3.9 Accounting for resistance

Adhering to the subversive and innovative movement of the Awakening’s socio-ecological transition can be confronting to the established order and hegemonies. It is clear that forging a new path of dependency before we calibrate existing civilizational behaviours will elicit resistance, rifts, schisms, and opposition. There will be conflict.

In terms of the nature of the emergencies with which we are confronted – we need only think of the intensification and the acceleration of climate change – the scale of conflicts will be more or less attenuated depending on which viable options present themselves. History reminds us that in the face of great adversity we too easily shift to barbarism and different forms of totalitarianism.

The reality of having to respond to resistance with justice and equity and of having to face confrontational actions that mobilize different forms of violence can neither be obscured nor minimized. Let us remember the words of Martin Luther King^[1]¹:

We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.

With patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the levelling process of humility and compassion ; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity ; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom.

Notes

1
Amnesty International, 16 Martin Luther King quotes to remember : https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/01/16-martin-luther-king-quotes-to-remember/.