Tuesday, January 23
by Amy
The Symposium was exhausting. I don’t even know where to begin or how to recap it. I’ve been in the Movement for several years now and every now and then, I get too much of it. With more and more people coming in, I have to be careful not to appear cynical or tired. But I am. Sometimes, it just feels like no one is at the helm. Or the people at the helm are grabbing the wheel and yelling at each other.
“Turn Left! Turn Right!”
So we all jerk around, making twitchy turns and with no real purpose or direction.
I shouldn’t feel this way. It’s an election year and everyone’s going to care about that rather than the real issues.
This is where I agree with everyone else: The campaigns are a distraction. Whoever ends up wherever, it’s going to be the same thing. It doesn’t matter. The war will continue.
Isn’t it like that each year?
So in Evanston we all met. We listened to Andrew Young and Staughton Lynd, who is a great man. Mr. Young says that either we will change through nonviolent demonstrations or riots. It was his theme: Violating a person's life or property is wrong. But what about distruption?
The people coming to the Movement these days don’t have the nonviolent training. We’re expected to educate them on what nonviolence is, except that now, there’s a big discussion underway to change the definition. We’ve been talking about it here at the offices. What is nonviolent protest? What defines violence?
Working off of Coleman’s notes, you can see how the debate is continuing. He’s got this quote for Mr. Young: “We wouldn’t violate the life of a person or his property. But we would insist upon confronting that person and demanding justice by refusing to cooperate with him economically, by withdrawing our labor, our support politically, by any means that we can (to) disrupt his life in order to bring about justice.”
So what they’re looking at is disruption. “From Demonstration to Resistance” according to us. But what is demonstration? What is resistance? What is violence?
