In 1899 in Glasgow, Keir Hardie, arguably the main founder of the Labour Party, launched a furious attack on Lord Overtoun in a pamphlet called White Slaves. Overtoun was a rich factory owner, a donor to charities and an evangelical Christian who criticised the local authority for allowing trams to run on Sundays.

Hardie revealed Overtoun’s other side in his treatment of workers at his chemical works. They toiled 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Deadly fumes were liable to poison their lungs. All this for low wages and no sick pay.

Hardie countered with another pamphlet. His theme was that Overtoun’s practices were unchristian.Overtoun backed down, increased wages, improved conditions and largely abolished Sunday working.

So who was this Hardie? Tony Benn calls him “Labour’s first and, in many ways, greatest leader”. Yet, unlike Burns, his birthday is not celebrated in Scotland. Born illegitimate in 1856, for a while as a child he was the sole earner in his family. A prosperous Christian baker sacked him for being late. It provoked in Hardie a venomous scorn of hypocritical Christians.

As a young coal miner, he had two turning point experiences. In his diary, he penned, “Brought up an atheist –converted to Christianity” in 1878. Then his readiness to speak out for miners got him the sack. Later he was appointed a full-time trade union official. His developing socialism stemmed less from Marx and more from his observations of poverty and his acceptance of Christ’s teachings.

In 1892, Hardie won a sensational general election victory at West Ham South and was soon dubbed “member for the unemployed”. He lost that seat but then won at Merthyr Tydfil.

Hardie never abandoned socialism. What about Christianity? After leaving the pit, he lived in Cumnock where, after arguing with the middle class deacons at the congregational church, he helped found a working class church.

On becoming a full-time political activist, he appeared to stop regular attendance. Yet my study of his speeches shows that he remained an outspoken Christian. He continued to attack rich Christians whom he considered ignored both Christ’s injunction not to pursue money and possessions and also Christ’s lifestyle of being close to the needy. Towards the end of his life, he declared, “I myself have found in the Christianity of Christ the inspiration which first of all drew me into the movement and has carried me on in it”.

He died in 1915. No official tributes were voiced in the Commons yet hundreds of working class men and women marched to his funeral in Maryhill, Glasgow.

It is difficult to transpose Hardie to today but I reckon he has implications for the Labour Party and the church. He shows the party that socialist policies are not necessarily vote-losers. Within a decade of his death, Labour was in government. The church can be credited with attacking poverty, but they often fail to follow Hardie’s example and condemn the hypocrisy of prominent wealth-accruing churchgoers. Both Labour and the church should remember Keir Hardie.

Keir Hardie. Labour’s Greatest Hero, £10.99 by Bob Holman published by Lion Hudson, priced £10.99.

September 9, 2011

OPINION

I’m getting ready to duck, but don’t shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer. Or so says Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard.

Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious believer. Best known for Bowling Alone, the book that made ”social capital” a key indicator of a healthy society, Putnam, with his co-author David Campbell (a Mormon), has waded into the debate about religion in the public square with his latest offering, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. The book emerges out of two massive and comprehensive surveys into religion and public life in America.

Their most conspicuously controversial finding is that religious people make better citizens and neighbours. Putnam and Campbell write that ”for the most part, the evidence we review suggests that religiously observant Americans are more civic, and in some respects simply ‘nicer’ ”.

On every measurable scale, religious Americans are more generous, more altruistic and more involved in civic life than their secular counterparts.

They are more likely to give blood, money to a homeless person, financial aid to family or friends, a seat to a stranger and to spend time with someone who is ”a bit down”.

Putnam and his team interviewed 3000 people twice over two years, asking a range of questions about people’s religious lives as well as their civic involvement, social relationships, political beliefs, economic situation and demographic profile.

The religious landscape is very different in Australia, but what information we do have suggests similar results here. A 2004 report by the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Research and Philanthropy in Australia, found that people who said they were religious were more likely to volunteer, and for more hours, than others. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data suggests the same. Nonetheless, a study here as in-depth and wide-ranging as Putnam’s would be fascinating.

Putnam says religious people don’t like everything about his book, but they do like this material.

Yet, despite what I’m writing here, I’m not really claiming that people of faith are better people than non-believers.

Many of my friends have no faith and would outdo me on measures used in these surveys.

In the church, just like any area of life, it’s a mixed bag of the good, the not so good and the, well, nutty.

But this research is in stark contrast to claims by prominent authors such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. After reading their works, you’d swear that religion makes you immediately abandon rationality to become an inward-looking extremist. What Putnam’s book does at the very least is to bring a bit of balance into the conversation.

A sobering note for believers is that this study reveals that the content of a person’s belief isn’t what matters so much as their level of involvement in a religious community.

An atheist who comes to church to support her partner will rate as well as any believer on these scores.

What can’t be denied, according to Putnam and Campbell, is that there is something unique about a religious community, that has an impact on people for good.

So next time a removalist truck delivers a bunch of God-botherers into your neighbourhood, don’t despair. It might be reason to celebrate.

Simon Smart is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity.

 Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gods-truth-believers-are-nicer-20110908-1jzrl.html#ixzz1pDYFShRe

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/gods-truth-believers-are-nicer-20110908-1jzrl.html

By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Washington

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion’s Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint. ”I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary.”

Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital.

‘Trembling’

When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.”I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think,” recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California.

Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Paris. Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger. ”At the borders, my father was always really trembling,” recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a “strong man” who had given the family “great confidence that everything would be OK.”

Unlikely hero

The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives.

“I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out. My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren’t hurt. The ones that didn’t have him, they took them and you never heard about them again.”

Of Mr Sardari, she says: “I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris.” Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, Sardari was an unlikely hero.

Nazi propaganda

In his book In the Lion’s Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran’s legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II. Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers. In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry. He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children. When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari’s humanitarian task become more perilous. Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

Racial purity

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive – and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed “Djuguten,” were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer’s skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis’ ideology to gain special treatment for the “Djuguten”, as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari’s new book shows. High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with “experts” on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect – which the book suggests may well have been Sardari’s own invention – were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

Lonely death

By December 1942, Sardari’s pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari’s book, as “the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage”. But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps. The number of blank passports in Sardari’s safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people “this could have saved over 2,000 individuals”.

Sardari never sought recognition for his work during his lifetime, insisting he had only been doing his duty. He died a lonely death in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981, after losing his ambassador’s pension and Tehran properties in the Iranian revolution. He was posthumously recognised for his humanitarian work in 2004 at a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter “popular misconceptions” about Iran and the Iranians. ”Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians,” he says. ”There is no distinction ‘I am Muslim, he is Jew’ or whatever.” He believes the story illustrates the “general cultural propensity of Iranians to be tolerant” which is often overlooked in the current political climate.

In Ms Castano’s luggage were lessons and pedagogical principles developed and evaluated as part of her PhD thesis, from the School of Education, which looked at the role that science education plays in reducing violence towards others, including animals.

“I have always had an interest and love for animals,” she said.

“I consider there is a strong link between the way we relate to animals and the way we relate to people.

“I am passionate about nature and I studied a Bachelor degree in Biology.

“As I studied I began to realise that the perspective of science towards nature and animals which is taught at the schools and university science programs is often centred in a utilitarian view.

“In other words, animals and nature are valued if they can offer a resource to humans and I consider that view has brought many of the problems in the environment and society which we are currently facing.”

During her work as a tutor at Deakin University, she had the chance to observe science classes at schools in Australia and she realised things were no different here.

“I wanted to challenge that thinking and view on animals,” she said.

“I want to challenge the way science is often taught and to explore if there is any link between the way science is taught and the values and attitudes towards humans and animals it promotes.”

While Ms Castano found there was growing evidence in other fields to support her contention, the amount of research in the education field was limited.

“I initially used the information from research done in other fields to develop a theoretical framework for the intervention I designed and then put it into practice in Colombia,” she said.

“I decided to do it in Colombia since I have worked there as a school teacher and have witnessed highly violent situations not only in several communities and towns but also in school settings; so I thought my study would be highly relevant to those more marginalised and disadvantaged communities and with children who were exposed to high levels of violence.”

Ms Castano explained that in disadvantaged communities in Bogotá children were often desensitised to violence and were used to cruelty to animals.

“Students have had limited opportunities to have contact with animals, and most of those experiences involved issues of animal cruelty like circuses that treat their animals poorly and cockfights, dogfights and bullfights,” she said.

“But I used those experiences students were most close to in order to challenge their views and attitudes.”

“I decided to use those experiences of animal cruelty and the pedagogical principles I have identified as potentially useful to design science lessons that encouraged changes of attitudes in children.”

Ms Castano explained that “in the lessons I designed, children learned about animals through discussing the ethical issues that are involved in those situations, the emotions and feelings they could generate in the animals and how this could be similar to situations they had to face daily inside and outside the school.”

Ms Castano said that once children started to become engaged in the discussions and share personal experiences they had not shared before with their classmates, they started to realise their classmates were experiencing similar situations and emotions and their attitudes and interactions started to change.

“There is a big potential for science to change the view towards animals and nature that most of us currently hold and promote compassionate and caring attitudes towards others based in their own value,” she explains.

“At the beginning it was difficult to offer any class due to the high levels of aggression among the students that participated in this study.”

“But as time went on I observed many positive changes in the attitudes of the children who participated in this study and in their interactions with their classmates.”

Despite thess promising results, she argues, “the purposes, nature and pedagogy of the science that is taught in schools need to be widened and include aspects of ethics and moral issues about the way we behave towards animals and nature that are often ignored.”

“My thesis suggests how science education can accomplish this and serve social purposes that are not commonly included in science classes.”

Carolina Castano on the Deakin Research Channel

The whole question of nonviolence was taken by various people as being primarily a question of revolution or change or avoidance of war, but the more I reflect on the matter the more I see that it goes very, very much deeper.  So I will start talking about technology because what we stand in need of is to recognize the violence in our technology.  We are always prepared to react in a violent manner because we are very short-tempered.  We want to solve the problem immediately.  We normally solve problems by taking a sledgehammer and smashing it and then the poor problem explodes into twelve bits, and then we take sledgehammers to smash each of the twelve and again they explode.   The whole idea of nonviolence is to start living a nonviolent way, and the slogan of the organization which I set up in England twelve years ago, the Intermediate Technology Development Group, is something like, “It’s second class people who solve problems.  First class people don’t have them.” It’s much better not to have them in the first place.   As a highly intelligent person once asked, “When we see the connection, if an ancestor of long ago would visit us today what would he be more astonished at – the number of our dentists or the rottenness of our teeth?” We’re very grateful that we have these problem solvers, the dentists, but it would be much cleverer not to have rotten teeth.  There are whole populations that have perfectly good teeth.

The proposal of nonviolent solutions often attracts real hatred, real animosity.  For instance, if you say we can have a far more efficient agriculture without all these violent chemicals, then you attract to yourself great annoyance.  Particularly from academics, which is understandable because they have spent years and years learning about all these chemicals, the doses and the counter-doses and the poisons and the counter-poisons and then you come along and say we can do without all this.  But this violent technology is going to be our undoing unless we find some ways of correcting it.

For instance, in agriculture, chemistry is violent.  Biological processes are relatively nonviolent.  Some people say that diseases are biological processes, but we don’t mean that.  Nature on the whole is very benign, very well balanced.  If we understand what she needs and that all of the scavengers also do work, we can utilize weeds instead of killing them.  We can learn from the infestations because they are indicators that the scavengers have come to remove something.  Those who have developed this art of the nonviolent approach to the problem of growing enough food find that these problems don’t really arise.  There was a German gardener who established a garden on the grounds of a former brickyard.  There was no fertility whatsoever, but he built the fertility on his own and he offered any visitor one mark for every bug he could carry for the garden.  There just weren’t any.  These things can be done and have been done and are being done.  This is a nonviolent approach.  To be sure, it is not perfect, but I believe that nothing in this world can be perfect.

I will give another example of violence, perhaps the most horrifying.  We are prepared to get plutonium in order to get a bit of energy so that we can go on building rooms where all sunlight is carefully excluded and nothing can happen unless we burn energy.  We do this in order to be able to carry on with these absurdities, which we have indulged in at a time when our oil and natural gas was cheap and plentiful.  We are now prepared to produce plutonium and litter the world with this unbelievable ghastly substance, which is a danger to all living creatures for all time once it has been put into the world.  The Good Lord did not put it in the world.  We make it.  Then we say that science will make sure that this will never leak out into the biosphere.  Wonderful science.  They try to make us believe that from now on there will never be any earthquakes, no violence of any kind, no civil disturbances, no criminals, no schizophrenics who may pull the wrong lever, and therefore, it is quite alright to put into the world this terrible substance, a danger to all life for 3 million years after it has been produced by man.  So, there are many, many other examples.  This widens the concept of violence and of nonviolence beyond the purely political.  Let’s try to widen it a bit more into the philosophical, the very fabric of the modernistic way of thinking.

You know, something happened three hundred odd years ago in our intellectual and spiritual history associated with the names of Francis Bacon and René Descartes.  They suddenly turned round the very principle of Western civilization.  The principle of Western civilization was formulated by Thomas Acquinas, who actually himself was quoting Aristotle, namely that the slenderest knowledge of the highest things is more desirable than the most precise knowledge of the lower things. In other words, there was a vertical scale, and René Descartes came along and said that only such knowledge is worth having as can be absolutely precise.  The model for this was geometry and mathematics, which automatically confines attention only to the lower things.  Only these things can be mathematized.  But these mysterious factors like life or consciousness, or, at a human level, self-awareness, the kind of consciousness that recoils upon itself and thereby opens all doors, can never be mathematized.  They cannot be known with precision.  They can only be known to the extent that we can mobilize inside ourselves the quantities necessary for knowing.  So, there can be no question of complete precision, let alone measurement.  And this was the great moment when Francis Bacon said that, in the words of Descartes, we shall make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.

“The masters and possessors of nature”: this is an entirely new attitude that previously no part of mankind had ever held.  Historically, we had looked upon ourselves as, in a sense, creatures.  But that we should have even the ambition to become masters and possessors – that is where the real deeply-rooted violence comes from.  Descartes already, wanting to be precise, said that animals are machines.  Then, of course, it only took 100 years before the next philosopher came along and said human beings are machines.  And when these ideas gradually take root in a civilization it doesn’t take very long before they are carried into practice.  We know we have carried the idea that, after all, animals are only machines.  We have carried this into practice with a vengeance.  They are machines to produce eggs or machines to produce meat in great animal factories – again, an example of the violent spirit that comes from wrong metaphysical positions.

Hence unhappily, because the modern age has perfected itself in the treatment of human beings as machines.  In our industrial system, human beings are means of production and technology is developed not from the point of view of what is the need of the human being to develop himself or herself, but where do we put the human being to speed up the process of production?  And, of course, if this could be mechanized, then we could do away with the human being.  All this stems from the loss of the vertical direction and the loss of any kind of an idea that life has any purpose but just to get through it in some manner that is not too disagreeable.  I believe as an ecologist that we will not get any of our economics straight unless we recover a sound metaphysical basis.  There is, I believe, in all human beings, a tremendous urge which can be smothered that is still there to rise above, above all the frivolities of everyday life, and that used to be symbolized by cathedrals rising up and by all sorts of myths and legends.  All this we have been deprived of increasingly since Descartes.  And now we still have to search, to rise above, and what do we do?  Send people to the moon.  The biggest monument in Moscow is a launching platform for space rockets.  We used to have launching platforms for souls and that doesn’t use much mechanical energy.  It conserves on natural gas for the soul to rise, but for a rocket to rise, that takes any amount of natural resources and non-renewable natural resources.  I am not joking.  These things are interconnected items, and to talk about conservation or ecology without making this connection is a waste of time.  The point is that there must be growth.  Well, having lost the consciousness of the vertical dimension, you say there must be economic growth; we don’t really know why or what, but we imagine that if there is more activity, that this is a good thing which protects us.  Although, we are at the end of an era, so that even your new president was able to say that more is not necessarily better –a very, very big statement.  One of the biggest statements made for 100 years.  Of course, it’s always been assumed that more is better.  So I wanted just to make the connection between this idea of nonviolence, which is normally treated as if it was just a matter of ethics, and show that it is also a matter of technology and that technology is also a matter of metaphysics.

The whole idea of sending people to the moon has to be understood metaphysically.  It is not good enough to say, “Well, we are just little boys and because we can do it, we must do it.”  No, we have a need for this upward movement and when we can’t do it spiritually, then we have to do it physically.  Perhaps this has spiritual consequences that may be beneficial.  These people have seen the earth from a distance and have suddenly become conscious that the earth is not as scientific philosophers have been telling us, just a cosmic accident, of no importance.  They have come back and they have said that we have seen the jewel of the universe, a thing of genuine beauty, and a thing all round and just as big as it is and no bigger.  We have visited other planets either in person or by photography and all that we can see is wasteland.  Horrifying wasteland.  Of course, we haven’t seen many of them, but those we have seen gave us a new view of the world.  Perhaps even the silliness of sending people to the moon may bring us back to the truth, because an operation like shooting people up to the moon is an operation that can only grow out of a very violent spirit.  We want to be masters and possessors also of the moon, also of the solar system; with all the fantasies that are being discussed about space colonies and all that, well, one has to keep one’s sense of humor.  I was asked what I thought about it and I said, “Well, you can have my list of people whom I would nominate to send, and I would even subsidize them.  But I’m afraid it won’t happen because this event is losing all sense of reality.”

The things we work with must have some physical existence.  That’s why we are on this earth.  The word is indeed the beginning, but it is not good enough to stay only with the word.  The Gospel, the fourth Gospel says, “In the beginning is the Word,” but read on, the Word has to come down, become flesh and dwell among us.  So the real question of all of us is, how can we first hear the Word, but then bring it down and make it flesh so that it can become a reality among us?  Therefore, we have to do something in the material world, and one of the biggest tasks in my group is to work toward the creation of a nonviolent technology.

Gandhi knew all these things instinctively with a sureness of touch, which is all the more astonishing the more you read of what he said.  How simply he said it!  He knew that nonviolent technology must be technology on a human scale.  We see the skyscrapers – this is the outcome of a violent attitude to everything and has a rather enormous economic consequence.  I spent two years as a young man in the United States, and for many decades when people asked me where I was born, I used to say I was born at the age of 21 in America.  But now I see how strange things are.  How, somehow, the scheme has gotten out of hand.  On the one hand, I find enormous skyscrapers.  And then on the other hand, enormous areas covered with one-story buildings.  That’s very strange isn’t it?  I mean, why can’t we have 3, 4, 5-story buildings as in the European cities?  If there really isn’t enough ground, why this on the one hand – ultra-human scale vertically (physically) – and on the other hand, again the horizontal expansion so that all cohesion is lost? Somehow we have lost touch with one of the fundamentals, namely, what is the proper scale of things?  And when the scale is wrong, then there is violence.  And very easily there is despair.  We have to prepare ourselves for a period, I won’t say it’s today, perhaps in the next 20 months but most certainly in the next 20 years, where there is an increasing fuel crush.  It won’t be a matter of exploitation but a matter of resources.  There just isn’t more than the oil that there is, and at the present rate of usage, it is not going to last more than a couple of decades.  Well, we can’t afford to come to the end of it altogether, so during thenext two, three decades we’ll have to be on a sliding scale learning to do with less and less.  Not to accept this, simply to pretend to ourselves that science will solve these problems, is nothing short of suicide.

Well, let’s return to Gandhi.  The essence of Gandhi as a nonviolent leader and economist is that he says, “I’m not interested in any mechanical or other appliance which is outside the reach of the people.  Bring me machinery, bring me the finest inventions, but they must be such that everybody has access to them.”  This is a nonviolent attitude and I wrote in my book, I think repeatedly, the very, very deep and brilliant saying by Gandhi: the answer is not mass production but production by the masses. Now this must be understood in the West more and more deeply.

What is the difference between mass production and production by the masses? Everybody needs to be a producer, because everybody is necessarily a consumer, and if you are a consumer without being a producer, you are a sponger.  You are living at the expense of others.  You can’t have even your self-respect.  (I’m not talking about babies or the aged or the crippled.)  There are many sorts of arrangements where not everybody can be a producer or where to be a producer you must lower yourself to be tied to some little niche that you might possibly fill.  Then everybody becomes fearful and neurotic because of the alternatives.  I can’t be a producer because I’m unemployed.  I can’t find a job, or perhaps I’m not prepared to do the kinds of nonsense that they actually expect me to do, well, then I can’t lead a decent upstanding life.  It’s a terrible dilemma for me.

So Gandhi says we don’t need mass production, which is arranged by a few ultra-wealthy or powerful people and a technology that is out of the reach of the people at large.  It is so expensive that it can only be used by people who are either very rich or very powerful.  He wanted production by the masses – a relatively simple technology so that everybody can be productive.  And if you just quantify this, you will decide very quickly that the multiplier effect when really everybody can be productive produces wealth on a scale that the mass production society can never produce.  We have indeed efficient machinery which turns out the stuff, but the proportion of people who are actually productively working is getting smaller and smaller.  It is now so small that only a tiny percentage of our total social time is time that we all of us have together as useful for production.  With further and further mechanization and automation, that percentage is further shrinking, so that the joy of productivity and being creative is organized out of our society altogether.  Needless to say, all this is accompanied by theorizing that has suggested to most of the western world that actually to have to work is a bad thing, that the satisfaction of life can only be had in leisure hours.  Being in a situation where most people can’t enjoy their work because it is mindless and stunting is really pretty disastrous.  And this gives rise to all sorts of wild behavior.

Now to change the subject a little bit and make it a little bit more metaphysical.  There are three different levels: unity at the top, diversity in the middle, and uniformity at the bottom.  I’d like to associate these three words with some others.  Unity, if you take this metaphysically, can be called the divine or heaven.  Uniformity can be associated with the idea of hell.  And this is us here, this is the world, let’s call it Earth.  That is to say, the situation in our lives is one of great diversity and multiplicity, which is a very unstable situation and we have a very urgent desire to get out of this instability.  And we have two possibilities of seeming resolve, that is, whether to go up or to go down.  Now, a mass production society is a society that is built on the idea of uniformity.  This is a movement downwards because with uniformity and standardization you can only get at the lowest level, namely, of lifeless, mindless matter.

Industry is a consistent and systematic attempt to eliminate the living factor from what we are doing.  It is much easier in the textile industry to work with man-made fibers than with natural fibers.  Why?  Because the man-made fibers have total uniformity, whereas there is always an uncontrollability about anything living because there is an element of freedom in it.  So industrialists say, “Well, surely my part is to eliminate the living factor.”  The ideal is total automation.

It’s like a doctor I met in Africa who was studying a disease that comes from snails in the water.  They produce organisms that get into the skin and into the human body, and then out of the human body back into the snails.  The way to deal with the disease is to break the cycle somewhere.  And he says he’d come to the conclusion that it is impossible to eliminate the snails but perhaps it could be solved if we eliminate the human beings.  Then the cycle is broken and the disease will have gone.  Industry is a little bit like that.  They say we want goods.  We are interested in goods and we’d like to eliminate the human being because automated machinery can’t go on strike, it doesn’t indulge in absenteeism.  You have to organize the maintenance, but you don’t have to deal with beings who ask for higher wages and things like that.  So, this is the tendency of mass production.  Industry is forced toward uniformity, to eliminate life.  So it is a downward movement.  And, of course, it kills the human spirit.  If you ask a worker, “Do you like your work?”, then you are well-advised not to wait for the answer.  This is one of the reasons why we have worldwide inflation because people are waking up to the fact that they are being used and that there is no point in it except the weekly paycheck.  It’s rational, then, to say if I work only to get money, I must arrange matters so that I work less and less for more and more money.

But it may be a return to some kind of sanity to force management to reconsider that technology is dehumanizing.  So that work can be made more enjoyable, instead of simply saying, as the slave-owners used to say, “Oh, no, they don’t really mind.  They actually like it.  They are so moronic that the less they have to think, the happier they are.”

I referred to Descartes.  One hundred years later, we had a man called Adam Smith, the founder of economics, whose bicentennial has just been celebrated along with the bicentennial of the publication of his book, The Wealth of Nations.  There, he says that human beings are formed by the work they do, and if this work is totally mindless, the human being will become as mindless and stupid as it is possible for a human being to become.  He goes on to say that this is going to happen in all progressive societies and to the great majority of the population.  And he says that without batting an eyelid.  He doesn’t say that this is a great threat that will lead to total collapse of our civilization; he simply says that this is what will happen and, of course, it would be desirable for government to do something against it.  You won’t be surprised to hear that Marx took up this remark with a certain amount of vengeance.

Well, to return to these levels – the divine level of unity, our level, and the level of hell or the underworld of uniformity.  But you will notice already in the words that unity and uniformity sound very much the same and, hence, ancient wisdom says Satan was the ape of God.  You have to look carefully to see that the difference is a total difference, but the appearances are deceptive for those who have neglected their own spiritual culture.  Now, we can associate this with a few other ideas.  Namely, with the idea of quality and with the idea of quantity and here, of course, in the middle are both.  That is to say, everything that you encounter can be looked at as a quantity so much, so heavy, this or that, or as some essential quality.  We don’t know what you are all doing or going to do.  I started life as a statistician, but also I spent quite a few years as a farm laborer.  Well, when I was a farm laborer some 40-odd years ago my task before breakfast was to go and count the cattle, and then I would come back and touch my hat to the bailiff, “Yes sir, 32, they are all there.”  ”Well”, he said, “run off and have your breakfast.”  One day, I arrived there and there was an old farmer standing by the gate who said, “What do you do here every morning so early?”  I said I was counting the cattle.   So he shook his head and he said, “If you count them every day they won’t flourish.”  Well, he didn’t know that I was a statistician in disguise.

Nothing really counts in our society unless it can be quantified.  And the things that really matter cannot be quantified.  In economics we have had a movement from economics to econometrics – great mechanical, quantified models of how things are supposed to intertwine.  It’s a total denial of humanity to approach a human problem in that way.

Now, I’m finally going to associate these concepts after the commercial drug has worked.  You see up here, where it’s a matter of quality, there you have nonviolence.  Quantity, pure quantity, is pure violence because there is nothing to respect.  There is nothing to be tender with.  There are just brutal facts.  There is no soul, there is no life, you are just a number.  This is the region of pure violence and, of course, on this earth, it’s a mixture of the two – nonviolence and violence.  Why is this so?  Because it has been arranged that the strain and stress force a higher level, a higher human level.

There are two classes of problems.  There are convergent problems and there are divergent problems.  Now what does that mean?  If you have a problem, namely, how to get a speedy transport on two wheels and launch this idea with a number of designers, they will come up with the bicycle.  You will see that the more they work on it and the more experience they gain, the more all the different answers of different designers converge until you have the final bicycle.  The bicycle has not changed for maybe 70 years.  That is a convergent problem, and a convergent problem can be solved.  And once it’s solved, we are the beneficiaries even if we haven’t taken any part in the work.  The problem of how to live in a dark room where sunlight is excluded can be solved by electricity and transmitters.  And once it has been solved you only have to operate a switch.  It makes no demands on you at all.  Now, if the whole world consisted of only the convergent problems, no doubt they would all be solved and we would have nothing more to do, and then turn into cabbages.  But this was not the idea.  So the Good Lord has mixed it with a large number of divergent problems which cannot be solved and should not be solved because the solution, I might use the terrible word, the final solution, is only with death.

A very typical divergent problem is education.  If you take equally intelligent people, and put to them the question, “What is the best education?”, one person is bound to say that it is the passing on of the culture of the society through the next generation.  And this can only be done in an atmosphere of discipline.  The little beggars have to sit still and receive it.  And another person with an equally penetrating insight says, “Now wait a minute, these little beggars are all different and you can’t force them.  You have to build a little ring fence around them and then put their roots into the culture and they will take up what they need and grow in accordance with their own laws and thirst and this can only be done in freedom.”  Both answers are correct.  But normally in logic we learn that if discipline is a good thing, more discipline is even better, and the most discipline is the best.  And then you get a school that is a prison house.  Freedom is a good thing and more of it would be even better, and the most of it is the best, and again you don’t get a school, you get a loony bin.  So, this is a divergent problem because discipline and freedom are, in fact, opposites, and there is no compromise.  Either the little fellow can do what he likes or he has to do what I tell him; there is no halfway house.  In politics we have much the same.  We have freedom and liberty and we want equality.  Well, if you leave things free, then things will be very uneven and unequal, and if you enforce egality then your liberty goes out of the window.  There was an intelligent Frenchman connected with the French Revolution who realized that this pair of opposites can be reconciled at a higher level, and hence, the slogan of the French Revolution was not simply the absurdity of having egality and liberty at the same time.  The concepts become reconciled if there is fraternity.

Now, how can I say that this is at the higher level?  How can I recognize it?  Egality can be arranged; it can be legislated.  Liberty can be arranged and be legislated, but fraternity is a quality of the human being.  It cannot be legislated and it cannot be synthetically produced.  It must come from every one of us out of our inner energy.  It is a higher thing.  Therefore, you can conclude that life has been arranged full of divergent problems.  When there are no solutions to the problems, we are continuously stimulated to rise to a higher level.  In this sense, nonviolence is the higher level.  We must not assume that we can achieve nonviolence on this earth, but we must remember that if we don’t practice nonviolence and aspire towards it, then assuredly we will sink down into violence.

(Transcription of a lecture delivered in Berkeley, CA, 1976)

by John Fullerton

I never heard of Ray Anderson the first time I went to cover one of his speeches at a conference. But after a few minutes of listening to him, he became a hero.

Anderson—as many of you probably know—became an unlikely, and influential, figure for the renewable movement. He built Interface, a carpet manufacturer based in Georgia, into a multibillion dollar business over several decades. Then, an employee asked what Interface planned to do for the environment. Anderson huddled with executives and handlers and wondered what to serve up as a reply: we comply with all laws; we have never been convicted, etc.

While preparing the canned response, someone gave him Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce that detailed how civilization could destroy itself through depredation of natural resources.

“It hit me like a spear in the chest,” Anderson told me.

After reading the book, Anderson put Interface on a quest: to make Interface a carbon neutral company by 2020.

Investors, pundits, customers and even employees thought he was nuts. But since 1996, Interface has reduced fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent and total energy use by 44 percent, curbed greenhouse gases by 82 percent, reduced water use by 73 percent, and decreased waste going to landfills by 67 percent. Meanwhile, revenue has grown 66 percent and earnings have zoomed. Since 2003, Interface has made 83 million square yards of carpet with zero environmental impact linked to its production. Employees began to examine ways to make their operations more efficient.

And carpet tiles—a European concept brought to the U.S. by Interface—are now all the rage among designers. Style, profit and sustainability in one package.

Just as important, Anderson realized that you can’t convince someone or an organization about the need to protect the environment or invest in a sustainable future. They have to convince themselves. You could try to goad Anderson into saying something bad about an opponent, but he would resist. He always felt that everyone would come to agree with him if given time.

The only person he would criticize was Milton Friedman. He couldn’t the economic hero of the 80s and 90s. For those of you that lost thousands today in plummeting oil stocks, maybe you will want to pick up Anderson’s Confessions of a Radical Industrialist.

Demographically, he was in some ways the ideal messenger. A successful businessman not from California who came to believe in sustainability through personal conviction and a St. Paul-like moment backed up by a solid balance sheet. If his health hadn’t begun to fail, he would have been a formidable force in the Obama White House, or even the U.S. Senate.

Now we have to build on that legacy.

“The Greenest CEO”

Written by Ken Edelstein

Ray Anderson has been called the “greenest CEO in America” for his uncompromising advocacy of zero-waste manufacturing. In the 1990s — after his now well-known epiphany over industry’s impact on the environment — he reorganized the Fortune 500 company that he’d founded around the principles of the “Natural Step” manufacturing philosophy.

Interface enjoyed healthy growth over the next decade and a half. At the same time, the company cut waste and pollution (by more than half, according to most measures) and claims to be on track to eliminating its waste and pollution by 2020.

The transition gave Anderson a dramatic story to tell as he made his own transition from day-to-day operation of the company to environmental visionary — both for Interface and for much of American industry.

“Without a doubt, the business case [for reinventing industry] is crystal clear,” he told me in an April interview. “Our costs are down — never can get enough of that. Our products are better than they ever have been, because of biomimicry. Our people are united around this. … And, of course, there’s so much good will in the market.”

While reporting about sustainability in Georgia, I crossed paths with Anderson on four or five occasions. What most struck me was his ability to be blunt about the severity of the environmental crisis while at the same time to maintain the upbeat courtliness of a Southern executive.

In that April interview, the ailing Atlanta native expressed both optimism and frustration over whether his message was being heard. On one hand, he said, the political system is doing little to push the transition of industry toward sustainability. On the other hand, a “co-evolution of education and environment” is helping to change the outlook of the next generation of leaders.

“The people who are now in their 20s, getting out of school, 20 or 30 years from now, they’re just going to have a very different approach,” he said. “And I think they’re going to get there in the nick of time.”

Though he was a 1956 Georgia Tech honors graduate in industrial engineering (who was granted an honorary doctorate by the school just last week), Anderson’s personality seemed customized to the role of entrepreneurial CEO. He was a gifted pitchman and an outside-the-box thinker — who twice revolutionized his own industry.

The first of those innovations came in the 1970s, when he founded Interface to become the first manufacturer of modular carpet tiles. The company quickly became one the largest publicly held carpet makers.

Anderson is known more broadly for his decision in 1990s to climb what he called “Mount Sustainability.” Other leaders in the Georgia-centered carpet industry have followed suit with their own sustainability programs, although none has made as dramatic a commitment as Anderson.

Like many a businessman facing many a challenge, Anderson focused on environmental issues only after he became aware of a problem in the marketplace: A sales manager in California told him in 1994 that clients were asking questions about the company’s environmental impact that the sales team couldn’t answer.

Anderson established an environmental task force, whose task became more ambitious when the CEO began reading a book on the topic called the “Ecology of Commerce,” by Paul Hawken. He never seemed to tire of recounting the “spear in the chest” he felt as he read the book.

The company set about to reorient its entire culture around the Natural Step process advocated by Hawken. It embraced the concept of reworking all its processes and even its approach to designing products to move toward an elimination of all waste and pollution; Anderson called thatMission zero.

Anderson wasn’t shy to use his new-found prominence in sustainability circles to tell his company’s story. He was named to co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development during the Clinton administration. Major profiles about him appeared in, among other places, Fortune, The New York Times and Time, which in 2007 also named him one of its “Heroes of the Environment.” Over the next decade, he spoke to at least 1,000 audiences on environmental issues.

Anderson gave many of those speeches after he’d learned in late 2009 of his illness. In those last 20 months, his message didn’t seem to change — although to the listener, it may have gained in poignancy.

He was hesitant to speak publicly of his illness, citing the implications it might have for a public company. But in an updated introduction to his latest book, “Business Lessons of a Radical Industrialist,” he had this to say about the personal challenge he was facing:

“Cancer is no fun. If you don’t receive the right treatment, you die; and even with the very best treatment you can still die. I seem to be receiving the right treatment; though the very best results one can hope for, complete remission (which I am nowhere near yet), leave one knowing it can recur, maybe in a different part of the body as a metastasis, or maybe in a mutated form.”

This article was reprinted with permission from the Green Building Chronicle.

Katie Redford, a 25-year-old student at the University of Virginia School of Law, was doing a human rights internship on the Thai-Burmese border in 1993. During her time there, she heard many stories of villagers fleeing from military-ruled Burma into Thailand.

The Burmese army terrorized communities as entire villages were destroyed to clear a corridor for a gas pipeline being built for the California-based oil company, Unocal, and its partners, including the French oil company, Total, and the Burmese military junta.

One local activist told Redford how he and others had written to Unocal and the U.S. government describing the violence they suffered. They received no response. The young man asked her: Given that he had been ignored in his peaceful attempts to prevent the destruction of his community—did he have the legal right to blow up the pipeline? Redford pointed out that she was only a second-year law student, but she guessed that no, that would be illegal. “And, in any case,” she added, “it’s really not a great idea.”

The question did, however, make her think through the challenge of how to find suitable redress. At the time, it seemed impossible.

Redford met with an activist named Ka Hsaw Wa, who had been jailed and tortured in 1988 for his part in Burma’s pro-democracy protests. While working secretly near Burmese army units, Ka Hsaw Wa agreed to smuggle Redford across the border, where, despite a bout of malaria, she gathered information for a report on the brutality connected with the pipeline.

Redford documented a range of horrific abuses. In one case a woman’s baby was thrown into a fire and burned alive. As Redford later recalled: “Refugees who were literally fleeing their burned homes, fearing murder, rape, or being seized for forced labor, would look me in the eye and say, ‘Please, when you go back to your country, use your freedom to protect ours. Use your rights to protect ours.’”

On returning to law school, Redford searched for a way to force Unocal to take responsibility for the abuses that she believed had been committed on Unocal’s behalf. She focused especially on an obscure law signed by George Washington in 1789 and originally intended to combat piracy. Two centuries later, Redford believed the long-defunct Alien Tort Claims Act might have a useful role to play, by giving U.S. courts the jurisdiction to make rulings against companies in connection with international crimes committed against individuals outside of the United States.

Redford worked for a year on a paper that explored those options. The paper gained her an academic A. But her professor assured her that she was deluded if she thought that suing an international oil company in connection with abuses in a far-off country could ever happen in the real world. Redford later described the conversation: “It will never happen. It’s a terrible idea. You will not succeed.”

Redford challenged that confident assessment. In 1995, she and Ka Hsaw Wa founded the nonprofit organization EarthRights International. Using the arguments first set out in her student paper, they filed suit on behalf of 15 Burmese villagers in an unprecedented legal action as corporate America looked on nervously. Then, in a landmark decision in 1997, a federal district court in Los Angeles concluded that U.S. courts can adjudicate claims against corporations for complicity in abuses committed overseas.

A series of appeals and counterappeals followed. Finally, in December 2004, just months before the trial was due to begin, Unocal settled out of court. Though the amount has never officially been disclosed, the company is reported to have paid millions of dollars in compensation.

For those involved, as important as the money was the principle. A law student, and those she went on to work with, proved wrong those who believed that villagers on the other side of the world could challenge a global company for its part in their suffering. As one of the forced-labor victims said, “I don’t care about the money. Most of all I wanted the world to know what Unocal did. Now you know.”

Redford and Ka Hsaw Wa, who were married in 1996, continue in their work with EarthRights International to highlight connections between human rights abuses and international business. Companies around the world—in Indonesia, Nigeria, and elsewhere—have been forced to think about their human rights responsibilities as never before.

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

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General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver. -Bertolt Brecht

Yigal Bronner, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, included this quotation in an open letter he wrote in 2002. He and hundreds of others refused to serve with the Israeli army in the occupied territories. These soldiers were from prestigious elite units, who had seen active combat and risked their lives. Many were jailed for their refusal. They became known as seruvniks from the Hebrew word seruv—refusal.

The seruvniks drew their compatriots’ and the world’s attention to the dehumanizing effects of the occupation on both Israelis and the three million Palestinians in the occupied territories. They insisted, in what became known as the Combatants’ Letter: “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people. We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense. The missions of occupation do not serve this purpose—and we shall take no part in them.”

Bronner’s letter to the general who called him to serve in the occupied territories was a meditation on the relationship between an individual soldier and the army that orders him to do the unthinkable. Bronner had one such experience when he, working as a tank gunner, was ordered to fire a missile into a group of people. “I am the final small cog in the wheel of this sophisticated war machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I am supposed to simply follow orders—to reduce myself to stimulus and response. To hear the command ‘Fire!’ and pull the trigger, to bring the overall plan to completion,” Bronner wrote. “And I am supposed to do all this with the natural simplicity of a robot, who senses nothing beyond the shaking of the tank as the shell is ejected from the gun barrel and flies to its target.”

Bronner wrote that, although he was not a particularly gifted soldier, he was capable of thinking. And so he refused to fire. He acknowledged that he was “a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on.” But his warning to the general and Israel’s political leaders was powerful: “One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But … ultimately other gunners, drivers, and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately, our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history books, for all generations to see. So, general, before you swipe me away, perhaps you too should do a little thinking.”

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

yesmagazine.org/people-power/10-everyday-acts-of-resistance-that-changed-the-world

In September 1943, the Nazis prepared for the deportation of all Danish Jews to concentration camps and death. But Georg Duckwitz, a German diplomat with a conscience, deliberately leaked the plans for the roundup, which was due to begin on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Armed with the information from Duckwitz, Danes swung into action.

Teachers fetched children out of class, and told them to go home and pack their things. Friends and strangers alike provided alternative accommodations, so that nobody would be at home when the Nazis came knocking on the door at the registered addresses of Jews. Adults and children checked into hospitals under fictitious names, suffering from fictitious ailments. Others appeared at chapels, as if to attend a funeral. The “mourners”—sometimes hundreds at a time—then traveled at a stately speed out of Copenhagen, as part of a huge funeral cortege. Families were transported to remote beaches, where boats picked them up at night and took them to safety. Others arranged escapes in broad daylight. In Copenhagen, families stepped into canal boats that advertised “Harbor Tours.” These special harbor tours avoided traditional sights, delivering their passengers to waiting fishing boats instead. Families hid in the hulls, or were covered by tarpaulins, herrings, and straw, and were ferried to neutral Sweden to wait out the war in safety.

As a result of Duckwitz’s whistle-blowing and of Danish solidarity, 99 percent of Denmark’s 7,000 Jews survived.

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

yesmagazine.org/people-power/10-everyday-acts-of-resistance-that-changed-the-world

Aristophanes never intended the Lysistrata story to be taken literally. His play was a satire, a way of pressing for an end to the death and destruction of the long-running Peloponnesian War in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The story played with an obviously unthinkable idea: that women, by withholding their consent to sex, could do something to end a brutal conflict.

Two thousand years later, Lysistrata has achieved a real-life momentum of its own.

In Kenya in 2009, many feared a renewal of the post-election violence that had brought the country to the brink of catastrophe a year earlier. The relationship between the two main political rivals, Prime Minister Raile Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki, remained dangerously tense. Women’s groups, fearing another descent into violence, urged men to settle their differences and, as they put it, “begin to serve the nation they represent.” To emphasize the point, they announced a sex strike.

They were perhaps inspired by a similar action taken in Sudan in 2002, when thousands of women in the South took up the practice of “sexual abandoning” to compel men to end the twenty-year civil war in which an estimated two million people had died.

Rukia Subow, chair of one of the groups in Kenya, argued, “We have seen that sex is the answer. It does not know tribe, it does not have a party, and it happens in the lowest households.”

The strike gained widespread support—even the prime minister’s wife, Ida Odinga, declared that she supported it “body and soul.” Women’s groups welcomed the success of the action—“Kenyans began talking about issues that are affecting them. And it got the politicians talking.” The women even persuaded some sex workers to join the strike.

It ended with a joint prayer session. The prime minister and the president finally agreed to talk.

Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson adapted this article for YES! Magazine from their book, Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World © 2010 by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson, Union Square Press, a division of Sterling Publishing Co,. Inc. (Facebook/SmallActsofResistance).

yesmagazine.org/people-power/10-everyday-acts-of-resistance-that-changed-the-world