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For Peace & Justice: Why I Am Fasting

By Dave Dellinger

On September First I am starting a water-only fast that will continue for at least 21 days. On September Twenty-First I will take stock and decide whether to continue longer, as my colleagues Brian Willson, Scott Rutherford, Karen Fogliatti, Teresa Fitzgibbon, Don Cunningham and Jack Ryan plan to do. They plan to fast until October 12, "Columbus Day." Like them I am fasting to reflect on—and call attention to—what five hundred years of the greed-oriented Columbus Enterprise have meant, and still mean, to the people and ecology of the United States and the world. And like them I fast to remember and draw strength from those who have resisted injustice and tried to live in tune with Mother Earth and their fellows. Meanwhile, here are some of my preliminary reflections on the context and purpose of the fast.

A lot of people wonder how things can be so bad in this country and so little is being done to change them. But in reality there is a lot more rebellion and experimentation with positive ways of relating to one another than meets the casual eye or is given proper attention by the media. The military-corporate elite and its two do-nothing political parties are sitting on a volcano of public discontent that is bound to erupt. More accurately, they are sitting on a whole series of fault lines beneath the surface of today's society. And the time is approaching when one of the inevitable eruptions will start a whole series of explosions, as when the refusal of Rosa Parks to go to the back of a segregated bus led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, sit-ins, Freedom Rides and the unexpected explosions of the Sixties.

Unlike the Sixties, which set the artificial standards by which most people judge today's degree of activity, no single demand dominates today's rebels or attracts public attention the way that civil rights and the opposition to the Vietnam War dominated the revolts that took place from 1956 to 1973. Instead, the areas of activity have grown until, like Heinz, there are fifty-seven varieties. Not everyone goes to the same city on the same weekend to shout the same slogans and this makes it easier for the media to claim that "the days of social revolt are over." But to understand the media's reasons for saying this, consider that they intoned this message all through the Seventies when the women's movement was gaining energy, recruits and momentum. And when the beginnings of a dynamic movement for the rights of Lesbians and Gays were visible, a movement that by now is gaining increased public support and winning at least a few ordinances in defense of their civil rights. But the media had learned in the Sixties that it is dangerous to their interests and the interests of other corporate entities for people to believe in the power of non-violent that goes beyond voting, lobbying and writing letters to Congress. Ever since, they have worked to convince the public that there is no hope that demonstrations and civil disturbance will affect any major changes in the society. A few Band-aids, yes, but no fundamental shifts in power and policy.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, what are we going to do about the United States? Will we accept the propaganda of our power elites that "our system is triumphant" and should be established all over the world, with the U.S. as Superpower? Or will we admit that our system has failed too, depriving millions of their basic human rights, from food, housing, health care and jobs to a safe and healthy environment? From meaningful work that can support a family to an honest government and realistic participation in the decisions that affect their lives? During the period in which the Soviet Union was falling apart, the U.S. had a doubling of billionaires and of the homeless. Shall we pretend that the children of billionaires and the children of the homeless are "born equal" and that this is a democracy? Between 1980 and 1985 more children died from diseases related to poverty than the total number of U.S. combat deaths in the Vietnam War. And in the United States, the rate of Black incarceration is six times that of whites. Shall we conclude that Blacks have a proclivity for criminality in their genes? Or that the economy, culture and system of "justice" are criminally racist? And what of the Gulf War, the Iran-Contra scandal and U.S.- trained death squads in Central America?

I could continue with a whole carload of examples. But I won't, because at one level of their consciousness most people know these realities—and much, much more along the same lines. The real question is what are we going to do about them? When will the volcano that the government is so fearfully sitting on erupt, as the Soviet volcano erupted, because people will no longer tolerate such conditions?

One of the purposes of my fast is to encourage the development of nonviolent movement that will have the power of a volcano without its mindful destructiveness, a life-giving movement that will be thoughtful, empowering, and productive. I will be rededicating myself to some principles that were enunciated by Martin Luther King Jr. in the last few months of his life. His espousal of these principles marked a dramatic new stage in his awareness and activities. They made him so dangerous to the established power elite that elements within it arranged for his assassination. Here are the principles and insights as King articulated them and as I have selected them from a number of his last talks and articles.

"For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions... a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values... Power must be relocated, a radical restructuring of power must take place... We can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. From now on, our movement must take on basic class issues between the privileged and the underprivileged...The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism... We... must work out programs to bring the social change movements through from their early and now inadequate protest phase to a stage of massive, active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system.

Nonviolent protest must now mature to new level... mass civil disobedience... There must be more than a statement to the larger society, there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point.

The movement that we need must include both the kind of nonviolent resistance to the status quo that King called for and imaginative experiments in positive forms of human relatedness. We must develop programs and institutions that are based on respect for the dignity and ultimate sanctity of every human being, regardless of race, age, sex, sexual orientation, abilities, skills and whatever mistakes or crimes that some people may have committed. Even crimes? Some of society's victims do terrible things that are deplorable even though they harm far fewer people than the crimes of our present society and its rulers. But as Judge David Bazelon has written: "Society should be as alarmed by the silent misery of those who accept their plight as it is by the violence of those who do not."

In a similar vein, The New Yorker wrote concerning the April, 1992, riots in Los Angeles: "But what, as a nation, did we really expect? The residents of our inner cities have for many years now been unable to lay claim to our sense of common humanity and simple decency. On what basis can we expect to suddenly lay claim to theirs?"

Finally, Martin King once said to me: "we don't have to like everyone but we won't solve our problems if we don't love them." From time to time during the fast, my colleagues and I will attempt to spell out some of the concrete steps through which we think that these principles—and that kind of love—can be implemented. But the task is one that will require the combined trial-and-error efforts of many hearts, minds and lives, with many experiments in applying the principles within one's own community and in one's own relationships as well as in programs for the overall society. To those who are already involved in such efforts, I say "thanks and Godspeed. Let us do our best to work together, whatever our differences on details of strategy or tactics." To those who have yearned for the kind of society that King had in mind but have held back for lack of hope that it can be accomplished in today's world, I invite you to join us in these efforts. As I once heard a wise person say; "If you tell me what I propose will take a thousand years to accomplish, that's all the more reason for starting this afternoon."