Lessons from Gandhi on the violence within all of us
Transcriber: Delia Cohen
Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Good afternoon.
Audience: Good afternoon.
I met Jonathon Jones -
where is he? -
Jonathon Jones: Right here.
(Laughter)
Arun Gandhi: in Groveland Prison
many years ago.
And when he came out on parole,
I thought he would make a good teammate.
He would represent
the new age of nonviolence,
while I represent
the old age of nonviolence.
So we’re a team,
and we go out and speak together.
I want to invite you to partner up
with the person sitting next to you.
And I want one member
of the partnership to make a tight fist
and imagine that you have the world’s
most precious diamond in the fist.
And I want the other member
to open the fist.
(Laughter)
Now, tell me,
tell me honestly:
How many of you asked
the other person to open the fist?
So you see how deep violence is within us.
I merely asked you to open the fist,
and you immediately become physical
and try to pry open the fist.
So my grandfather was right when he said
that [violence] is
very deeply rooted in us.
We have built a whole culture
of violence around us,
a culture that is so deep within us,
it has overtaken our entertainment,
sports, religion, language,
our relationships.
Everything about us is violent.
And that is why he said, “The only way
we can achieve peace in this world
is by becoming the change
that we wish to see.”
If we don’t change ourselves,
if we don’t look at our own
weaknesses and transform them,
we will never be able
to bring peace in this world.
We are all longing for peace;
we all work for peace.
But if we don’t know
what peace looks like,
we are never going to achieve it.
He taught me a lesson
when I was 13 years old
and had the privilege of living with him.
He made me draw
a genealogical tree of violence.
He said, “The only way
you can understand nonviolence
is by first understanding
violence itself.”
And he made me draw this family tree,
just as we do a family tree,
with violence as the grandparent
and physical violence
and passive violence
as the two branches.
And every day before I went to bed,
I had to analyze and examine everything
that I had experienced during the day
and put them down on that tree.
Things that I may have done
to other people
or people may have done to me
or things that I may have read about.
Whatever it was, all of that
had to be analyzed and put on that tree.
Now physical violence is something
that we understand and we know about
because it hurts so much.
It’s all the physical
manifestations of violence,
where we fight and kill
and murder and rape
and do all of these things
using physical force.
But passive violence is something
that we don’t recognize.
We don’t even know about it.
Sometimes, it’s just become
so deeply rooted within us
that we don’t even think
of it as being violent.
And the way I had to find out
whether this is passive violence or not
was to ask myself a simple question:
If somebody were to do this to me,
would I be hurt by it or helped by it?
And if I came to the conclusion
that it would hurt me,
then that would be passive violence.
And that could take the form of anything:
discrimination, oppression,
suppression, wasting resources,
throwing away a perfectly good thing,
that we do in our societies all the time.
I read in The New York Times not long ago
that we, in the United States,
throw away $60 billion
worth of food every year.
Goes into the garbage.
And yet we have millions of people
in our own country who go to bed hungry.
Now that is a form of violence too.
But we don’t recognize
that as being violence,
because we don’t see the hurt it causes.
So it’s important for us to know
about the passive violence
that all of us commit.
And that is why Grandfather
made me draw this tree,
which was a form of introspection.
When I began doing this,
I was amazed that within a few months
I was able to fill up the whole wall
in my room with acts of passive violence.
The physical violence
didn’t grow very much,
but the passive violence grew endlessly.
And that’s when Grandfather explained
to me the connection between the two:
That we commit passive violence,
all the time, every day,
consciously and unconsciously,
and that generates anger in the victim,
and the victim then resorts
to physical violence to get justice.
So it is passive violence
that fuels the fire of physical violence.
So logically, if we want to put out
that fire of physical violence,
we have to cut off the fuel supply.
And since the fuel supply
comes from each one of us,
we have to become the change
we wish to see in the world.
It’s only through changing ourselves
that we will be able to change society.
And if we can change society,
then we will be able
to bring peace in this world.
This led me to coming in
to the prison systems
and going out into the world
and planting these seeds
of peace and nonviolence
in the minds of people.
And when I went to the first prison,
in Philadelphia,
and this was way back in 1993,
Hector Ayala was one of the inmates there.
And the question he asked me, he said,
“You want us to change,
but society has already condemned us.
They are never going to accept us
as human beings.
We can become saints,
and they will not accept us.
So why should we change?”
And my response to him was
that the day you start doing things
to impress somebody,
you are being very insincere.
You were to change because you know
that is the right thing to do.
Whether anybody accepts you for it
and appreciates it or not,
you are going to change
because that is the right thing to do.
And that is what I like to tell
people all the time:
change because you know
that is the right thing
and that is what you want your life to be.
You know, we have
unconsciously given our lives
to unknown people
to determine what it’s going to be.
We allow ourselves
to be provoked by somebody,
and that provocation leads us
to do things that we
don’t really want to do.
So it’s important for us
to know all of these things
and to transform ourselves
and change ourselves
so that we can make
a difference in this world.
That is the message I brought
into the prison systems here.
That is how I met Jonathon Jones,
and he represents the change
that I’ve been talking about.
So I will let him now tell you
about the change
that took place in his life.
JJ: Thank you.
(Applause)
Violence, for me,
started in the household.
I didn’t want to get up
in the morning to go to school,
didn’t want to do my chores,
didn’t want to come in the house
when the streetlights came on.
I lied, I stole,
and I would get whuppings.
I took the violence I learned
at home to the streets.
On the streets, my violence escalated,
and I committed violent
crimes and got arrested.
So as I stood in front of the judge,
Mother in the courtroom
with me, crying,
I realized that those whuppings
that she used to give me
were meant to prevent this.
I was sent upstate - prison -
and then that’s when
the shift happened for me:
the shift from violence to nonviolence.
It was just a simple thought.
I didn’t want to be punched
in the face no more,
nor did I want to punch
anybody in the face,
because both hurt.
So I made a decision
to participate in the
Alternatives to Violence Project,
AVP.
And one of their core principles
is transforming powers:
transform a violent conflict
to a nonviolent resolution.
So I got transferred.
Eventually, I ended up in
Groveland Correctional Facility.
At Groveland, I became
an AVP facilitator and trainer.
Through doing one of the workshops,
I met a volunteer
and facilitator named Shannon,
and she told me about
the Season for Nonviolence.
And I was like, “Hmm, that’s something
that can be done in prison.”
So I discussed it
with a friend of mine name Jule,
and together, we presented
the idea to the administration.
And two of the people are here today:
she was the Superintendent at the time,
Superintendent Amoia,
and he was the Deputy of Programs
at the time, Dep of Programs Cronin.
So they approved it.
And then the men of
Groveland Correctional Facility
were inspired by the Season,
and they began to write essays
and poems about nonviolence.
They began to draw pictures,
read books about nonviolence.
They began to write songs, sing.
Then they began to do the 64 days
daily reflections for living nonviolently.
So then I was like, “Man,
this right here is amazing.”
They would raise money
and give the money to organizations
out in the streets fighting violence.
In December of 2015,
I was released from prison.
So I took the nonviolence
I learned in prison -
yeah, that’s right,
I learned nonviolence in prison -
I took that to the streets with me.
So then on the streets,
about a couple years later,
around in [2017],
Groveland asked me to come back in
and talk about the Season for Nonviolence.
So with Arun Gandhi,
I went back into Groveland.
That right there was amazing:
coming back into prison
I had just got released from
to talk to the men about
the Season of Nonviolence.
And some of the men that when I went home,
you know, were still there.
And I was like,
“Wow, this is amazing for me,”
but it was more amazing after spending
a couple of hours at Groveland
to be able to leave the same day.
That was even more amazing.
So then after that, Attica asked,
“Could you come into Attica
and talk about the Season of Nonviolence?”
And then Auburn asked,
“Could you come into Auburn
and talk about the Season of Nonviolence?”
And just like the men of Groveland,
the men of Attica and Auburn
were touched by the power of nonviolence,
right?
They were touched also.
(Applause)
Soon after I got released,
I eventually started working.
So I was driving a van one day
and coming out of the parking lot,
going to another work site.
So as I pulled into the street,
I’m driving, a car shoots past me,
and then it comes in front of me.
I didn’t think nothing of it.
Then the car slows down. I slow down.
And then the car stops,
and I smashed on my brakes
but I still hit the back of the car.
I was like, “Wow.”
But then the car drove off,
and then it pulled up in a parking lot.
So I just kept going.
I said, “All right. Whatever.”
I just kept going.
I wanted to get to my work site,
but I noticed that the car
was following me.
So as I pulled up
in front of my work site,
the car pulled up.
I jumped out of the car,
like, “What’s going on?”
He said, “Yo, don’t you know
you cut me off?”
I said, “Hey, man.
I don’t think I cut you off.
But you know what? I apologize.”
And he looked at me, he paused,
he was like, “All right.”
(Laughter)
Then he just drove off.
(Laughter)
And, you know, in that moment,
I chose to be nonviolent.
I value my ability
to make decisions today.
I value my ability to choose today.
I’m not going to let circumstances
dictate how I respond to situations.
I choose to be nonviolent.
And there’s one other thing
I learned from that incident also.
I learned the power
of a well-timed, deep breath.
So much can happen
when you take a deep breath
and you start connecting
with that nonviolent side in you.
Thank you.
(Applause)