January 19th this country celebrates the civil rights moral leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Having studied Gandhi’s non-violent approach to liberating India from the colonial British Empire, King saw a way to achieve the same here, ultimately freeing African Americans in the segregated south.
It has never ceased to amaze me that the principles of nonviolence and conflict resolution skills are not essential curriculum in our school system. Just as laboratory experiments compliment science, nonviolence and peaceful conflict resolution need to be practiced and experienced as well as learned. Ego management and acknowledging the benefit of the whole, balanced with assertiveness, is not a born talent but a learned and practiced skill.
Imagine a world where this education and experience was as basic a skill-set as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Who knows but we might have a more peaceful and just world.
