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Barrett
discusses alternatives to escalation Avoiding violence, avoiding defeat When you use violence in any situation, you are still left with someone who is defeated. When you use non-violent principles, there is no victim. According to Joyce Barrett of Ploughshares, this is the only way to effect true victory. Invoking the principles of men like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Barrett leads a workshop on Alternatives To Escalation Wednesday, during the two-day conference of Peaceful Communities held at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Peterborough. Barrett and the small audience readily discuss issues that have global ramifications right down to familial alternatives to violence. The conversations and approaches are fluid enough to support both approaches, and the audience seems willing enough to engage in this discussion style. Barrett says civil disobedience is not violence. As someone long involved with peaceful initiatives, she believes that if individuals are using the behaviours they wish to project, then they are being successful. "Even when you spank a child," says Barrett, "you may indeed achieve short-term compliance." "But what is the larger message?" she asks. "Is it maybe that the big guys can beat the little guys?" Handling anger appropriately is a key component for finding alternatives to escalation. "And that means finding appropriate and proportionate responses," says Barrett. Barrett believes that peace is a dynamic process of inevitable confrontation, negotiation and then compromise, not a static, uniform ideal. On societal activism, Barrett says this is imperative to change represented by activists exists only because governments have lost their way in being an effective voice for key, shared principles. These include peace, justice, participatory democracy, human rights and civil liberties. |
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