consciousness. Consciousness stirs my conscience and motivates me to action. In this approach, I have been informed by the brilliant Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). Consciousness that does not activate the conscience is stillborn. For me, it always means that one is not fully aware of the contradictions of her or his situation. An active conscience thrives in the presence of community. The pages that follow point to the living connection between consciousness, conscience, and community.

I begin with conflict with my father and the early death of my mother. I experienced a steady awakening to how people practicing different kinds of power respond to the violence pervading our society. I searched for the sources of this violence. I asked why and how it is so pervasive. And I wondered if we humans are violent by nature. Does our violence doom us to an early extinction? This led me to a liberating discovery—that nonviolence can transform our way of life and overcome the threat of extinction. But the path of nonviolence can be difficult.

The Personal Is Political

The Last Beating

My father's favorite instrument of punishment: six feet of rubber hose. He doubled it in his hand and brought it down hard. It gave off a swoosh before branding my flesh with U-shaped bruises.

One summer day at our church Vacation Bible School when I was twelve, I lifted my shirt to show a friend the welts I had received the night before. Miss Davis, a teacher, saw the blue-red wounds all over my back and blurted, What in the world happened to you? I pulled my shirt down, glanced at her, and said nothing. My friend also said nothing. Miss Davis acted as if she'd stumbled onto something that was none of her business. She quickly assembled the class and led us all in singing, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Then we prayed, Our Father who art in heaven, thank you for our mothers, thank you for our fathers, forgive us our sins, and help us be good boys and girls…

Neither Miss Davis nor any other adult ever spoke of my father's violence. People in church, at school, and in the neighborhood seemed to feel that spankings and beatings were part of growing up. Fathers, principals, and teachers were expected to keep boys in line—girls too, though for a girl to be spanked was rare. Girls were also abused—psychologically, mentally, and sometimes sexually. But it was generally accepted that the last beating was for boys.

I was sixteen the last time my father tried to beat me. My life up to that point had been shaped by his escalating violence. It began with switches across my bare legs, which always started by my father telling me, Go out in the backyard and cut a switch off the bush. I knew he meant from the tall shrubs along the driveway by the garage. Once, when I was six, I brought a switch too small for the task. He stormed out of the house and came back with the biggest, toughest switch I'd ever seen. From then on, I always cut longer, sturdier switches.

What began with switches across my legs became in winter strikes across my backside with the leather strop he used to sharpen his razor. Sometimes he'd use his narrow leather belt. It hurt more than the switches or razor strop. Other times, he'd strike me with an eighteen-inch wooden ruler. But by the time I was ten, he would mostly use a yard-long willowy branch, half an inch in diameter at the tip. It made a whirring sound before it struck. Seeing the branch on a ledge above his closet door made me shudder.

Son, this hurts me more than it does you, he would often say. This was my first lesson in hypocrisy.

At school, boys often talked about the spankings and beatings we'd received. Girls were good, and boys were bad. So boys were the ones who should be punished, either because they'd been bad or because they were about to be.

I brooded over my punishments. I thought my father was unfair and cruel. He whipped me far more than my younger brother for what I regarded as minor offenses. To this day, I am unable to remember the deeds for which I was punished. I do recall that sometimes I'd get whipped for not being home when he thought I should be. I never had a watch, and it was easy to get caught up in flying a kite or skating until evening shadows made me dash home. My return home would often be met with a beating.

Occasionally, I'd get in trouble for playing ball instead of collecting money on my paper route. The problem was there'd always be someone who didn't have the twenty-five cents per week or dollar per month. My father decreed there would be no play until all my subscribers had paid. I was just as unable to force people to pay as my father was to keep me from playing ball. His rule of all pay or no play could be enforced at any moment of any day. All he needed was to see me playing while there were unclipped receipts in my collection book, and he'd order me indoors to be punished with his weapon of choice.

As a boy, I was convinced that the severity of my punishments was out of proportion to any wrongs I'd done. I also began to realize that beatings weren't necessarily part of the experience of growing up. I knew boys who'd never had a hand laid on them, and others who got spanked, but only rarely, and then for good reason. I knew the parents of these boys, and they seemed like good people to me.

The more I compared what was happening to me with what was happening to my sisters, my brother, and my friends, the more I realized I was being treated unfairly. If I'd known anyone who could help me, I'd have asked for help. Mother died when I was six, and I felt that beatings were beyond the ken of my four older sisters. We never discussed being hurt by our father. By the time I was ten, I sensed that my sisters had determined that their role in the family was to uphold the ruling authority of our father. I could never appeal my case to them.

I needed to take my case to someone who would give me a sympathetic hearing—and stop my father's abuse. There was my stepmother, but she was either too afraid to intervene—or worse, in league with my father. Grandpa Mullins, from my mother's side of the family, was a lovable gentleman; but he lived a hundred miles distant, so we never saw much of him. And he was not an authority figure. I knew I would need an authority figure, somebody who'd be a match for my father.

Pop Ashburn, the principal at Woodrow Wilson High, was an imperious yet approachable man. I thought maybe he could hear my case. But I crossed him off the list when I decided he'd just feed me a line about grinning and bearing it. I was getting desperate. I considered going to the police. But I decided they'd laugh at me, tell my father, and send me back home in more trouble than ever. My Sunday school teacher and other churchgoers would be no help either. I knew some were, like my father, tyrants in their own homes.

This left Dr. Criswell, the pastor of First Baptist, the biggest church in Downtown Dallas. When I was a boy, this church had more than five thousand members, with a Sunday attendance of two thousand. Our family always attended its services. My father was actually a deacon in the church. First Baptist was a formative force in my life. I felt it put me in touch with a source of spiritual power.

I was a true believer in the Baptist faith, and Pastor Criswell was the embodiment of that faith. He was also the only person I considered equal to my father. So I decided to take my case to him. I played out the whole scenario in my imagination ahead of time. I saw myself entering the church, walking up to his study on the second floor. He would greet me warmly, invite me in, and talk about my saintly father, then ask me why I had come to see him. I'd tell him about the whippings and beatings. He'd open his Bible and read verses about love and forgiveness and the duty of obedience. Then he would come around to my side of his desk and ask me to kneel with him in prayer. Then I would leave. And the beatings would continue. I had already tried prayer and knew it was no help. So I crossed Dr. Criswell off the list, which left me with nowhere to turn.

Except, of course, to my friends, which included girls. Some girls were amazingly good at helping heal the hurt, especially those who had also been hurt. Then there were those who were just good at listening. We'd listen to each other and support each other.

Then there was Shirley Green. I first met her at church. She was plain but lovely, a little awkward, with a beautiful smile. She and her parents had recently moved to Dallas from Oklahoma. They lived in a two-room house across the Trinity River, an hour-and-a-half trolley and bus ride from where I lived.

One Sunday evening—I was sixteen and a junior in high school—the well-to-do Wicker family invited our church training union group to come to their home for an end-of-school party. Their house had a terraced lawn, a winding creek, a badminton court, an outdoor barbecue, ping-pong, and picnic tables. The Wickers had teenage children and had always been generous to young people like me.

That Sunday evening, I invited Shirley to go with me, and she said yes. In the car going home, I shared my plans with my father.

When is the party? he asked.

Thursday night.

And when is school out?

Friday.

You know you can't go out at night when you have school the next day.

But all we do on Friday is receive our report cards, get our yearbooks signed, and go home before lunch.

It's still a school day, and you can't go out the night before.

But I've already made a date with Shirley Green, and she has no phone, so there's no way I can cancel. I can't just leave her standing there wondering what happened because I don't show up.

You know you should not have made a date with Shirley Green. You can't go.

On Thursday morning, I repeated my points that nothing happened at school on Friday, that I couldn't let Shirley down, and that I intended to go to the party. The last thing my father said was You can't go. But I went.

Shirley looked gorgeous in a dress as green as her eyes. The party was wonderful. But suddenly, I was called to the phone. My father had been on the phone lecturing Mr. Wicker about parties on school nights. I listened to Mr. Wicker, father of two high school students and deacon in the church, repeating the same things I had said about the last day at school.

My father never cursed or shouted. But he had a withering way with words. And my being at the party gave him a chance to give a piece of his mind to his fellow deacon, someone who had never seen this side of him. Mr. Wicker passed the phone to me. My father's anger came through the phone at fever pitch. He demanded that I get right home. I replied, calmly, that I'd made arrangements for a ride that would take Shirley home first across town, then bring me back to east Dallas. This would get me home earlier than the bus. My father slammed the phone down, and I returned to the party embarrassed.

I arrived home around midnight. The house was dark. I crossed the front room and started down the hall toward the bedroom shared with my brother. I sensed my father's presence before I heard him, heard him before I saw him. When I caught sight of him, he was holding the rubber hose doubled over in his right hand. He ordered me to bend over the bed. For the first time in my life, I refused.

He tried to wrestle me down. He was stronger than I, but he couldn't beat me if I refused to let him. I moved in close, wrapped my arms around his neck as if to hug him, lifted my feet from the floor, and hung my body deadweight from his shoulders. He was completely immobilized. But he continued to struggle. His breathing grew heavier, faster, and louder. He tried to fling me across the bed where he could hit me. But I hung on. Finally, he grew limp with exhaustion. I loosened my arms and stepped back as he stumbled from the room, wringing wet with sweat and muttering. Never again did I see that rubber hose in his hand. Never again did he try to beat me.

Power Struggle

It was a power struggle, a knowing mother said when she heard how my father's beatings ended. For all my life up until that moment, my father had exercised power over me. Suddenly, at age sixteen, I refused to let him continue, and the balance of power between us shifted.

Power is the ability to do something. If it is unequally distributed, if one party holds power over another, inequality exists; and with that inequality, the foundation has been laid for domination and harm. Strife is inevitable. The dominant party will strive constantly to keep the other party subservient, and the subservient party will struggle to be free.

That moment in my bedroom, without realizing it, I engaged in a profoundly political struggle. By asserting my own power, I forced my father to surrender the dominance he had always taken for granted. And looking back on that night, I now realize that two different kinds of power were confronting each other. Power based on physical violence met power-from-within.

If power is the ability to do something, dominating power is the ability to force people to do what they wouldn't do otherwise. Such power is driven to control and dominate. It uses intimidation, fear, and force. My father made ample use of fear and intimidation. He backed them up with switches, belts, and the dreaded rubber hose. Each new use of these instruments activated my memory of their past use and instilled in me fears of their future use. Such weapons at any given moment were accompanied by my memory of their past use and my fear of their future use.

The drive to dominate and control relies on weapons as a last resort. And reliance on weapons leads to bigger and better weapons. Dominating power thus has led from bludgeons to bows and arrows to bullets to bombs to poison gas, rockets, drones, and nuclear weapons. This kind of power must be maintained by artificial means, and those who exercise it must struggle to stay current with the technology of destruction. A key to the effectiveness of this kind of power is its logic, which begins with intimidation and fear, then moves to reeducation, propaganda, punishment, and, finally, destruction.

Dominating power—whether between individuals or nations—is our typical understanding of power. We are likely to think: Number One is more powerful than Number Two, because Number One is bigger and stronger. With such physical strength, he can force the other to do as he wishes. But dominating power is not the only kind of power that exists.

Another type is power-from-within, which I displayed with my father. Power-from-within refers to innate ability. It is the potency that resides in a newborn child, in a seed planted in the earth. It manifests in a dancer dancing, a builder building, a mother mothering. It is the power of the sun, the sea, the soil, the wind—and of persons coming into their own. Within each of us is the life force distinctive to our own person. To be fully empowered, we must be free of domination. There is a constant tension between power-from-within and dominating power.

Late one night, my friend Deborah Brink walked home alone. A man wielding a large knife came out of an alley and commanded her to come with him. She looked him in the eye, grabbed his wrist, and pushed the knife down and away. The man fled. Deborah had met violent power with power-from-within.

In the fall of 1982, Barbara Engel and I were living in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Out for an evening stroll, we realized we'd left our busy area behind and were walking down empty streets. Just as we turned back, a man in a long coat rushed toward me and demanded to know what I was doing in his neighborhood. He had no weapons. My arms met his, and we performed an impromptu dance in the street. I moved with him, then past him to join Barbara who had run on ahead. I remember taking a last look at my assailant. He looked bewildered. No one had harmed him. And he hadn't harmed anyone.

These cases of power-from-within may seem like examples of fearlessness. Neither Deborah nor I were distracted by fear. We were prepared for what we met, not because we knew what would happen but because we'd each cultivated a certain amount of self-possession. I had been practicing tai chi. When the man in the long coat came at me, I redirected him, letting his energy carry him away. I can't speak for Deborah except to say she was cool and collected, ready for anything.

Of course, inner power does not always prevail when it meets violence. But inner power is a precondition for equality. It is an indispensable basis for cooperation, community, and democracy. Dominating violence, by contrast, disrupts community and in the process destroys democracy and rejects equality.

Such lessons were implicit in the midnight struggle with my father. Without realizing it, I was for the first time learning about nonviolent change.

This led me thirty years later to participate in a nonviolent blockade of the train tracks going into the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant outside Denver. The Rocky Flats site occupied about ten square miles of windblown grassland at the foothills of the Rockies, sixteen miles from central Denver. The plant turned out three to five plutonium pits a day for thirty-seven years. These pits are the fissile core of every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. Rocky Flats was a crucial link in the mass production of nuclear weapons. If the plant could be stopped, mass production of nuclear weapons in the US could be halted.

I had lived in Denver for four years without knowing about Rocky Flats. I had moved to the area in 1974 to teach at the University of Denver. Before arriving in Colorado, I taught in seminaries and universities in California, Connecticut, and North Carolina, where I supported the Civil Rights Movement and participated in student, feminist, and environmental movements and opposed US military intervention in Vietnam.

In 1974, I did not know that there were scientists like Dr. Carl Johnson, director of the health department in Jefferson County, where Rocky Flats is located. He carefully documented high levels of radioactivity around the plant and higher-than-usual incidences of cancer in areas downwind from the plant. I did not know that some pigs on farms near the plant site had given birth to deformed offspring. I knew nothing of the contamination of the Great Western Reservoir close to the plant, source of drinking water for the suburban city of Broomfield. I'd not heard of major fires and accidents at the plant or of the routine radiation releases from its stacks. And I was unaware of organized efforts to shut the plant down.

Since about 1969, all my teaching focused on the fact that we humans face three threats able to end our existence on this planet: a nuclear holocaust, an environmental catastrophe, and authoritarian governance. I had no idea that a few miles from where I lived in Denver was a nuclear weapons plant that posed all three threats in a major way.

I learned about Rocky Flats in the spring of 1978 when a handful of people occupied the railroad tracks entering the plant in order to stop trains carrying radioactive materials. They were arrested, but when some were removed from the tracks, others would take their place. This became standard operating procedure. Many were arrested repeatedly. Such sustained nonviolent civil disobedience continued for a year. The group called themselves the Rocky Flats Truth Force, truth force being a literal translation of satyagraha, Gandhi's word for nonviolence.

On April 29, 1979, I joined three hundred people blockading the tracks and the two roads entering the plant. Our blockade had been planned as nonviolent action. Those who blocked entries to the plant pledged to commit no harm while being willing to suffer harm should it come our way. We were not passive. We were acting to stop the grave harm that had for many years been happening in our neighborhood and in our name.

In preparation for the blockade, all participants received training designed to ensure that no harm would occur as a result of our action. Since such situations are unpredictable, the training prepared us for all kinds of eventualities, especially the possibility that violence might erupt. Were that to happen, the violence should be contained rather than allowed to spread. Our training included role-playing where we acted out scenarios for dealing with violence.

One method we practiced for stopping violence was to hang oneself deadweight from the perpetrator's neck, absorbing that person's energy and stopping the harm. In this way, a small woman can stop a football giant without hurting him. Tears shot from my eyes when we did this exercise, for what I had done spontaneously with my father was being taught in organized nonviolence training.

The fact that at sixteen I stopped my father's beatings with a technique used in campaigns of nonviolent resistance set me thinking of other parallels. I discovered many similarities, each one of which required a break from patterns of compliance. Each included an act of disobedience. And acts of disobedience implied that rules imposed without sharing the decision-making are unfair and subject to rejection. Disobedience in these cases is not only a duty; it is also an expression of collective dignity.

Of course, a major difference between my father and Rocky Flats is that my father's beatings ended while the mass production of plutonium pits continued. Though it ended at Rocky Flats a decade later, it continues elsewhere, and the US is now (in 2020) spending huge sums to modernize its nuclear arsenal. The government has committed to a $1 trillion update of its nuclear capabilities over the next thirty years.

This continued nuclear weapons output brings to mind one more parallel, the idea of a midnight struggle. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is well-known for its doomsday clock whose hands approach or retreat from the midnight hour of a nuclear Armageddon. Early in the 1980s, after Reagan became president, the clock hands were moved to three minutes before midnight. After the agreement between Reagan and Gorbachev to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe, the clock hands were moved back to six minutes before midnight. In 2016, when several countries, including the US, said they would modernize their nuclear weapons, the hands of the clock were moved to two and a half minutes before midnight. In 2018, with uneasiness about Trump, they were moved to two minutes before midnight. The clock now includes alongside the nuclear danger the environmental problem of global warming. What the clock hands do not factor in is, to my mind, the gravest threat of all—authoritarian governance. Authoritarian rule ranks high on a threat list because it creates the culture that enables both nuclear and environmental catastrophes.

When I grappled with my father in the heat of that midnight in Texas, at stake was his character—and mine. I often wonder if he ever felt grateful for my having put a stop to behavior he regretted. For me, that night was a turning point on my way to independence and responsibility. And I feel strongly that our collective midnight struggle over nuclear weapons, the environment, and governance is a turning point for the human race.

My life for the past four decades has been devoted mainly to the nuclear issue. Almost everyone would call nuclear weapons a political issue. But what is at stake is far more profound than politics. The real struggle is over power; it is also a struggle for character—the character of ourselves as citizens of the world. It is a struggle for the character of all people.

The power to make fateful decisions is now concentrated in the hands of a very few, who have moved our lives and all life on Earth into the near-midnight zone of extinction. What kind of humans are we if we do not reclaim our birthright? What can be said of us if we fail to assume responsibility for our earthly existence? Whatever can be said will never be said if we don't stop the blind rush to end life on this planet.

One reason we don't easily exercise our own power, one reason we permit others to make fateful decisions regarding our lives, is that we have been taught to accept official power-over rather than to experience power-from-within. Our first order of business is to awaken to our own potency. But this is only a beginning. It will not suffice merely to have a society of awake, alert, empowered people if these people remain separate from each other. Hence, there is a third kind of power, namely power-with. This I experienced when I joined others in civil disobedience on the railroad tracks leading in to Rocky Flats.

Power-with, quite simply, is the ability to do together what could not otherwise be done. Power-with means people united on behalf of a common cause. When there is a linking of hands, hearts, and heads, we create a collective force that can make a difference both externally in the community and internally in each individual. An activated community gives birth to the empowered individual.

Deborah Brink, my friend who stopped a man with a knife, belonged to Denver's Cook Street Community, a supportive, politicized group. A neighborhood commune, it consisted of closely knit households that met each other as equals and empowered everyone, Deborah among them. In the group were leaders of the resurgent feminism as well as those endeavoring to end production at the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

A compelling example of power-with in the public arena occurred with the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the rear of the bus as the local law required, Blacks boycotted the buses until they were desegregated. Thus began a nonviolent campaign that not only made Martin Luther King Jr. a national leader but also awakened the dignity of a people long treated as nobodies. Dr. King often said that this sense of collective self-worth was the most important legacy of Montgomery.

When a person falls victim to dominating power, the victim often becomes the violator. My own victimization taught me how to dominate my younger brother, not to mention bully dogs and cats. For years I disciplined them by bruising both bodies and spirits. In spite of my vow to be different from my father, I found myself standing in his shoes.

Sigmund Freud's treatment of the Oedipal complex identified this dynamic. He concluded that sons will always rebel against their fathers to become dominating fathers themselves—and then they will be overturned by their own sons. Freud's theory corresponds to our epoch of patriarchal dominance. But it falls short of a total explanation because it leaves out the all-important solution of recovering our inner power and thereby moving from dominance to equality. The recovery of inner power can short-circuit the chain reaction of familial and social violence that flourishes when inner power is not recognized and recovered.

Inner power does not mean the absence of conflict; it means, rather, its full acceptance. Conflict can be accepted only by those who face each other without the intent to dominate. Those who must dominate are in fact rejecting conflict by aiming to control all who differ from them. Their attempt to control ultimately leads to brutality, murder, war, and suicide. But conflict accepted can activate the chemistry needed for transformation.

Not all who become violent have suffered direct abuse. Many are the victims of a form of indirect abuse from poverty, hunger, disease, or homelessness. Much of the apparently random violence in our society originates in such indirect abuse.

When matters important to us are controlled by others (finding a job, paying our bills, feeding our children, living in a world we