Nonviolence as an affirmative value . . .

I do some part-time work (writing) for our local battered women's shelter, and I'm forever making the argument that, as a society, we have to end violence against women and other vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed, and/or under-represented groups . . .

working on a recent assignment, it occurred to me that what's missing in our discussion of violence these days is the notion of promoting nonviolence as an affirmative value -- something that we did a lot of in the 60s, but which seems to have fallen by the wayside in these turbulent times . . . just when it is most needed . . .

so I did a little googling to see who's doing what to make bring nonviolence back into the national discussion . . . the first resource I found was something called Nonviolence.org . . .

http://nonviolence.org/

digging a little further, I came across their links to other resources dealing with peace and nonviolence . . .

http://nonviolence.org/links/

I think one of my goals in the New Year will be to see if I can get the organization I work with to start talking about nonviolence as a desireable value that we should be celebrating, fostering, and promoting . . . I'd like to see nonviolence once again be a topic of national discussion and maybe offset some of the barbaric war-mongering that seems to be at the forefront of our national consciousness (and BushCo's agenda) these days . . .

Funny how the world sticks to killing when it works so badly.

hundreds of years, and much of the work has been secular in nature so that religious arguments and attitudes haven't gotten in the way. I started posting some of this stuff on my blog (below).

I had some problems logging in to Blogger after Google bought it and kind of forgot about the blog for a while, but things are working now and I should shortly be posting updated peace and nonviolence sources and historical writings.

The concept of peace and nonviolence as positive forces, not simply reactions or defenses to violence and war, is fundamental to Quaker thought, and there's a vast amount written that I've been sifting through.