Friend Geoff
Ainscow was instrumental in getting Sunnyvale, California’s, gun safety
ordinance passed by voters overwhelmingly last year. Geoff’s remarkable story
of citizen action, and the incident that sparked him to “get mad as hell and
not take it, anymore,” is chronicled at the website of the Conscious Elders Network.
Of course, the
inevitable resistance from local and national gun rights advocates continues in
the courts. See the article in today’s San Jose Mercury News.
Geoff’s action
is an excellent demonstration of what one motivated citizen can do. Yet, while
a battle here or there may be won, the war goes on. And, while such actions - whether battling guns or racial injustice or
hunger or poverty or environmental degradation or any of the other myriad woes
besetting this troubled planet – are absolutely necessary for building a better
world, they are not sufficient.
Also necessary
as well as sufficient is action – both inner and outer – to transform the culture
of separation and fear (fear being the rationale openly cited by gun advocates
per the Mercury News story for opposing the ordinance) that underlies all those
injustices and violence into a culture that understands that all is one, that we
are all connected and interdependent. In such a culture, security lies in
communities of right relationship. Walling ourselves off from one another in fortified bastions
of guns and gates is both futile and feudal and, in a culture of right
relationship, archaic.
We can do this.
The culture of peace and right relationship is already happening. Our job is to
help it become the dominant culture in the hearts of all humankind.
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