well once again to the radical imagination i'm your host i'm a sociologist at john jay college here in new york the united states has the highest rates of violence of any economically developed country on earth its homicide rates are far have to ten times higher than any of these other countries to say that we have a national epidemic is to state the obvious the international institute for teaching studies reports military expenditures for the united states totaled over a trillion dollars a year and our defense budget and military spending around the world is higher than the next fifteen countries combined when the term structural violence is used and defined by the psychiatrist james gilligan as the increased rates of excess and non natural deaths and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society as contrast it with the wilds of the lower death rates experienced by those who are above them we're referring to death rates among the poor and lower classes ten times the rate of the rich and privileged our social structure and institutions are harming countless millions by preventing them from meeting their basic and peaceful human needs the radical modulation is so happy to have on the show today to extraordinary committed individuals who have dedicated their lives and life energy to imagining and teaching peace so we welcome professor david blow from bronx community college vives or to the peace club there and jenna chism who founded creating a culture of peace nonviolence training which david also coordinates at the college welcome to you both and let's talk about giving peace a chance it's so great to have year welcome welcome welcome please tell us a little about how you got into this organizing an activism and teaching both that at the college and and elsewhere how did you get involved well back in two thousand and six i was getting a very restless at the college because the iraqi war was in its rd or th year by that time and i felt the need to do something so i started a peace club and that club has been running every semester ever since but after i started the club i still was feeling very uncomfortable that i wasn't doing enough and so i went to our chairperson the chairperson of the english department and got permission to teach a class of regular english and i teach english as a nd language and had not taught regular english in decades and i asked to teach the level which is a research paper level and the professors have their the option to choose their own team for the course so i chose peace and nonviolence and so i started to teach in two weeks into the semester i saw that i could do handle the english part of it fine but didn't know what i was doing about teaching peace had this just this marvelous experience and what how did you send come to send this letter well the retreat center retreat at what's always advertising i think programs ok so when they saw some how you meantime i felt much more comfortable teaching english with the theme of peace and nonviolence and in two thousand and nine and went back to kirk ridge for the facilitators level because i wanted to become certified as a trainer in the creating a culture of peace organization the city so i was certified at that time and in the next semester at the college the president was offering president of the college was offering grants to faculty who had an interesting project that was concerned with just global awareness so i wrote a proposal and it was funded and janet came to the campus in the spring semester of two thousand and ten and led the trainings we did two basic level trainings and one facilitator level training and a number of a number of us students who qualified to be facilitators on staff and faculty interest and we did a number of trainings after that and i saw the need last semester to get another grant from a new president to do another round of training so via proposal was funded again and so janet is back here again this semester and we've already done one basic level  another one this weekend and then in june those who are interested and who who qualify will come back for four more days of training and they'll be certified and they're going to help me in the future to do more trainings on campus and all over the place to move around the country perhaps yes start a book and so janet how did you get into this sort of sixty's you know i was a tile younger even younger child growing up in very small las vegas the time my parents would get us up in the middle of the night have us put on jackets and dark glasses in our pockets drive sixty miles north to the never had a nuclear test site get out of the car stand there in the dark with dark glasses on having been told by the newspaper the exact time and how to drive as close as possible to see the nuclear bomb go off and that was in the fift and i was thrilled and we did that many many times so this was a big deal for your parents to her children for just reading this wonderful event as they saw it right and i'm somewhat to come with the soviets and sputnik so in elementary school and in high school i got down to studying all the math i could  physics all the science was quite taken by all of this became the the darling of the nuclear scientists when i would visit them in the lab in las vegas or religion i couldn't graduate and i screamed at my chemistry adviser and thought i would certainly fail and he said well you can take a few courses pass fail life ok and then i took more religion courses and more religion courses and i got so into it and i graduated with a major in religion and what happened to the chemistry that i just was still i don't know i just let that go look that i let that go well but then i thought i wanted to get or dame but i had just joined the episcopal church and i was shocked to find out that they didn't ordain women i had assumed they did and i panicked i thought i needed a couple years to get my head together so i drove to washington d c from the west i decided i'd like to see the east coast got a job at the national cathedral and as an administrative assistant and i was used as the representative to the civil rights marches to help organize down church things civil rights marches and i was marching on the white house with clergy and bishops and i saw a whole different picture of the church it was anti vietnam testament old testament ethics i was it was the time when biblical criticism was brand new and we were looking at how the books of the bible were written why what what was the writer trying to grind what was his thing how did it relate to the culture of the time and you would then if i would some of the prophetic i don't additions we've had people on this show  and and empowerment anyway so right i got very involved in civil rights and antiwar work because i was staff at the national cathedral and they were involved  it and it was matching that with my theology interest right you know then i married my high school sweetheart who was in the military and went to hawaii with him in the nuclear submarines and that was vietnam and i worked for the possible cathedral as the director of religious education in honolulu and i started organizing peace marches with clergy and laity against the war while your husband was manning these nuclear and he was very supportive of me support of ok wow all right what i did so i wasn't i hate the military personnel right i was hate the war hate the nepal mean of the children and leading the marches and there was really a segment of vietnam soldiers who felt very much like my church was not happy with me however  people young people particularly out there activating those impulses yet was a was a moral concern because i could see how the american people were being misled by the administration at that time we were sold a bill of goods about the war in iraq and i said it was totally unjustified and that something needed to be done  so so you set up this program that you're now working together on and i assume you do this with other people around the country and so on so let's let's hope the audience understand a little bit of what you actually do you're in class there what do you try to present to the students one how do you begin to approach all of this you obviously one the students are interested right they've they've taken this poverty programs and with children and empowering young children and empowering their parents ok and then teaching at the university level to empower student teachers and parents and children and my understanding of education is that lecture and sermons even and lots of reading is not enough and that they're not people are not empty vessels to fill up but rather they learn best by different media some by seeing it in print some by hearing it some by putting their bodies into it and that i found out about the popular education approach used at the highlander institute in tennessee years ago for all the civil rights leaders and labor leaders including dr king and rosa parks and i really tried to understand how we could do that and in creating the program therefore we have five content areas but we try to use major exercises where people are using their bodies and working in groups we try to help people understand that if you have if you're illiterate or you're a p h d it doesn't matter because you have life wisdom and we try to pull it out of you and show it to the group and told everybody to share the wisdom i don't have it all go on i just also i keep curious you sort of work the miracle here in the sense that you are you have a president that was open to this right it was open to having the sort of course having these things become active is that it's a correct a very enlightened sort of ministry or i would say yes  you on this you know that's terrific that's in these new good well good so great all right so i just want to get that in because that that's so helpful and important so you have these five structures you know we have five things and but again what we're trying to do is get people very involved so that they remember and get it in their bodies and in their minds and in our hearts we start with and and david you might want to talk about this we start with violence we have five things you have the st st theme is violence and we put students through an exercise called the barometer where they're taking getting a sense from each other about what they consider to be violent or nonviolent we give them different scenarios and they have  d to take a stand on one side of a line or another and they're listening it's basically a listening exercise and hearing what each other are saying about their views of violence and violence gives a particular example he's a question of interaction that you might give the students well one scenario is a bystander watches a male abuse a woman in the street the bystander does nothing is the bystander violent or not ok and listening to the different points of view and they're surprised and i was and then we did agree ok yeah so then there's also brainstorming with different examples of violence categories of violence the causes of violence and the effects of violence and we come up with a long list that they generate which we write on newsprint and they're usually very surprised  and it's that all those the that you also explore with this well again looking at the method where using right and they come to those conclusions i don't do it this way i s ones that they start to put it together yes so we're starting with violence and in fact they also set in small groups and share their own stories of either being victims of violence or committing a typical st day there well we divided into the five modules and so the next module i call it the good news now now it's the good news and we talk about active nonviolence and what is  is and we say you have a choice and we would like to see you choose active nonviolence instead the nd model the rd motto is social change and social movements how they and the th one is community building how do you build a community to do the work what are the stages of development of to true community going past pseudo community and chaos  using scott peck zork what you may know consensus decision making them so on how do you build solidarity that will make your community effective then we go into action and project planning so we give them dr king's approach his steps for doing project planning and movement planning and guidance a lot of guidance and they plan projects with timelines resources how they're going to deal with opponents are they going to do direct action negotiation all kinds of things and they come out of this with projects that they've chosen gandhi characterized active nonviolence and he said you know you may have the idea that it's all resistance and protest but that's not it it's really made out of two components primarily so one is resistance and protest twenty percent of your time and energy eighty percent of your time and energy should be used in constructing the new culture you wish for that's a real surprise for so many people it's a very active and so then i say well barbara deming was a feminist and divorced in the united states and she talked about the two sides of nonviolence as well and i took her idea she had called it the two hands two parts of nonviolence but i said i wanted to get it into my body so i usually stand and do this but i do this alone i say this is the hand of protest and resistance this is the hand that says i will not cooperate with violence i will say no to dehumanizing and destroying i will say no no no and i will keep it out yet with the other hand i will reach out with this hand i will say i will make myself vulnerable i will listen to you i call on you to do the same to be vulnerable to listen to me this is the way we can build our relationship and it may even result in reconciliation i need both both hands then what i do is i invite everyone to stand and we form a circle and i do it as a wave silently so that i start in the next person copy what i do and i stomp my feet and put out my hand and they really have to get their bodies into it and it goes around then i everybody i reach out and everybody reaches out and then i go like this and it's in their memory and the teaching of course right now of course there's so much talk about resistance and how to resist and right what can be accomplished by that and what comes next so do you find a lot of the students talking about these very concrete issues that we're facing every day dealing with the  actually you take them to leaving the campus are they actually going out in their own protests in their own marches and actions are just part of the course or is it something you leave for them to so some students who go through the training and staff and faculty as well come up with a real project that they carry through either on campus or or off and others do it as an exercise in preparation for some future time when they will need it to do some kind of social action that's a good way of doing that you know so do you have actual vents that your students are going to at this point please some of them  yeah putting themselves on the line getting arrested or i mean well we just started this crap ok this is right but that could see velly but all over the country i mean right but the students are the ones that are really you're there as a facilitators rightly they're making the choices and and so i came up with three projects but we we were not going to outline a model that didn't  to them because they just at all times created their projects and i mean i i just did because i'm in california i just did two trainings there before i came  they created projects one of them was to create their congregation as a sanctuary congregation so that is their plan in detail they spent two hours detail the other was another one said they're going to start centering prayer groups this was an all christian group centering center in prayer group that means a certain kind of but it's only going to be for peace and justice activists because they need that balance because of meditation and meditation meditation they're not getting from the church itself right so yeah  yeah another one is working on being an ally and effective ally with the local native americans who have great concerns about a dam that's going to flood some of their land frequently my concern i'm a long time peace activists of course and i've been arrested many times and i can do direct action training for people who are going to risk arrest and we're ready to actually do yes you and i can do that right the training program though that we're talking about mostly right now is three days long and it's getting into the being grounded in it really understanding nonviolence i have found so many peace activists and justice activists are filled with the passion but that passion can easily be provoking the police intentionally with all palestinians same kind of energy here and they'd say to me i'm not supposed to be angry janet right i'm not supposed to be angry i said jesus was angry king it's ok to be angry as nonviolent as gandhi said anger is the fuel for doing the work it's how you channel it but would you agree with talking nonviolence it's how you channel it so channel it nonviolently which is with strategy with discipline with planning and that's training that's the cardinal rule right that's that's the bottom line yeah all of this is nonviolen for public television maybe a couple of decades ago and it's about nashville the sit ins at lunch counters at the documentary it's real to yeah it's nothing is dramatise it's all footage of what actually happened interspersed with comments from the people who were the major actors major participants i mean and it very very clearly shows the amount of training that was done for months ahead of time to get people ready because they knew that the with all the racism going on in nashville course all over the south  that there was a great potential for them to be beaten and maybe worse and it shows the discipline and many many other things that are necessary in order to the planning where with where they were going to start you know why lunch counters rather than restaurants or movie theaters or whatever those kind of the solutions the the trainer was telling them stories about nonviolence so the participants are training at a really good sense of what goes into getting prepared to do a nonviolent action tough maybe impossible question and answer but how can you can you compare some of the energy it was going on to lunch counters with some of what our students are feeling today young people that you had back to back in the particular part of the country i mean there's a lot of a lot of hate against muslims against jews against afro americans against latinos gays gay people  but it's not localized in one particular part of the country and so it's more difficult to mobilize people to resist and to form movements  going to bring about change i think the dreamers are feeling that the desperation yeah one was just one like just absolutely deported so i think they're scared and  you're trying to do i think in the classes to connections that people are feeling with other people who feel it's not part of the program to to to get to understand better what young people from a particular community is going to versus another one and get them to see the connections that we're all in this together in a sense because again the system as we all know it was very adept at dividing and conquering and putting us against hearing that someone is concerned about the native americans and the dakota access pipeline keeps coming up ok and then maybe we'll transfer to the local native population and how to work with  them that so environmental issues will come up racism will come immigration sanctuary deportation comes up and they hear each other and i hear those things yeah but the one you haven't mentioned although one of the talk with you about your work with but oh yeah you said you'd like to hear really the anti war movement in the country i mean what are you finding part of veterans for peace so i understand they are  i think there isn't anything but not certainly to level that we have vietnam so how do we bring that about what it's all i think they're doing the work i think they're they are organizing they are not  are a read there are protests and arrests at the never at a nuclear test site where i've been arrested many times it was on the board at a lot of the environmental the pipeline issues the fracking issues better and are there and getting arrested they are seen the connection between militarism whether it's police action on a community or its oil  they're seeing a lot of there at almost all the actions that you can think of there are hundreds of them went to the dakota access pipeline protest in north dakota a couple one thousand yeah but i mean veterans yes yes and we don't think of that absolutely so i think there's more and more understanding about how these different parts of violence and injustice are related to each other and as you say you do have veterans in your classes in your sessions correct i've done a number of training to its veterans yes in fact the head of of our  myth about nonviolence is that it is weak and that it is being passive not resisting but that's why we tend to say resistance there's nothing pairs of a bird even somebody lying on the street dead weight being lifted up by police is doing something very active just by by laying there because it takes two or three people to move them so it's so it's a but just frankly a very wrong way to look at nonviolence to call it passive just yours is an academic to you said you started in two thousand and six at the both you know i'm hopeful which is why i wrote the nd proposal to give more funding to do more training yes i think you should be reaching out we should talk about reaching out to other branches of the city to the system try to find a couple more enlightened presidents perhaps listen we are we are running out of time here we just got a few more minutes but i want to make sure that we've covered some of the main points that you've wanted to get across you know of course we want to enable you to tell us how to contact you tube because i'm sure many in our audience would be interested but if we had some of the main it sounds fascinating it really really does well we teach two we teach one of the skills that's going to be in the video we call the hassle line and we ask people have you ever been hassle that is two lines of people and one of them say they're trying to nonviolence and are intended to be nonviolent and the other one is hassling them and giving them a hard time and calling them names and yelling and doing all kinds of things and how do comport yourself in that situation well we line them up in the video that we'll say and give them no hints at all at st then we run it a nd time and we've given them all kinds of tips about body posture asking questions instead of telling them off as if he was a team but over and over again once you give people this the of the alternatives yes they usually take it yes and that's what we need that's why we're calling this the sociological magination think about alternative narratives and this is in there of that we don't think about and this about the stages of movement goes through and that is really great news to even activists how we use a so yes a sociologist named bill moyer not the t v person ok ok ok who was a sociologist in san francisco and who lays out eight stages that movements generally go through and the tasks they have to accomplish at each stage to move on  and there is a stage number five where it's easy spare in the movement and how do you get through it ok and and i think because we want to mention this too because you do work or have worked with dr william barber on this as well so we have a very broad based national movement that people can relate to nonviolent movement more movement that would seem to be very much in line with what you're doing as well correct i mean i have not worked with him my daughter has i think she's a civil rights attorney and i think he's he's in the same he's the king of our time is part of what actually happens in your training and what you're trying to accomplish here is we're trying to give people hints on  alternative ways to act and as dr king talked about he talked about a double victory that we're heading for that that's our goal we're going to win you over in the process absolutely try to win some of our audience a little by by telling us how we can contact how they can contact you we're going to put this on the screen to perhaps you just like ok to tell us what the best way to get in touch with i'm living in california now because i have grandchildren there ok so i moved from the east coast and from the fellowship of reconciliation where i created the program the fellowship of reconciliation is in nyack new york ok interface so the like this was very helpful