Chapter 5
Luke woke up at five thirty as usual and kissed Jo on the cheek before grabbing her keys from the table and heading back to his apartment. His room now seemed dark and uninviting. Luke’s entire being seemed to be radiating from his chest, and his heart was screaming for him to be around the corner with Jo, not here. Entering his seated meditation, Luke noticed he was not as centered as normal, and it took him longer to settle his mind. But like everybody else, his mesh with the universe was in constant flux. Sometimes he was in the current, and life seemed effortless. Other times he found himself just holding his place, like he was caught in a circular eddy at the edge of a stream. And when it all went to shit, well, then it was like he was trying to paddle his kayak up a raging river with similar results. It had taken him years to become comfortable with the changing nature of life—to know what he could affect and what he could not. And that meant moderating his response to both the highs and lows, finding that balance in between.
***
Back at Jo’s house, Luke let himself in after she didn’t respond to his light knock. He went to the kitchen to look for coffee. After finding what he needed, he made them each a cup. He got back to the bedroom just as Jo was coming out of the bathroom. She crawled back onto the bed and sat with her back against the wall, a pillow over her lap.
“Come over here,” she said. “Take those clothes off.”
“Morning, baby,” Luke said, handing her a cup of coffee. “How are you feeling?” He stripped and sat on the bed up against the wall next to her.
“Too much wine. Confused. In a couple ways,” Jo said before sipping her coffee.
“Yeah, me too.”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.” She put her cup on the nightstand. “One of us didn’t get off last night,” she said, sliding down Luke’s body and grabbing his now hard cock.
Her mouth was warmer than he expected because of the hot coffee. Taking a sip of his own, Luke watched the back of Jo’s head as she moved her mouth up and down his cock. Like most men, he loved a good blowjob. But at this point in his life, it took a woman who knew what she was doing to keep him hard and make him cum with just her mouth. Not like when he was a kid and he had to use every trick there was not to cum. Luke let her suck him for a while until he started getting soft from the lack of pressure and stimulation. Setting his coffee on the nightstand, he put his hand on the back of her head and started moving his hips, fucking her mouth trying to stay hard. Jo tensed at first, but then relaxed as she let him control the speed and depth of his cock in her mouth. But as his size came back and he got more excited and pushed her head down harder, she started to gag, bringing his attention back to her instead of his dick.
“Come up here. Suck on my nipple,” Luke said, shifting his body to position her head on his chest. With his nipple in her mouth, Jo watched as he jerked off, amazed at his lack of inhibition. She had never seen a man masturbate before, and she was surprised at how erotic it was. Biting his nipple, she reached down and cupped and squeezed his balls, hearing him moan in response.
“Oh, baby, that feels so good,” Luke said, holding her head to his chest, now jerking off at full speed as he felt himself close to cumming.
“Oh, baby, oh yeah, oh suck me now, Jo. Suck me!” Luke moaned, holding his cock up for her as she released his nipple and took him back in her mouth.
“Oh God, oh yeah, harder, baby, harder. Oh fuck, I’m going to cum!” he said, feeling her trying to take as much of him down her throat as she could, now making herself gag.
“Oh fuck! Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop,” he said as waves of intense pleasure burst forth, sending him twisting and jerking and arching his pelvis off the bed in what seemed to be an endless organism as Jo stayed latched to his cock, not letting a drop of cum escape her lips.
“Oh fuck! Oh fuck,” Luke said over and over as the currents subsided and he fell into a long, deep laugh. “Oh God, I needed that.” He laughed again as Jo slid up his body to kiss him, the remnants of cum flavoring her mouth.
“Wow! That was so exciting,” Jo whispered in his ear. “I love watching you jerk off. Fuck, that’s hot! God, I’ve never seen a man cum so long or so hard. Or laugh like you do when you’re cumming,” she said, and they both giggled at the comment.
“Oh yeah, baby. God, that was amazing. Guess I love you watching me too,” Luke said, still panting as they snuggled closer to recover.
***
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Jo set a skillet of scrambled eggs with toast on top on the coffee table and gave them each a plate and fork before sitting down next to Luke on the sofa. “So what are you doing here again? I’m still not clear on it all,” she said, sliding some eggs onto their plates.
“Me neither,” Luke said. “I’ve got some implants I need put in. That’ll happen in a couple of days. I need to write a book, or something along that line, but I’m not really clear on just what I’m trying to do. Which makes it kind of hard at this point. But if I keep at it, it’ll come to me. It always has before. The hardest part about writing is just doing it.”
“And why here?” Jo asked.
“I needed some place where I could find clarity,” Luke said. “There’s too much psychic confusion in the states. The people are barraged with a constant flow of misinformation that’s saturating their lives and conditioning everything they do—and believe. And while some of them are aware of this, most of them are too busy just trying to support their families to think about it.” Or if they are well–off, he thought, they don’t want to think about anything that doesn’t support their higher status; most people believe in, and enact, a world that’s being constructed for them day by day. It’s like being in the twilight zone, he thought. Or The Matrix. “And Nicaragua seemed to be the cheapest place to come and escape from that influence as I figured out a way to counter it. At least that’s one of the reasons.” Luke felt a twinge of sadness as his mind touched on the more personal side of his choice. We’ll leave that for another time, he thought.
“And somehow you expect to change that?” Jo asked, pushing her plate away before turning on the sofa to face him, cradling her coffee cup on her lap.
“I don’t expect to change anything, at least not by myself,” Luke said. “I want to be a bridge between the academy and the informed public—to write for the people who are trying to stay aware and understand what’s happening on the planet.” And hopefully influence the new people now coming into play, he thought. “I’m trying to give the next generation not only the hope that we can transform our world, but also ideas and a vision of how we can do that. But that’s where I’m stuck. I’m not sure of the best way to do it.” Luke finished his eggs and sat back with his coffee.
“But what about all the work you did for your PhD?” Jo asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be publishing articles in academic journals and stuff like that? Isn’t that the key to everything after you have your doctorate? You know, the old publish or perish shit?”
“Sure, if a person wants to teach,” Luke said. “But I don’t see myself doing that.” And they probably wouldn’t want me anyway, he thought. He’d gotten too spoiled being on his own. “Plus, my ideas are too far out there. They challenge the status quo. No, the plan from the beginning was to write for the people. Going back to school was never about getting a job. It was about discovering how I could best serve our world.” And then growing into a man capable of putting it out there, he thought. “Finding the way I can use my innate talents and potentials to help the most during my time on the planet.”
“Kind of egotistical. Not very fucking realistic. But admirable,” Jo said. She took their cups and went into the kitchen for more coffee.
“I get that all the time,” Luke said. “Look, I’ve either got something really important to do in this life, or I’m the world’s biggest dreamer. But I won’t know which until I see this plan through. Until I get written whatever the hell it is inside me that’s trying to get out. And that’s where faith comes in.” And he wondered how much of it he had left.
Jo handed him his coffee and sat back down on the couch. “Right. Good luck. Sounds like you’ll need it. I gave up on faith a long time ago. But can’t you still teach while you figure this out? I mean, that helps too, doesn’t it? Influencing your students?”
“Not as much as I thought when I went back to school,” Luke said. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of good things come out of academic research. But there’s also a lot of drivel being shoveled out. But more than that, I never saw any sense of urgency. And a lot of the big problems we face are urgent.” Even if it’s just stopping one more person from suffering from some war we shouldn’t be in, he thought. “The idealism it takes to believe we can each make a difference usually gets squashed out of people as they conform to the mind–set controlling their particular field. And in the process, most of them lose their voice.”
“But it didn’t happen to you,” Jo said, studying his face.
“But I went back to school in my forties when I was already an informed adult,” Luke said. “I had the real–world experience needed to put what I was learning into context with what was happening on the planet. And that was much different than the experience the young people coming into college right out of high school had.” Not to mention the professors, few of whom had spent much time making it in the real world outside of the university, he thought.
“So more about what you want to write,” Jo said.
Luke paused to collect his thoughts before answering. While he could see the vision, he was still looking for the trail to it. “It’s time to stop trying to transform our world one region, one country, at a time,” Luke said. “That’s too simple—it doesn’t recognize how integrated our planet has become. It’s a linear approach that supports the status quo. Power saying we can’t do this until we’ve done this and this and this.” He felt his pulse quickening. “To change the world system takes a global approach—one that recognizes the complexity of today’s world. I’m starting to see a way out of this mess.”
“What mess? You mean the economy dumping, or our constant wars, or Fukushima, or what?”
“All of that and more,” Luke said. “Throughout time, populations have let small handfuls of people control their lives. But they’re greedy and corrupt and obsessed with increasing their power over others. They don’t have the average person’s best interest at heart, much less the planet’s. And now they’re trying to consolidate their control over the entire world.” And they’re doing it, he thought. “Think about all of the organizations created to regulate the world economy. The people don’t elect the members of those boards—and we have no say in the process. Yet they control how the world conducts its business. But their loyalty isn’t to the people or ensuring we run the planet in a sustainable way. It’s to that group at the top who put them there in the first place.”
“I know all of this,” Jo said. “You’re preaching to the wrong person. But what the fuck can we do about it, Luke? There’s no way to change what’s happening. At least not at this point. It’s just too fucking big to even contemplate.”
“But is it?” Luke asked. “There are over seven billion people on the planet. And there are, what, maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, individuals controlling the biggest corporations in the world? People with the money to influence, if not dictate, how the planet is run. That’s bullshit! This world is for everyone. Humanity as a whole should have the ultimate say on how we live our lives, not a few people trying to control the rest of us for their own gain. People with money don’t have a right to more say in our affairs than those without. Being rich is not a leadership quality; it’s the ability to work an unfair system better than everyone else, and it’s a quality we don’t want the people leading us to have.”
“Like I said, Luke, what do we do about it?”
“The people controlling our world for their benefit need our cooperation to do so, and most of us are giving it to them,” Luke said. “So it’s time for us to stop cooperating in our own destruction. Humanity needs to claim ultimate sovereignty over the planet. It’s our collective right to dictate how governments and businesses conduct their affairs.” They must be made to answer to us, he thought, not us to them.
“But what the fuck, Luke!” Jo was shaking her head. “You can’t get the people in any one country to agree on anything, much less the people around the world. You’re spouting idealistic bullshit! Sorry,” she said, not really looking like she was.
“I know what it sounds like,” Luke said. “But I’m not saying everyone in the world would have to agree on everything that happens. I’m talking about setting up a framework of basic, overarching guidelines to ensure that our governments and businesses act in ways that benefit and sustain our world, not just themselves.” And no, he thought, this won’t happen anytime soon. “We might not be able to pull this off yet, but at least we can start the discussion. And begin creating the momentum we’ll need.”
“But you still have to have everyone agree on that framework,” Jo said, setting her coffee down. She crossed her arms, looking at Luke. “And how the hell do we do that?”
“Not necessarily,” Luke said. “This is about humanity’s best coming together and guiding us into the future. There’re people from all cultures and religions and nationalities reaching levels of development that allow them to transcend those group boundaries. These people embrace humanity as a whole—as one race. They’re based in love, not fear. And they’re all coming to a similar set of higher values—ways of being inclusive of everyone, not just their group.”
“Go on,” Jo said, uncrossing her arms and putting her hand on Luke’s leg.
“Somehow we need to bring these people together to create the framework I’m talking about,” Luke said. “A people’s mandate based on our highest ideals that dictates how we expect business to be conducted in the world. And we can do this. The ideas that came together to create the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were well beyond what the common person could envision on their own. But they could understand those principles and support them and die for them, which we’ve done all along.”
“But how do you enforce any of that even if you could pull it off?” Jo asked.
“That’s where nonviolent conflict comes in,” Luke said. “Somehow there’s a way to use an international decentralized nonviolent campaign to enforce the people’s mandate I’m describing.” He wondered what Jo was thinking about him now. At least she isn’t running yet, Luke thought. “Anyway, those are the ideas that are coming up, but they’re not all there yet.”
“How do you plan to do this?”
Luke looked down, contemplating the answer. “The original plan was to build a beach club,” he said, looking up at her. “To create a space where I could invite thought leaders from around the world to come and work on these ideas.”
“Like some sort of beach club slash think tank,” Jo said, smiling.
“I know,” Luke said, seeing her amusement. “I want to create a space where individual and group inspiration is cultivated. An environment where the routine falls away so new ideas can come forth. But it has to be set up in a way that lets the universe participate too, in some synchronistic sort of way.” And that’s where most of these retreats fall short, Luke thought. They were too structured and agenda–driven, trying to control processes that should happen on their own. And when people did that, they circumvented the potential around them. “People need to be able to respond to their intuitions, to choose how and when and with whom they interact. And a lot of those decisions are best made in the present moment. So yeah, a think tank. But one where constraints and rules and agendas are minimized, and the participants can interact in a more natural way.”
“I like that you’re considering the needs of the individual,” Jo said. “Back when everyone thought group work was the answer to everything, we really screwed ourselves. Some of us do our best work on our own, and the only way we can do it is to be left the hell alone. God! I used to resent being forced into group projects in college. It must have been tough going back to school in your forties. I couldn’t have put up with the bullshit at that age, much less now.”
“Yeah, it was,” Luke said. “A lot of the professors wouldn’t recognize that older students were coming in at higher levels of development in many areas than the young people entering right out of high school. That wouldn’t have been PC. So everything we did was held back to that entry level of development necessary to operate as an adult, and that did us all a disservice.”
“Too much to think about right now,” Jo said, stacking the dishes in the frying pan. “Come on. It’s my turn now. I haven’t had a Sunday in bed in a long time. Besides, we need to work on opening me back up.” She left the dishes on the table and headed into the bedroom without looking to see if Luke was following.
***
Luke woke up to bombas going off right outside Jo’s bedroom window. Looking over at the clock on the nightstand, he saw it was coming up on three in the afternoon. Jo was still asleep, rolled over on her side with her back to him. Running his hand over her ass, he remembered how much interest she had shown in pleasing him. He had never been with a woman so concerned that he got off too, or who asked to be shown what he wanted or how to do it. But again she wasn’t able take him. And as much as she wanted him to “bust through” whatever was blocking him, he just couldn’t do it. As soon as he heard her yelp or saw her in pain, he went limp. She said it had been ten years since she’d been with a man. But would that matter? He’d been with other women who had gone without sex for seven or eight years, and they didn’t have any problems. But she didn’t seem to appreciate the idea that she might have psychologically shut herself down to men, that this was some kind of unconscious response to keep him away. Regardless, for now they had to come up with other ways to get each other off.
***
Walking down the left side of the Calzada, the streetlights were coming on as Jo played tour guide. When they got to the corner across from an Irish bar that served as a landmark for the local gringos, she led Luke down the side street to El Corral.
“I’ve never been to this restaurant before,” she said as they stood out front looking through the open double doors. “But I think it’s owned by Nicas. And the steaks are supposed to be good and a little cheaper than the other place that the expats go to.”
They took a seat at one of the heavy wooden tables inside and looked around, commenting on the cowboy decor. Several bales of hay were set up against one wall with a couple of rusty lanterns sitting on top. Two old saddles were on the floor next to them, and horseshoes and branding irons were hung scattered about on the wall.
“Someone needs to tell them to change their horseshoes,” Jo said.
“Why?” Luke asked.
“They’re hung upside down. The open end is supposed to be pointing up so all the luck doesn’t run out,” she said, looking at Luke like he should’ve known.
“Well, given the luck Nicaragua’s had over the last couple of hundred years, I imagine there’re a lot of upside–down horseshoes in the country. Want to share a bottle of wine with dinner?”
“Maybe they have a Malbec. That would be good.”
After the waiter poured their wine and took their orders, Jo turned to Luke. “So, why Nicaragua?” she asked. “There are a lot of places in Central America to do what you’re doing.”
“Well…” Luke looked away. He felt the sadness from before return. I’ll end up telling her sooner or later, he thought, then decided to do so now. “I kind of feel I have a spiritual debt to this place, so I needed to at least give it a chance. And I needed some closure.”
“Explain, please,” Jo said, seeing Luke take on a distant look, his demeanor changing. His energy had shifted, and she sensed grief.
Luke looked at Jo. “I’m committed to nonviolent conflict now, but that wasn’t always the case,” he said. “At one time I embraced violence just as strongly. It’s what I was raised on. And I fell for the whole red, white, and blue story about the United States being the world’s godsend—that we were obligated to protect everyone and defeat communism, and since we were so moral, we had the right to make everybody’s country after our own.”
“Go on,” Jo said, watching his face harden.
“I had a big brother a year and half older than me,” Luke said. “We almost looked like twins. People had a hard time telling us apart unless they knew us. He was kind of my hero, you could say. He taught me how to fight and drink and hunt and all of that fun stuff. And he was an idealist. He believed in America. He thought we were actually promoting freedom and democracy and human rights around the world. And back then we were both really black and white in how we saw the world, him more so than me. Something was either right or it was wrong, and there wasn’t much in the way of middle ground. He taught me to walk my talk. He’d fight for his ideals in a second or stand up for anyone he thought was being picked on. It didn’t matter the odds. And he always won.”
“Okay,” Jo said, wondering where the conversation was going.
“Well, back in the early eighties, we were hearing this stuff about communist rebels in Central America and how the dominoes were falling all over again, like we had been warned about in Southeast Asia.” Luke cleared his throat. As much as he had tried, he still hadn’t forgiven himself for what had happened. “And this time it was happening right in our backyard, or what we considered our backyard. But because of the backlash from losing our war on Vietnam, our Congress was limiting the help we could give the Latin American countries, or more correct, the dictatorships we were supporting. So we decided to go down on our own and fight for who we thought were the good guys, the ones the CIA were helping. We wanted to make our bones.” Luke rubbed his forehead, his expression pained.
“I don’t understand,” Jo said, not wanting to believe what she was hearing.
“I’m saying I tried to come down here as a mercenary,” he said, looking at Jo. “We hooked up with some vets from ‘Nam who were refreshing their skills and decided to join them. But right before we left, my brother told me to stay. He said it would be better for him to check things out first, and then for me to meet him in a few months. And he wouldn’t budge no matter how much I argued with him. So he left, and I never saw him again.” Luke turned away and stared at the wall, his jaw tight. Hold it together, Luke, he thought.
Jo was taken aback. It took a moment for her to piece together what Luke had said. This guy was so Zen–like, so loving and caring in bed, so committed to finding his way to help the world—without violence. And he had wanted to be a mercenary? What in the fuck was going on?
“A mercenary,” she said, shaking her head in bewilderment. “You mean someone who goes to war and kills people for money?”
“Yeah. Well, no,” Luke said, looking back at her. “At least not in our case. This was about our ideals more than money. But we were fucked!” He willed himself to keep his voice down. “We didn’t have a clue what was really going on. Our government didn’t give a shit about the people down here or about their freedom or about defending democracy. All they cared about was maintaining their power in the region, just like they always have. Just like they’re still trying to do.” Luke felt his heart beating harder and a slight tremor run through his body. Yes, he felt like a fool for his actions as a young man, but he was also angry. His intentions had been good, as least according to his view of the world then, but he had been lied to. All of the ideals he thought his country was based on had been a sham. And that had pissed him off so much it was still fueling his passion today.
“What happened? To your brother?” Jo asked.
“We don’t know, not exactly, anyway,” he said. “After we didn’t hear from him for a few months, we started trying to contact our government to see if they knew anything. And no one would tell us, even if they did know. But my mom’s persistent. She made herself a real pain in the ass. But it didn’t seem to help.” Luke took a deep breath, now more sad than mad. “Then one day she got this phone call. The guy wouldn’t say who he was, and his voice was muffled, but he told her he’d seen Jake right after he would have gotten down here. The guy said he had a lot of respect for him, and that’s the only reason he was calling my mom. According to him, Jake hooked up with the Contras like we’d planned, but that he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. And when he saw what it was they were doing, he tried to back out, to quit and go home.” But you don’t quit those kinds of jobs, Luke knew. “This guy said the last time he saw my brother, his hands were tied behind his back and some mercs were leading him off into the jungle.” Luke looked away again, his eyes tearing up.
“I don’t understand.” Jo ran her hands through her hair. “You mean they killed your brother? But why? Didn’t he go there to fight with the rebels, the Contras?” she asked, trying to make sense of what he was saying.
“Yeah,” Luke said. “But calling the Contras ‘rebels’ is another lie we were told. Years later we learned they weren’t soldiers—they weren’t interested in fighting government troops. They were sadists, terrorists. Their whole agenda was to rampage the countryside. Rape, murder, torture, disappearing people, and any other atrocity they could come up with. And that wasn’t Jake, or me,” he said, desperate for her to believe him. “Whatever he saw down here was wrong enough to make him change his mind and bad enough that they couldn’t let him live for seeing it. I used to hold out hope that somehow he survived. I mean, there was never any body, and this guy didn’t actually see him being killed. But that hope fell off a long time ago.” Or maybe it didn’t, Luke thought, knowing he had been scanning the streets for his brother since he got to Granada.
“You still seem really emotional about all of this,” Jo said. “I mean, I know he was your brother, but all that happened over thirty years ago, right?” she asked, double–checking the math in her head.
“Nothing hit me until I went back to college in my early forties. It was my first term. Somehow, I ended up in this exhibit about the desaparecidos before it opened to the public…” he started to say.
“The what?”
“The desaparecidos,” Luke said. “It means ‘the disappeared.’ In several Latin American countries, thousands or tens of thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by their governments. Then their bodies were hidden, so they just seemed to vanish from the earth. They were the victims of the death squads led by people we trained in what used to be called the School of the Americas.” Or now, Luke thought, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Like changing a name meant anything. “So anyway, I got lost upstairs in this big building on campus that was used for special events. And all of the sudden I found myself standing there all alone in this long hall that had tables set up with all of these old photographs of people—men, women, teenagers—all with the person’s name handwritten on them. And there were these small white crosses with blood spattered on them scattered throughout the pictures. And then it dawned on me that these were the desaparecidos from Central America, people who had been stripped from their families never to be seen again.” Luke felt his chest tighten up as guilt flooded through him. He held Jo’s eyes and went on. “As I walked through the place, I went into shock. The world around me fell off, and I entered this space of clarity, of knowing without thinking. I realized exactly what I had almost gotten myself into—what Jake did get himself into. The horror we had wanted to be part of because we were dumb enough to believe our government’s lies. Because we weren’t informed enough to realize how huge the gap was between the American ideal we believed in and the reality of what American imperialism was doing to the other people in the world.” His eyes pleaded for her to understand him. “Just like the young people today who are joining the military don’t understand what is really driving these wars. They think they’re fighting for one thing, and in reality the reasons are very different. Anyway, then the tears started flowing down my face. And they wouldn’t stop until I left. If Jake hadn’t made me stay back, I would have been part of that crap or killed with him. I often wondered if he suspected what might have been happening, and that’s why he wanted to go down first. He would have wanted to protect me like that.” He turned away from Jo and stared down at the floor.
Amazing, Jo thought, seeing him holding back tears again. In the silence, she could feel the full brunt of his grief, and his shame. Thirty years later and he was still feeling into what he almost did and what happened to his big brother. This guy has come so far, she thought. Further than anyone else she had ever known. She was starting to understand where his motivation was coming from, why he felt we could transform our world. It was because he had done so in his life. And of course if he could do it, he would think we could too. But can we? she wondered. He didn’t seem to understand how few of us were able to change, even when we wanted to. But either way it didn’t matter. She was falling in love, and that scared the hell out of her.
***
After dinner, Jo and Luke walked back to the Vista Mombacho Apartments in silence, lost in their own thoughts. Luke was glad Jo had wanted to talk about lighter subjects after revealing that part of his past. He knew he shouldn’t still be getting down on himself for what he almost did, but at times it was hard not to, especially now that he was down here.
Jo was finding herself drawn to Luke’s passion. If her sense about him was right, she needed to know just what she was getting herself into.
“I want a cigarette and another glass of wine,” Jo said after the doorman let them into the apartments. “Let’s head up to the roof. I want to hear more about your work. Then we’ll go back to my place and you can fuck me.”
Luke grabbed a new box of Clos from his apartment, and they went up to the roof.
“So talk to me about nonviolent conflict,” Jo said, taking a seat at one of the small rooftop tables.
“It’s a third way for people to claim their right to participate in how they’re governed. If the normal legislative processes have failed and the people don’t want to start a violent insurgency, then strategic nonviolent conflict is how they can resist and bring down an oppressive government willing to use violence against them.”
“What’s the strategic part referring to?”
“Everything,” Luke said. “A nonviolent campaign needs an overarching master plan just like an army going to war. And that strategy has to be in place before the campaign begins. This is why so many efforts fail. They’re reactionary starts. People get pissed off and protest, but without any specific goal or plan to achieve it if there is one. And if the objective is to transform their country into a more democratic society, then they need to create the documents to frame that new government before they begin. They can’t wait until the regime falls to do this. Otherwise, they just leave a space for another group to come in and take power. They switch one dictator for another.” And that’s the real definition of a revolution, Luke thought, changing who’s in power. And the ones in power are almost always violent. “But nonviolent conflict isn’t about spinning the wheel and letting someone else take over. It’s not the opposite of violent conflict. It’s a means to a different end. It’s about transformation, not reformation…breaking out of the revolutionary cycle. It’s creating something new that includes the best of the past while transcending it, not just patching up the old system.”
“So how’s this work?” Jo asked.
“One way is for the people to undermine the support that a regime needs to survive. No ruler has absolute power. Every dictator needs people for the government to function. He—and they’re almost always men—has to have the loyalty of the military and security forces so he can put down anyone opposing him. He needs the human resources, the people with the knowledge and skills that it takes to keep the government running. And he needs support from outside the county, help from other governments, so he can operate in the world system.” While in theory a dictator has the ability to control everything in his country, Luke thought, in reality his power is dependent on enough people cooperating with him, either out of fear or out of loyalty or from being paid off. And that, he knew, was the key to their demise. “So to overthrow a dictator, the people need to develop a strategy that undermines his support from those groups—to use tactics that disrupt the day–to–day functioning of the government while getting their message, their grievances and the solutions to them, out to the rest of the world so others will support their cause. But all of this depends on the regime needing its own people. If that’s not the case, then this type of strategy is much harder to do.”
“What do you mean? You just said everything depends on the people cooperating with power for it to survive.”
“But it’s not always that simple,” Luke said. “Sometimes other factors limit how much the people can strategize, or how much the dictator relies on them for his survival. For example, say there’s a dictatorship in some African country that has huge deposits of natural resources, and that dictator works a deal with another country, say, China, to extract those resources. And that other country brings in the people and equipment needed to then ship those resources home. In that case, the dictator managed to take most of his population out of the picture, so their cooperation is a moot point. The country mining the resources pays off the dictator, who then pays off the few key ministers and leaders of the security forces it needs to stay in power.” And it doesn’t matter if the country suffers or if the people are happy or not, Luke thought. “This is one reason we see some of the biggest gaps in wealth between the poor and their leaders in those countries.”
“You’re talking about the dictators that have multiple palaces and shit in golden toilets while ninety–nine percent of the country starves,” Jo said.
“Yeah.” Luke nodded. “Another situation that limits the people’s ability to resist is when the dictator structures the country in a way that stops them from being able to organize. For nonviolent conflict to succeed, the people need to be able to come together and discuss their problems and the solutions to them and then design the strategy they’re going to use to topple the government. It’s hard to stop that from happening forever, but it can be done for a while.” And from the reports coming out of North Korea, Luke thought, that’s one way they’ve managed to limit dissent over there. “And then there’s the bigger international picture. What’s happening with global politics at any point in time can affect how much the people in any particular country can accomplish. We saw this with the fall of apartheid in South Africa. It wasn’t until the rest of the world sided with the blacks that their efforts succeeded.” And right now it’s this international piece that’s one of the biggest factors affecting the Palestinians, Luke knew. Until enough countries that Israel needs to survive, specifically the United States, change their position and support the Palestinians, they have little hope for change.
“So then nonviolent conflict isn’t just about strategy and the people’s will to resist,” Jo said, rubbing the back of her neck and frowning.
“Right,” Luke said, sensing her exasperation. “This is one of the debates that have divided the field. Activists think that strategy can overcome anything, that the people’s will combined with their creativity can meet any challenge. But scholars tend to believe that the structural conditions in the country or international community determine the people’s ability to resist.” And as usual, both sides have a part of the bigger picture, Luke had learned. But why was that so hard for people to accept? “And there are also a lot of other factors involved that don’t fall under the heading of either strategy or structure.”
“I’m not following you,” Jo said, unscrewing the cap on the box of Clos and then trying not to squeeze the carton too hard as she poured them each another glass of wine. “Like what?”
“For example, a country’s average life span. Age isn’t a guarantee of growth, but growth takes time to achieve. So the longer a person spends on the planet, the greater their potential to reach higher levels of development across different facets of being human,” Luke said. He knew that understanding this was one of the keys to achieving the transformation ahead. Somehow, we have to access the wisdom of our elders again if we are to survive, Luke thought.
He took a sip of wine before continuing. “Levels of individual development influence a country’s overall level of development. In other words, a country with an average life span of forty–five years will probably respond to events differently than a country with an average life span of twenty–five years.”
“But saying that really pisses off some people,” Jo said. “At least young people. It sounds elitist to say someone can’t understand a concept as much as someone else because they aren’t as developed. I wish we had different words for this stuff.” She let out an exaggerated sigh. “The way you’re saying it sounds like one stage is better than another. But they’re not. And we all have to go through the same progression. No one gets to jump ahead of the game.”
“I know,” Luke said. “And there are always exceptions to everything. But even though it upsets some people, we can’t disregard the fact that the longer we’re alive, the more potential we have to reach higher levels of thought.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Jo said. “So maybe the aging of the world’s population isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe with our life spans getting longer more people will reach those levels of development where we get past our differences and begin to get along.”
“That idea’s been brought up before,” Luke said. “But we need a way to recognize people for their service over time and let their words and actions and accomplishments, not just their age, determine the merit of their thought. As it stands now, getting the world to a point where enough of humanity has lived long enough to adopt values transcending our differences may be our only hope.”
“I like that,” Jo said. “So maybe we’re supposed to shift our roles as we age from being the cogs that make the world run to being the ones guiding how it’s run. It’s fucking scary having someone in the White House my age, much less younger.”
“And there’s another thing to consider,” Luke said. “What we see as a country’s outward level of cultural development may not be an accurate reflection of where the people are as individuals. Dictators impose laws to try and stop a culture from advancing so they can maintain the status quo. It seems this is what’s happening in kingdoms like Saudi Arabia. For the sheiks to survive, they have to put the brakes on cultural development and keep it at the level it was when the family took power. But eventually enough people in the country will reach higher stages of thought, and the gap between individual development and the imposed level of culture development will get so big that it allows transformation to happen.”
“But what about free will?” Jo asked. “We all have the ability to choose, no matter what. We might not like the choices we have or what will happen to us, but all of us can say no. No matter how many fucking laws they make, we don’t have to obey them if we don’t want to. So as usual, it comes right back to us.”
“I used to believe free choice of will was all powerful too,” Luke said. “Of course, I’m from the states.” He had embraced the exaggerated sense of independence and individualism promoted when he was younger and knew full well how they could fool a person into believing they had more control than they did. “But I don’t believe that now. A lot of people are oppressed in ways they’re not even aware of. Too many things like the levels of racism or ableism or gender equality in the country influence how much choice they really do have. Or how militaristic the society is, or how much bureaucracy is overlaying the country’s institutions.” And, he knew, these big overarching factors, embedded beliefs, and ways of acting mold and limit the choices people have. “So yes, we have free choice of will, but people have to be aware of the choices they have.”
“So what else do the people need besides a master strategy?”
“Legitimacy, for one,” Luke said. “A nonviolent campaign has to have massive support across the different classes, ethnicities, and religions in the country. The people have to come together for the common cause. That’s why it’s so tied to democratic ideals—both require an informed and involved populace. And when this happens, it can cause some people in the military and security forces to question their actions and defect to the other side.” That didn’t have to occur for a nonviolent campaign to succeed, Luke knew, but it sure helped. “And those defections are more likely to occur when the people not only maintain nonviolent discipline, but they do so with a nonviolent demeanor.” While Luke believed that owning up to one’s anger is important, he also felt that growing to where fewer things make us angry in the first place was a lot healthier for everyone—even if that wasn’t what most people wanted to hear. “Remember the coverage on TV about the Occupy movement?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Jo said, starting to get bored and horny. “What about it?”
“A lot of times it seemed based in anger,” Luke said. And it was a reaction more than a campaign, he remembered. It didn’t have a master strategy, and grievances weren’t well stated, much less the solutions to them. That was part of the reason the movement didn’t achieve the legitimacy it needed to go mainstream and recruit the cross–cultural participation required to win.
“Not that we don’t have a lot to be mad about, but it gave many people a convenient excuse not to join the effort,” Luke continued. “Anger rallies the troops, but it doesn’t persuade others to your cause. A lot of times it does just the opposite and turns people away. Anger’s a state of being that magnifies our viewpoint over all others. It causes us to say and do things that we wouldn’t otherwise.” Luke paused. The link between anger and violence is just too close for us to express our rage as a matter of course. Or because we think we have some kind of right to be angry, he thought. “People who can’t maintain nonviolent discipline in thought and word, as well as action, shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the front lines of the campaign. They have to help in other ways. Neither Gandhi nor King tolerated that kind of negative energy. This is a different type of fight. It can’t be approached with the attitude that we’re right, they’re wrong. We’re all in this together, whether the other side realizes it or not.” But people still get hurt and killed, and they’re almost always the protestors, Luke thought. Suddenly, he became tired and felt ready to wrap up their conversation. “So anyway, the people involved in a campaign have to be willing to grow. They have to be able to embrace the ideal of the type of conflict they’ve chosen.”
“You’re pretty intense about this stuff,” Jo said, looking him in the eye. “You know that, right? I mean, it’s okay, but intensity throws off a lot of people too.”
“I know. But nonviolent conflict is our best hope for survival,” Luke said. At one point he thought the world could achieve peace, but now he knew better. The fact that everyone had to work through the developmental continuum, and that there would always be large groups of people seeing
the world through a black–and–white lens, ensured perpetual conflict. “We need to find ways to disagree without wiping ourselves out. And with nonviolent conflict, we can win against violence while reducing our casualties and the destruction of our planet.”
“Enough, lover.” Jo stood up and put her arms around Luke’s neck. “You can save the world tomorrow. But right now, take me home,” she said before kissing him. “I drank too much.”
They gathered up their things and went back to Jo’s house.
End Chapter 5
Bob
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