Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 September 2020

Facts and Emotions

The world is heading into a climate crisis. The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have warned us that as fossil fuels heat up the environment, global temperatures will rise – and then extreme weather events ( wildfires, hurricanes, droughts and floods ) will soar. It is already happening.

Saturday, 4 March 2017

How can one practice non-violence?

In 1965 when I was studying Humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Martin Luther King came to speak to the student body. The civil rights movement was then at its height in the southern United States. There was not a room big enough to hold the student crowd, so King spoke to thousands of students in an open air meeting.

At the end of his talk King made a call for volunteers to go to work in the south, doing civil rights activities. About 25 of us responded. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded by Martin Luther King, was a non violent movement. We volunteers received two days of training in non violent resistance methods. We were told that if attacked we should not fight back, but instead we should adopt a non violent position. In the worst case scenario, we were to curl up and take up a fetal position and refuse to fight back.