HOW is nonviolent struggle MORE powerful than violent advocacy? Are you really COMMITTED to winning the Culture War?

I mean REALLY. Are you COMMITTED to winning the Culture War? 

Who won the battle in this image from Bloody Sunday? Who won the war? Hint: it wasn't the guys beating up the nonviolent protesters.

No doubt the concept appears, on its face to be counterintuitive. But journey back with me to with me to touch on the work of the likes of Charles Darwin and UC Berkeley psychology Prof. Dacher Keltner. Keltner authored The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence and is founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. Then back to March 1965. 

Susan Cain, author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, quotes Keltner, 

"We are impelled to relieve the sufferings of another," wrote Darwin, "in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved."

For Darwin, says Keltner, "survival of the kindest" would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood.  

Better than more common expression, attributed to Darwin, "survival of the fittest," that is.  

One of the most important contemporary examples to illustrate and demonstrate the POWER of nonviolent struggle and starkly contrast it with violence was Bloody Sunday in March 1965.

On March 7, 1965, police, state troopers, and a citizen “posse” violently attacked civil rights marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, United States. More than 15 marchers were hospitalized for injuries suffered in an event known as “Bloody Sunday.” 

The marchers, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were attempting to walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was intended to draw attention to the violations of civil and voting rights in Alabama and throughout the South. 

Americans across the nation watched footage of peaceful protesters beaten until they were bloody, injured, and, as in the case of legendary SNCC activist John Lewis, suffered concussions. 

Days later, after a second attempted march (“Turnaround Tuesday”), a white minister died from injuries suffered. This media attention galvanized the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. A third march, led by Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., reached Montgomery on March 25, 1965. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later. Lewis remembers, "President [Lyndon] Johnson signed that Act, but it was written by the people of Selma."

Among the things Civil Rights hero John Lewis taught us,

“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.” John Lewis made this statement on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 1, 2020 commemorating the tragic events of Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday occurred on March 7, 1965 as peaceful protesters were beaten by law enforcement officers for crossing the bridge. Lewis and others like Amelia Boynton Robinson were beaten so badly they were hospitalized.

By the way, Diane Nash, an original member of SNCC, just days ago on July 7, 2022 [57 years after Bloody Sunday] was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Diane Nash is a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who organized some of the most important civil rights campaigns of the 20th century. Nash worked closely with Martin Luther King, who described her as the “driving spirit in the nonviolent assault on segregation at lunch counters.”

Who will be the Diane Nash of the movement to establish the personal sovereignty (and hence, the bodily autonomy) of women in 2022?