A secure and non-violent future demands a daring, daunting and perilous mission

Grand and heroic projects are sadly most often allied with violent historical epochs, but life has evolved to present us now with an even more daring, daunting and perilous mission.

Nonviolence will play a
key role in addressing global
 warming.

Faced with global warming; entrenched inequality; crumbling economics; the exhaustion of our fossil fuels, particularly oil; exponential population growth; the degradation of the world’s top soils; vandalism of our forests; the looming crisis of our food supplies; the erosion of our humanity by God-like technology; the collapse of earth’s bio-diversity and endless wars brought about by a surreptitious and misunderstood anger that has infiltrated life at every level, we look, with desperation, for the exit sign.
Many turn to supernatural forces or beings in their search for a solution, but the answer they seek is right here, with us, we hold it in our hands or, at least, in our way of thinking.
The remedy rests with nonviolence and although that might seem easy and achievable, it is not. Living a genuine, and unflinching, nonviolent life is only possible through a courageous and radical reshaping of our lives: a truly grand and heroic project.
That said and accepted, where do we start? Facing sweeping emotionally and seemingly overwhelming difficulties, many do nothing, but to lean, for a moment, on a cliché – the journey to anywhere, in this case nonviolence, begins with the first step.
That first step can be here, in Shepparton, or more intimately, in your mind and that beginning is simply about using language that is nonviolent, both in terms of the words you use and, importantly, their intent.
Although subtle, such a change can alter your understanding and interpretation of events and equally how others feel about what is happening in their lives.
Along with paying attention to what we say, and how we say it, we should consciously avoid anything that normalizes violence, something about which the mainstream media is frequently guilty.
Television is among the worst offenders and so should be simply turned off, and other information sources – newspapers, magazines, books, movies and the various forms of social media – should be treated with caution and accessed selectively.
Much of what we imagine entertainment, and frequently sport, is fanciful cloaked violence and our modern commercial world is about winners and losers in which covert violence boosts bank balances.
Genuine nonviolence is a concept so difficult to both comprehend and employ that is rarely has any true traction prompting the observation from one that nonviolence was tried for a week and abandoned as it didn’t work, ignoring the fact that centuries of violence have completely failed humanity.
Bad things happen quickly, good things take time – violence springs from our ancient, reptilian brain; nonviolence arises from modern, sophisticated and mature brains.