Forgive me for posting in the blog without really knowing the ropes around here. In fact one of the reasons I want to post is to understand this blog feature.

I was thinking about the Gandhian construct of satyagrapha prompted by a post at Dave Pollard's blog "How to Save the World." (Okay, I put that link in just to see whether links in the blog work).

I'll copy what I wrote in the comments here. I hope this doesn't cause any problems with anyone. In that comment I didn't link to the writing I did on James Farmer; it can be found here
You might see that I'm trying to get a feel for how to use the blog feature here, and I hope what I'm posting is of some relevance to the subject of racial reconciliation.

Here's my comment at Dave Pollard's blog:

I was a garbage collector for a few days. That job really sucks! But I'll quibble that "theft, smuggling or selling drugs" pay a living wage. Lots of people are garbage collectors for the long haul. Recently I was talking with a friend who's a hot stick lineman. He was full of blue-collar rage that night. I brought up the that real change was made by the non-violent agitation of the Civil Rights era. He was quick to point out that while he felt like shooting someone, he most certainly wouldn't.

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about James Farmer, a civil rights leader who helped to bring Gandhi's non-violent resistance to the movement. A young Kenyan commented to that post that he struggled as a youth with the relative merits of violence and non-violence. But the important thing for him as an adult was through a book on Martin Luther King, Jr. he was introduced to the idea of satyagraha. He translated it as "passive-resistance" but I like how back in the days satyagraha was rendered as "soul force."

It's not an easy idea, and the intellectual foundations of the American Civil Rights movement shouldn't be forgotten. Today a new incarnation of "soul force" seems the what can help us break through. Electoral politics and the politics of policy matter, but as in the Civil Rights era, those are just part of the larger struggle.