GANDHI AND KING

The myth is that people like my self, who are liberal to the bone: the tree huggers, the mushy hearts, those who often accept the idea that non-violent or peaceful resistance is the way to win battles—it is not. It is a way to win wars.

Peaceful protests have a lot of appeal for “peace loving” people but if you are one of us be mindful of what you are doing before you accept the myth of immediate victor. There is a bigger chance you will lose the “battle” but only rarely will you will end up in jail, lose your job, or receive a hit on the head. The ugly truth is that peaceful protests usually don’t win individual battles but they do win “wars”. One thug or a person with a handful of money can hurt a lot of us but not all of us. Scott Walker is still Governor of Wisconsin. The 1 % verses the 99% “Occupy Wall Street” did nothing; Wall Street traders still openly rig stock purchases, big banks still steal your money. The list of these unfulfilled past protest in State Capitals and in Washington D.C is long but deserves serious reevaluation in terms of those eventually fulfilled verses those not fulfilled.

Abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, minority voters rights, gay right, for example. Strangely enough, the message in all of this is that peaceful protest is how democracy works. Our government is a system of social dominance designed to protect the wimps; that is what the clauses that guarantee us the right to assembly and free speech is all about; it puts the might on the side of the peaceful protestor. The objective of these measures is to win over opinions, and it has worked for 237 years. Our government protects the bully as well as the wimp; however, there are more wimps than there are bullies at the voting booth. Our system of government moves us out of the bestial past where might is right and aids us on our road to humanization.

The British government failed in Gandhi’s India, where the people did not have the right to vote, and in the plantation south such as MLK’s Birmingham, Alabama, where the government was controlled by thugs because “all of the people” did not have the right to vote.

The most import challenge in life is to survive. Obviously, if an individual does not survive he/she lost but their “cause” can still win. This knowledge could be the driving force; thus the hope of protestors. However, there are innate driving forces as well. Winning is the height of altruism, which results in a flood of “feel good” hormone (oxytocin) in our bodies; you knowingly sacrificed something of value for the benefit of others. Nonetheless, if survival is the dominating sense, then self-sacrifice for a cause is irrational; as those who read my blog post know, I take this as a strong clue that the driving force is innate. Perhaps, things like the “feel good hormone” are why people fight hopeless battles but more logically, it is an innate feeling of reciprocal altruism buried by survival of the fittest deep within our genomes.

In the case of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the greater good was to gain racial equality yielding a measurable increase in quality of life for a majority of people in the case of Gandhi’s India and a minority of people in the case of King’s plantation south. I am convinced that they sacrificed themselves in peaceful protest for what they perceived was a “hope of winning” their causes and not because of some vague “feeling” arising from their DNA/RNA and they won even though they didn’t expect to win. When you think of these two people, applaud them for their humanization, which puts them in a pantheon of the courageous along with the many “tree huggers” and “mushy hearts” that have fought for a cause but died trying thus redefine cowards, those who would let thugs beat them to make a point. 

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