We are connecters, consumer educators, reminders that we are all interconnected.
The purpose of this website is to start a world revolution based on compassion and personal responsibility.
Our vision is a world driven by the innate goodness of people and their values of justice, kindness, and compassion for other people, for the planet, and for animals.
It’s that voting time of year. Headlines about which politicians are promising this or that. Yards littered with political signs — vote “Yes!” on this and “No!” on that. We get anxious because a political loss could have far-reaching personal and community effects. And we get excited because *finally* we can make some positive change.
Are you throwing your vote away? Are you inadvertently voting *against* your own hopes, dreams, and values? Why are we so careful every 2 years or every 4 years to cast a few votes and then so reckless with the votes we cast every single day?
Every Dollar Is A Vote!
Each of our choices in the past built the world we live in today. And each of our choices from this moment forward will build the world of tomorrow. If you’re not making choices aligned with your values, whose life are you living, what votes are you casting… and what kind of world are you building?
Our individual choices are VOTES! You are voting for and actively building the future… with each and every choice, and especially with each and every purchase.
Your consumer choices act as the conscience of business. Businesses have grown so disconnected that they often only respond to money, not to moral principles. They no longer hear our pleas for kindness and ethics. If profits increase even though a company is spewing toxic fumes, enslaving people, or hurting animals, the company “believes” it is doing something right.
It’s not that these businesses are bad; they don’t know right from wrong — they are simply growing in the direction of YOUR votes. If your values and words which plead for humanity are drowned out by the clamor of your coins, you‘re saying to unthinking businesses, “Yes, keep doing what you’re doing… and do it in my name!”
Every dollar you spend or choose not to spend is a vote. You voted yesterday. You’ll vote today — maybe hundreds of times. Will you vote for a world that respects human rights, protects the environment, and has compassion for animals? Or will you make choices that build a world you really don’t believe in?
You help build a world reflective of our shared values of justice, kindness, and compassion only when your everyday choices are aligned with those values.
A 15-minute talk presented by matt bear of NonviolenceUnited.org on Nonviolence and living “A Life Connected.” Given to 400+ high school students and staff in 2009 (Denver, CO).
Being aware is painful. Ignorance is bliss. But ignore-ance is living life at half-throttle. Being aware is living a complete life. There is no honor in ignore-ance. There is no strength in not caring. The honor comes in bearing the pain. The strength lies in answering our responsibility to ease the pain of others. So, i’ll absorb the pain and i’ll repackage it as love. The pain of caring is this thing called life.
Draw a circle. Now, put the names of everyone who matters (people and animals) inside the circle. Those who don’t matter, outside. My life’s work (and yours) is to get everyone inside your circle.
I read an article listing the cleanest fruits and vegetables to buy if you don’t want to buy organic, but don’t want a mouthful of chemicals. It explained how you can stay healthy and save a buck. The article missed the point…
Buying organic isn’t about ‘me! me! me!’ Buying organic is about protecting farm workers and their families; it’s about keeping chemicals off the land and out of our water; it’s about protecting wildlife; it’s about saving rivers and oceans; it’s about clean rain and air; it’s about dismantling the giant chemical/gmo companies (like Monsanto and Dow ) that are destroying farmers around the world; it’s about survival of the planet; it’s about the future of food; and it’s about future generations.
Some will complain, “But I can’t afford to buy organic”. Cesar Chavez (founder of United Farm Workers and one of my heroes because he understood social justice as one interconnected movement) never made over $6000 in a year, never owned a home, and still he made organic and vegan choices. I asked his granddaughter Julie Chavez Rodriguez how Cesar would respond to “But I can’t afford it”. Without skipping a beat, she replied, “He’d say, ‘You pay for it now, or you pay for it later.’”
Cesar understood that when you buy something you are supporting it, you are subsidizing it, you are saying, “More of the same, and do it in MY name!”
Buying chemical foods is making the worst food the most available food — and it’s killing people, the planet, and animals. It’s setting up a disastrous future (and present!) where real food will be a thing of the past.
This isn’t about ‘you’ or ‘me’… it is about us. We’re all one.
Can’t afford to buy organic? We can’t afford NOT to.
From the inspiring Julia Butterfly Hill, a very nice description of the desperate need for reconnection. Our interconnection is real — like gravity. This is the nature and purpose of Nonviolence — the active support, connecting and reconnecting, of our fundamental interconnection with one another.
It’s interesting, watching this with someone else, they wondered why Julia didn’t say “and animals.” I know from my study of and belief in Nonviolence and interconnection, I’ve come to automatically imagine all people, all non-human animals, and all of nature when I hear “one another.” It’s now just automatic for me. My guess is this is what Julia pictures, too. I know that’s where her heart is.
“One another,” “each other,” “life”… some may picture their immediate family or their social justice group or national community or human community. But it’s really just one community… called Earth. We’re all in this together.
In the current difficult times of which we’re all a part, “So what” is a very popular attitude. For those of you who teach, do activist outreach, speak in front of groups, or even just try to talk with anyone these days about the important work at hand trying to make the world a better place, I thought you might appreciate this insightful acknowledgement and explanation of those blank stares and skepticism.
It is a short excerpt from an excellent book by Cynthia Kaufman, Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change.
Kaufman writes, “One of the attitudes toward life that’s most popular on television as I’m writing this is cynicism. Connecting with real people involves emotional vulnerability, and knowing about the world takes work. To protect oneself from either of those challenges, it’s attractive to adopt a worldview that says all human concepts are corrupt and that the outside world isn’t worth knowing about; that the world is corrupt and unchangeable, so informing oneself about it won’t do any good; that anyone who cares about anything is a sucker; and that people involved in social movements are a bunch of hypocrites and won’t accomplish anything anyway. Therefore, the best strategy is to be aloof, to make fun of people who try to take the world and their existence in it seriously, and to find pleasure and humor in distancing oneself from everything. While in many ways this cynicism appears to be a safe strategy, it rarely compensates for the loss of personal integrity and the social isolation that come with it” (252).
After reading Ideas for Action, I’ve added it to my own very small collection of what I found to be important books. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a firm understanding of social justice issues as well as hundreds of helpful resources for further learning, strategizing, and envisioning the future of social action.
Kaufman offers an excellent introduction and summary of social movements from a sociological perspective. While the book is over 300 pages, the subsections are quick and understandable. She begins by making us aware that we each carry a distorted view of the world based on our cultural norms, ideologies, upbringings, etc. Her use of surprising historical facts (like the rise of racism only after the conquering of the Americas as a product of capitalism in its infancy) and social facts (like one in every four homeless people have a job) are an effective reminder that we don’t know everything, that we need to keep questioning, and that there is always more to the story.
Kaufman’s theme is that the more we’ve learned from history and the better we understand the context and shared interests of all social movements, the better we will be at designing and carrying out social change.
Kaufman, Cynthia C. 2003. Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Thanks for tuning in… and thank you for all that you do!
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. [We experience ourselves, our] thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of [our] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us [excluding others, including animals]. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
An excerpt from the documentary “King in Chicago”. Interviews with activists who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement.
I especially like the advice that Nonviolence requires that each of us recognize our own contribution to the problem. We must in a sense first point the finger at ourselves and remove our investment in the problem so that we may instead be part of the solution.
We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Being aware is painful. Ignorance is bliss. But ignore-ance is living life at half-throttle. Being aware is living a complete life. There is no honor in ignore-ance. There is no strength in not caring. The honor comes in bearing the pain. The strength lies in answering our responsibility to ease the pain of others. So, i’ll absorb the pain and i’ll repackage it as love. The pain of caring is this thing called life.
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