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Arrested for Meditating? Why it's Radical to Stay Nonviolent in the...

Sarah van Gelder interviews model nonviolent protester, Pancho Ramos-Stierle, who says

So if you have the riot police coming with tear gas and pepper spray and all their weapons, we have a more powerful weapon, courage and stillness—it's kindness, it's compassion, it's generosity, it's the small things, but when you add them up that makes a pretty strong army.

In these so called "democracies" of today, state sovereignty takes the police form.

If we disobey with compassion and love in our hearts and minds, if we spend 90 percent of our energy creating the alternatives of a just, free, and liberated world, we will discover the joy to rebel against an imposed fear. We will be free from modern poverty and its two kinds of slaves: the intoxicated—the prisoners to the addiction of consumption, and those who aspire to get intoxicated—the prisoners of envy. It will be clear that our misery isn't caused by the siblings in corporations or most of the police officers or the army, but by our obedience to a flawed rule.

We ourselves must be strengthened and changed, for we have to experience an inner independence even before the corporations, police states, and governments grant the outward one.[emphasis mine]

This kind of consciousness raising tells me the Occupy movement has a grasp on the future. It's the kind of authentic self-change that can remake the culture.