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Taken from ‘Nonviolence’ by Mark Kurlansky and the Dalai Lama. Written as 25 lessons in the history of nonviolence Each one of these is at least one blog in and of itself. Many of these require much more information to be fully understood. But nonetheless each one is a great conversation starter, and will get you thinking. Hopefully I’ll expound on these ‘lessons’ in coming blogs.

• There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
• Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
• Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
• Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
• A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
• Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
• A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
• People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
• A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side to violence, the violent side has won.
• The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
• The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
• The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
• It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
• All debate momentarily ends with an “enforced silence” once the first shots are fired.
• A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
• Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
• Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
• People motivated by fear do not act well.
• While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
• Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
• Once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper,” without limits.
• Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
• The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
• The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.

~Mark Kurlansky

Is this really a bad thing? I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t want to pay more to the oil companies. It’s not fun to spend more money at the pump, while Exxon mobile records record profits. We all know this is pretty shady, and I hate it just as much as the next guy. But there is a positive side to this in my mind.

Somehow here in the US with gas prices continually going up, we continue to see the rise of gas guzzling vehicles as well. So are we really feeling the pain of high gas prices? It doesn’t seem like it to me.

So my question is, how high to prices have to get before America actually take fuel efficiency, and alternative fuels seriously?

Over the years we have developed amazing things. Amazing ways of generating power. There have been many alternatives to the gas engine proposed and built. Electric cars have been manufactured, and for he brief time in which they were offered, electric cars were in high demand. People were on waiting lists. (if you want to know more check out the movie “Who killed the electric car?”). So why do I see America still sitting around complaining about gas prices while they are filling up their 40 gallon gas tank.

I can’t really argue with why gas prices are high. It’s a product of capitalism. If the oil companies can get away with charging us that much for petroleum, why shouldn’t they? After all, the whole idea of working in a commercial society is to make as much money as possible. I’ll agree that it seems extremely unfair. But there are options. We can decrease the amount of gas we use if we really want to. Our society to a certain degree chooses to be dependant on oil.

Maybe if gas continues to rise we will eventually start demanding more fuel efficiency and begin looking for more viable alternatives. Just about everyone will say they want fuel economy, but if that really were the case for everyone when it came time to purchase a vehicle I think we would see a lot more options for fuel economy out there because of the demand.

Maybe crippling us with $5 per gallon gas prices is exactly what we need. A little kick to send us in the right direction.