Facilitating Change

Professor Timothy Snyder’s second lesson from those who have experienced authoritarian regimes is quite simple: 2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about – a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union – and take its side (Snyder 2017) . If you take a look at repressive regimes, no matter how the takeovers came, very quickly the move was to institutionalize the people and goals of the “revolution,” and there is no better way than to take over existing institutions. Whether you look at the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the National Socialist 1933 electoral gains and Reichstag fire power grab, or the way modern autocrats – like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir...

This is a time for frank talk about the ascendency of an authoritarian and abusive political culture in the United States of America. While Donald Trump is seen as the point person for this movement, and as President-elect is poised to implement these as U.S. government policy, these ideas are not new, and are not unique to a single leader, political party, demographic group or location. This is not a time for quiet acceptance, private complaints, and trying to ignore, work around, or accommodate to harmful acts and beliefs. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman empire dominated Europe and the Mediterranean by military force and oppression. The early Christian movement was by necessity a resistance movement, proclaiming a different kind of rule, governed by a God of mercy, where people shared so that all would have enough. Writing to the small community in Rome, at the seat of Caesar’s empire, the Apostle Paul counseled that these goals could not be achieved by domination and cont...

Building a non-violent world is humanity's most urgent priority. Domestic violence and abuse is a primary way in which people experience and learn abusive behavior. Domestic violence has immense effects on people's lives, and to society. Not only does it cause pain and suffering, there are direct personal and social costs in treating injuries, criminal jsutice interventions, and lost wages and productivity. More significant still are the lifetime costs borne by children exposed to abuse: reduced educational attainment and lifetime earnings, increased rates of substance use and mental health problems, increased risk of incarceration, increased rates of chronic illness and reduced life expectancy. In abuse intervention programs, trained group facilitators help participants see with their own eyes and in their lives the processes which led them to choose abusive behavior, and then to practice more peaceful, mutual, and just ways of relating to their partners, families, and ot...