Tag: change

by Rivera Sun, Editor of Nonviolence News If you want to make change, think outside the protest box. It’s easy to get hung up on protests. We’ve heard about them, they’re highly visible, and they’re relatively easy to pull off. The problem with protests is that – all too often – they’re easily ignored. Creativity […]

An Essay of the Man From the North (The Writings of the Fictional Character Charlie Rider from The Dandelion Insurrection) by Rivera Sun The Vote – the beloved, abused, scorned, corrupted, stolen, hijacked, pointless, profound, hopeful, depressing, hard-won, cherished vote – is not the only way to take action for meaningful change. Currently, the elections […]

An Essay of the Man from the North by Rivera Sun The clock is ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick. Can you hear it? We have only  . . . One minute, 48 seconds until United States poverty claims another life. Two minutes until midnight, with nuclear annihilation looming. 25 hours and 21 minutes until the next […]

by Tom H. Hastings Rivera’s Note: This true, personal essay from Tom Hastings caught my heartstrings and reminded me in the midst of everything, how important it is that we show up for our Earth and for each other right now. We are facing tremendous challenges, and our connections to and with one another are […]

I used to think of love as a side dish to social political change – the green beans next to the meat and potatoes of power and struggle. But, the more I live in the gritty world of honest humanity, the more I suspect that love is the essential mineral lacking in our nation’s veins. […]

An Essay of The Man from the Northby Rivera Sun A self-organizing movement like the Dandelion Insurrection relies on the collective and individual capacity of our participants. We are only as strong as the synergistic sum of our parts. The weaknesses of each person affect the effectiveness of the whole movement. The wisdom or folly […]

  The Earth is crying out for our love, for humanity to return to loving the contours, complexity, and exquisite beauty of our world. We have forgotten, turned away, hardened our hearts, and closed our ears. We have fallen into the terrible habit of thinking of this Earth as an object, a resource, or the […]

This is a photo of my electric hot plate stove. Years ago, when I moved to this house, my friends were working to stop fracking in the nearby county. In solidarity, I turned off our natural gas stove and bought a hot plate, paying a little extra each month for the wind power option available […]

Recently, I traveled by train across the US in a swaying, creeping journey that took me through the backyards and forgotten corners of our country. Here, you see the America that doesn’t make it into the slogans of presidential campaigns. These back alleys are not evoked by the statistics and demographical jargon politicians use to […]

If our cars fatally malfunctioned as often as police officers shoot citizens, there would be a massive recall, pulling vehicles off the road, overhauling the engineering design, firing culpable employees, and paying out settlements to consumers for injuries and deaths of family members. The problem of a complete lack of accountability within the police system […]

On June 27, 1915, Grace Lee Boggs was born in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father’s restaurant.  Grace later said, “because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.” Over her 100 years of life, Grace would, indeed, change the world […]

Consider this post an act of rebellion . . . a nonviolent action against the tide of business as usual. It’s just another Sunday at my house, but after over a decade of thinking, reflecting, learning, and changing, Sunday afternoons involve dozens of constructive actions that remove my consent from destructive systems and place my […]

This is an excerpt from Rivera Sun’s novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, featuring a moment when Zadie Byrd Gray commits to being a love-motivated changemaker and living up to her inner potential. Find the whole novel here. “There are three hundred million people in this country and someone has to pull their love from the womb […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

(This essay was originally part of a longer essay addressing five stories of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis and the parallels that can be applied to current events in the United States.)  Recent comments by US politicians have left many troubled, worried about a replay of Nazi-era Germany here in the United States. The specter […]

Know Your Nonviolent History (You’re Gonna Need It) According to Wikipedia: “A cacerolazo, cacerolada, or casserole is a form of popular protest practiced in certain Spanish-speaking countries – in particular Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Cuba, Spain – and more recently English and French-speaking countries, most notably Québec, as well as in Turkey during the […]

Recent Talks & Travels Along the West Coast Last week, I traveled the West Coast, speaking at several events and offering a few workshops on nonviolent change. With former-CIA intelligence analyst (turned anti-nuke activist) Elizabeth Murray and anti-drone, peace activist Sr. Megan Rice, I spoke about US imperialism and militarism, and the need for pro-democracy […]

Every fifteen minutes, I leave my work behind and dance. For five minutes, I move, stretch, spiral, spin. I shake my body free of the tensions of typing and the linear quality of online work. I release the news, the calls-to-actions, the cries of human suffering. I leave it all behind and dance. Like a […]

  Here at the foot of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, the desert is promising winter. The sagebrush mesa is dotted yellow with autumn flowering shrubs. Soon, the aspens high on the sides of the peaks will turn shocking gold with the bite of cold air. Our field of winter squash ripens orange, red, and […]