“Violence is not resistance. It is surrender to the script written by the state.
The regime wants chaos—because chaos gives it cover.”
Exactly right, great post.
I say violence is from the stupid part of the human brain. I get it, I can feel it in my outraged, patriot self but I will resist the temptation to let the old fight or flight brain be my conductor.
Our test in this crisis is to use our more evolved minds, minds that can understand the challenge before us, that can offer sound advice as Mark does so brilliantly every day.
If you throw rocks and burn cars, those images will be shown everywhere.
If you show courage, dignity, resolve and joyful solidarity and you are attacked by armed police and guardsmen, those images will be shared on social media and the world will see. Maybe not on Fox News. But you have phones to record what is happening.
This one burning car from Friday was on the CBS evening news tonight, as if it happened today. The media is complicit in the narrative. You are correct that peaceful is the way to go. This one burning car is all they have at the moment.
Yes! And the riots of the sixties and seventies galvanized the “I told you so’s” into the existing rigid right wing we are resisting today. At the time we won the civil rights we gained and the peace we demanded by quietly sitting on a bus, linking arms and singing peace songs, sitting in, being present in large numbers, flower power. The lasting image is the lone person standing unarmed, small in stature, in front of the overwhelming power of a State tank in Tiananmen Square. The lasting image is the bead wearing colorfully striped clad long haired peacenik standing in the face of a soldier in the line handing him a flower and demonstrating what peace was. Unarmed civil rights leaders simply walking across a bridge. When DrMLKJr was assassinated, there were city streets filled up with grieving resistors standing packed in together in silence. Self-control in spite of the rage and mourning inside. A woman left the high back stacks in a large library where she had been studying for hours, wedging in her night school education between raising children and work. She would be a teacher and put money in her own bank account under her own name as was her new right to do. When she reached the doors of the library downstairs to leave, she found them locked. The security guy didn’t want to unlock them. She was a tiny (but wiry) woman and he was afraid for her. Why? Because there was a sea of people outside. She insisted because she had to get home to her children. She was unafraid of people quietly standing. When she got outside, she asked the nearest man what had happened and he somewhat incredulously asked her how she could possibly not know DrMLKJr had been assassinated. The news floored her. She had held him in high regard. She explained she had been removed in the deep book stacks researching history. He asked her where she was going and she mentioned her car was parked on a side street. You see, she was a tiny white woman standing amid tens of thousands of black men. Most people at the time asked her about how she must have been afraid for her life “because of the riots.” She always explained how she was very sad for what was lost to the world with DrMLKJr gone, but that she was comforted by standing among so many people who felt the same ways she did. The man she had been quietly speaking to shed tears with her as he stood solidly in one spot to keep her from being crushed by the crowd. He then directed the people around them her need to get to her car to go home to her children so they moved the crowd and passed her through all the way and then asked the crowd near her car to part so that she and they would be safe as she carefully drove out of the city. They walked next to the car the whole way through the crowd. People waved at her and wished her well as they talked through her window and all shared the grief. That was the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia in 1968. Gandhi lead line after line of the people to the factory knowing they would be beaten…Satyagraha. Another woman living with a permanently damaged ankle who was a court stenographer had to carry her machine walking through the streets of NY back and forth between her office and court. On 9/11 she found herself running from the collapsing World Trade Towers. But she was not keeping up and the crowd was surging. The dust was raining down. She was about to be trampled. Someone scooped her arm and waist and quickly moved her into a nearby doorway while the surge passed, shielding her with his body. He ushered her all the way back to her office blocks away where her colleagues were relieved to see she was still alive. She turned to thank the man and praise his good deed but having deposited her to safety, he’d gone back out to help others. Out of the office windows from above, they briefly caught a glimpse of him leading a group. She never got his name. A selfless person not panicking, not turning in rage, not losing control or rioting back amid the destruction. Doing what he could to change the world for the better in the moment. Maintaining the calm for all around him amid the chaos of the attack. We don’t remember the soldiers winning nor their individual faces. The attackers are condemned for their actions. They do not live on. The peaceful resisters live forever as examples of what working toward perfection means. They are the crucible of freedom and hope, the keepers. We need to be the keepers.
We must be remembering differently. My memory of the civil rights era was one of riots. I remember that Pride started as a riot. The American war of independence involved property damage. The liberation of the concentration camps and the end of Nazi dictatorships in Europe involved the largest acts of violence in human history. You can absolutely advocate for non-violence, but to pretend it hasn’t been a part of meaningful resistance to oppression seems disingenuous.
You're not wrong to note that resistance has sometimes come with fire. But the question isn’t whether violence has occurred—it’s whether it worked. Whether it converted the conscience of a nation. Whether it built legitimacy, or gave the oppressor license to crack down harder.
Selma didn’t erupt because John Lewis didn’t fight back. He sat down. He let the cameras roll. He showed America exactly who the thugs were. And that image, not a riot, cracked the spine of Jim Crow.
As for Stonewall—it was a riot. But it also happened in an era when the cameras didn’t always roll. The gay rights movement wasn’t a national focus the way civil rights were. It wasn’t on every front page. It wasn’t broadcast into living rooms. There was no national narrative to lose—because there was barely a national conversation to begin with.
Now, we are being watched. Every step. Every frame. And those still on the fence—those unsure, afraid, or clinging to the regime’s talking points—will decide who they believe based on what they see. If they see peaceful citizens sitting down while tear gas and rubber bullets rain down, then only the truly corrupted will side with power. But if they see fire in the streets, the regime will say: “See? We told you. They’re the threat.”
You’re right that World War II demanded arms. But to compare it to this moment is not just a false equivalence—it’s a dangerous one. This is not nation against nation. This is us—inside our own country—trying to rescue democracy from those trying to strangle it.
And if you're suggesting civil war, then respectfully, you've lost me.
Nonviolence is not passivity. It's strategy. It's courage. And above all, it's the most dangerous weapon we have—because it's the one the regime can’t co-opt, can’t provoke, and can’t survive.
Yes! And the riots of the sixties and seventies galvanized the “I told you so’s” into the existing rigid right wing we are resisting today. At the time we won the civil rights we gained and the peace we demanded by quietly sitting on a bus, linking arms and singing peace songs, sitting in, being present in large numbers, flower power. The lasting image is the lone person standing unarmed, small in stature, in front of the overwhelming power of a State tank in Tiananmen Square. The lasting image is the bead wearing colorfully striped clad long haired peacenik standing in the face of a soldier in the line handing him a flower and demonstrating what peace was. Unarmed civil rights leaders simply walking across a bridge. When DrMLKJr was assassinated, there were city streets filled up with grieving resistors standing packed in together in silence. Self-control in spite of the rage and mourning inside. A woman left the high back stacks in a large library where she had been studying for hours, wedging in her night school education between raising children and work. She would be a teacher and put money in her own bank account under her own name as was her new right to do. When she reaches the doors of the library downstairs to leave, she found them locked. The security guy didn’t want to unlock them. She was a tiny (but wiry) woman and he was afraid for her. Why? Because there was a sea of people outside. She insisted because she had to get home to her children. She was unafraid of people quietly standing. When she got outside, she asked the nearest man what had happened and he somewhat incredulously asked her how she could possibly not know DrMLKJr had been assassinated. The news floored her. She had held him in high regard. She explained she had been removed in the deep book stacks researching history. He asked her where she was going and she mentioned her car was parked on a side street. You see, she was a tiny white woman standing amid tens of thousands of black men. Most people at the time asked her about how she must have been afraid for her life “because of the riots.” She always explained how she was very sad for what was lost to the world with DrMLKJr gone, but that she was comforted by standing among so many people who felt the same ways she did. The man she had been quietly speaking to shed tears with her as he stood solidly in one spot to keep her from being crushed by the crowd. He then directed the people around them that she need to get to her car so they moved the crowd and passed her through all the way and then asked the crowd near her car to part so that she and they would be safe as she carefully drove out of the city. They walked next to the car the whole way through the crowd. People waved at her and wished her well as they talked through her window and all shared the grief. That was the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia in 1968. Gandhi lead line after line of the people to the factory knowing they would be beaten…Satyagraha. Another woman living with a permanently damaged ankle who was a court stenographer had to carry her machine walking through the streets of NY back and forth between her office and court. On 9/11 she found herself running from the collapsing World Trade Towers. But she was not keeping up and the crowd was surging. The dust was raining down. She was about to be trampled. Someone scooped her arm and waist and quickly moved her into a nearby doorway while the surge passed, shielding her with his body. He ushered her all the way back to her office blocks away where her colleagues were relieved to see she was still alive. She turned to thank the man and praise his good deed but having deposited her to safety, he’d gone back out to help others. Out of the office windows from above, they briefly caught a glimpse of him leading a group. She never got his name. A selfless person not panicking, not turning in rage, not losing control or rioting back amid the destruction. Doing what he could to change the world for the better in the moment. Maintaining the calm for all around him amid the chaos of the attack. We don’t remember the soldiers winning nor their individual faces. The attackers are condemned for their actions. They do not live on. The peaceful resisters live forever as examples of what working toward perfection means. They are the crucible of freedom and hope, the keepers. We need to be the keepers.
A successful resistance to tyranny and oppression starts with and is guided by dignity and non-violence.
What unfolds beyond the peaceful pushback is out of our control but we stay nonviolent, and maintain the moral high ground for the future to build upon after the flames, ignited by others, have subsided.
Agree--- except let's not forget that the Myth of American Idealism (Noam Chomsky) has been imposed on an appallingly long list of aspiring "foreign" leaders that tried to establish their own democracies with absolutely ludicrous "support" by our CIA. The American public is oblivious about what has routinely and repeatedly taken place in the name of national security and blithe hegemony. Chicken Little is now imposing that same brand of heartlessness on US citizenry. How dare he?! " Mafia logic: What we say goes." (The Myth, 2024, p. 30). Thus, WE the People becomes just another lib communist plot to stomp out.
Democrats say acknowledge that we are not perfect but that what makes us great is always working toward perfection of our union. We can always do it better, but the important part is that we work on being better and want to.
“Violence is not resistance. It is surrender to the script written by the state.
The regime wants chaos—because chaos gives it cover.”
Exactly right, great post.
I say violence is from the stupid part of the human brain. I get it, I can feel it in my outraged, patriot self but I will resist the temptation to let the old fight or flight brain be my conductor.
Our test in this crisis is to use our more evolved minds, minds that can understand the challenge before us, that can offer sound advice as Mark does so brilliantly every day.
Thank you. Use our higher instincts and intelligence. Exercise our humanity.
If you throw rocks and burn cars, those images will be shown everywhere.
If you show courage, dignity, resolve and joyful solidarity and you are attacked by armed police and guardsmen, those images will be shared on social media and the world will see. Maybe not on Fox News. But you have phones to record what is happening.
Good trouble is required.
I wish this compelling non-violence message could be written in the sky.
In absence of that option, can you send this essay to every major op-ed news agency in the country?
Yes absolutely; how willl they stop “the people” who link arms and stand tall in the face of their violence.
Very well said. 👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏
Let’s keep John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King and other legacies of peaceful protest. I admire these brave men and women.
This one burning car from Friday was on the CBS evening news tonight, as if it happened today. The media is complicit in the narrative. You are correct that peaceful is the way to go. This one burning car is all they have at the moment.
Yes! And the riots of the sixties and seventies galvanized the “I told you so’s” into the existing rigid right wing we are resisting today. At the time we won the civil rights we gained and the peace we demanded by quietly sitting on a bus, linking arms and singing peace songs, sitting in, being present in large numbers, flower power. The lasting image is the lone person standing unarmed, small in stature, in front of the overwhelming power of a State tank in Tiananmen Square. The lasting image is the bead wearing colorfully striped clad long haired peacenik standing in the face of a soldier in the line handing him a flower and demonstrating what peace was. Unarmed civil rights leaders simply walking across a bridge. When DrMLKJr was assassinated, there were city streets filled up with grieving resistors standing packed in together in silence. Self-control in spite of the rage and mourning inside. A woman left the high back stacks in a large library where she had been studying for hours, wedging in her night school education between raising children and work. She would be a teacher and put money in her own bank account under her own name as was her new right to do. When she reached the doors of the library downstairs to leave, she found them locked. The security guy didn’t want to unlock them. She was a tiny (but wiry) woman and he was afraid for her. Why? Because there was a sea of people outside. She insisted because she had to get home to her children. She was unafraid of people quietly standing. When she got outside, she asked the nearest man what had happened and he somewhat incredulously asked her how she could possibly not know DrMLKJr had been assassinated. The news floored her. She had held him in high regard. She explained she had been removed in the deep book stacks researching history. He asked her where she was going and she mentioned her car was parked on a side street. You see, she was a tiny white woman standing amid tens of thousands of black men. Most people at the time asked her about how she must have been afraid for her life “because of the riots.” She always explained how she was very sad for what was lost to the world with DrMLKJr gone, but that she was comforted by standing among so many people who felt the same ways she did. The man she had been quietly speaking to shed tears with her as he stood solidly in one spot to keep her from being crushed by the crowd. He then directed the people around them her need to get to her car to go home to her children so they moved the crowd and passed her through all the way and then asked the crowd near her car to part so that she and they would be safe as she carefully drove out of the city. They walked next to the car the whole way through the crowd. People waved at her and wished her well as they talked through her window and all shared the grief. That was the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia in 1968. Gandhi lead line after line of the people to the factory knowing they would be beaten…Satyagraha. Another woman living with a permanently damaged ankle who was a court stenographer had to carry her machine walking through the streets of NY back and forth between her office and court. On 9/11 she found herself running from the collapsing World Trade Towers. But she was not keeping up and the crowd was surging. The dust was raining down. She was about to be trampled. Someone scooped her arm and waist and quickly moved her into a nearby doorway while the surge passed, shielding her with his body. He ushered her all the way back to her office blocks away where her colleagues were relieved to see she was still alive. She turned to thank the man and praise his good deed but having deposited her to safety, he’d gone back out to help others. Out of the office windows from above, they briefly caught a glimpse of him leading a group. She never got his name. A selfless person not panicking, not turning in rage, not losing control or rioting back amid the destruction. Doing what he could to change the world for the better in the moment. Maintaining the calm for all around him amid the chaos of the attack. We don’t remember the soldiers winning nor their individual faces. The attackers are condemned for their actions. They do not live on. The peaceful resisters live forever as examples of what working toward perfection means. They are the crucible of freedom and hope, the keepers. We need to be the keepers.
Watch this: https://t.co/NMFiWWGnCV
i have seen it. bravo
We must be remembering differently. My memory of the civil rights era was one of riots. I remember that Pride started as a riot. The American war of independence involved property damage. The liberation of the concentration camps and the end of Nazi dictatorships in Europe involved the largest acts of violence in human history. You can absolutely advocate for non-violence, but to pretend it hasn’t been a part of meaningful resistance to oppression seems disingenuous.
Dan,
You're not wrong to note that resistance has sometimes come with fire. But the question isn’t whether violence has occurred—it’s whether it worked. Whether it converted the conscience of a nation. Whether it built legitimacy, or gave the oppressor license to crack down harder.
Selma didn’t erupt because John Lewis didn’t fight back. He sat down. He let the cameras roll. He showed America exactly who the thugs were. And that image, not a riot, cracked the spine of Jim Crow.
As for Stonewall—it was a riot. But it also happened in an era when the cameras didn’t always roll. The gay rights movement wasn’t a national focus the way civil rights were. It wasn’t on every front page. It wasn’t broadcast into living rooms. There was no national narrative to lose—because there was barely a national conversation to begin with.
Now, we are being watched. Every step. Every frame. And those still on the fence—those unsure, afraid, or clinging to the regime’s talking points—will decide who they believe based on what they see. If they see peaceful citizens sitting down while tear gas and rubber bullets rain down, then only the truly corrupted will side with power. But if they see fire in the streets, the regime will say: “See? We told you. They’re the threat.”
You’re right that World War II demanded arms. But to compare it to this moment is not just a false equivalence—it’s a dangerous one. This is not nation against nation. This is us—inside our own country—trying to rescue democracy from those trying to strangle it.
And if you're suggesting civil war, then respectfully, you've lost me.
Nonviolence is not passivity. It's strategy. It's courage. And above all, it's the most dangerous weapon we have—because it's the one the regime can’t co-opt, can’t provoke, and can’t survive.
Yes! And the riots of the sixties and seventies galvanized the “I told you so’s” into the existing rigid right wing we are resisting today. At the time we won the civil rights we gained and the peace we demanded by quietly sitting on a bus, linking arms and singing peace songs, sitting in, being present in large numbers, flower power. The lasting image is the lone person standing unarmed, small in stature, in front of the overwhelming power of a State tank in Tiananmen Square. The lasting image is the bead wearing colorfully striped clad long haired peacenik standing in the face of a soldier in the line handing him a flower and demonstrating what peace was. Unarmed civil rights leaders simply walking across a bridge. When DrMLKJr was assassinated, there were city streets filled up with grieving resistors standing packed in together in silence. Self-control in spite of the rage and mourning inside. A woman left the high back stacks in a large library where she had been studying for hours, wedging in her night school education between raising children and work. She would be a teacher and put money in her own bank account under her own name as was her new right to do. When she reaches the doors of the library downstairs to leave, she found them locked. The security guy didn’t want to unlock them. She was a tiny (but wiry) woman and he was afraid for her. Why? Because there was a sea of people outside. She insisted because she had to get home to her children. She was unafraid of people quietly standing. When she got outside, she asked the nearest man what had happened and he somewhat incredulously asked her how she could possibly not know DrMLKJr had been assassinated. The news floored her. She had held him in high regard. She explained she had been removed in the deep book stacks researching history. He asked her where she was going and she mentioned her car was parked on a side street. You see, she was a tiny white woman standing amid tens of thousands of black men. Most people at the time asked her about how she must have been afraid for her life “because of the riots.” She always explained how she was very sad for what was lost to the world with DrMLKJr gone, but that she was comforted by standing among so many people who felt the same ways she did. The man she had been quietly speaking to shed tears with her as he stood solidly in one spot to keep her from being crushed by the crowd. He then directed the people around them that she need to get to her car so they moved the crowd and passed her through all the way and then asked the crowd near her car to part so that she and they would be safe as she carefully drove out of the city. They walked next to the car the whole way through the crowd. People waved at her and wished her well as they talked through her window and all shared the grief. That was the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia in 1968. Gandhi lead line after line of the people to the factory knowing they would be beaten…Satyagraha. Another woman living with a permanently damaged ankle who was a court stenographer had to carry her machine walking through the streets of NY back and forth between her office and court. On 9/11 she found herself running from the collapsing World Trade Towers. But she was not keeping up and the crowd was surging. The dust was raining down. She was about to be trampled. Someone scooped her arm and waist and quickly moved her into a nearby doorway while the surge passed, shielding her with his body. He ushered her all the way back to her office blocks away where her colleagues were relieved to see she was still alive. She turned to thank the man and praise his good deed but having deposited her to safety, he’d gone back out to help others. Out of the office windows from above, they briefly caught a glimpse of him leading a group. She never got his name. A selfless person not panicking, not turning in rage, not losing control or rioting back amid the destruction. Doing what he could to change the world for the better in the moment. Maintaining the calm for all around him amid the chaos of the attack. We don’t remember the soldiers winning nor their individual faces. The attackers are condemned for their actions. They do not live on. The peaceful resisters live forever as examples of what working toward perfection means. They are the crucible of freedom and hope, the keepers. We need to be the keepers.
A successful resistance to tyranny and oppression starts with and is guided by dignity and non-violence.
What unfolds beyond the peaceful pushback is out of our control but we stay nonviolent, and maintain the moral high ground for the future to build upon after the flames, ignited by others, have subsided.
Agree--- except let's not forget that the Myth of American Idealism (Noam Chomsky) has been imposed on an appallingly long list of aspiring "foreign" leaders that tried to establish their own democracies with absolutely ludicrous "support" by our CIA. The American public is oblivious about what has routinely and repeatedly taken place in the name of national security and blithe hegemony. Chicken Little is now imposing that same brand of heartlessness on US citizenry. How dare he?! " Mafia logic: What we say goes." (The Myth, 2024, p. 30). Thus, WE the People becomes just another lib communist plot to stomp out.
Democrats say acknowledge that we are not perfect but that what makes us great is always working toward perfection of our union. We can always do it better, but the important part is that we work on being better and want to.