This I Believe

A few years ago I was strolling down the Embarcadero on a trip to San Francisco. As I approached the Sausalito Ferry Dock I noticed a statue. It was Gandhi, caught in energetic midstride, his left hand raised as if to bless a crowd lining his path and his right curled around a bronze walking staff. The staff ended abruptly at the base of his hand and resumed after about a fifteen inch gap of thin air.

I felt sad and ashamed: what vandal, I wondered, thought he could rupture Gandhi’s connection with the ground? Why was the statue left unrepaired? Maybe the better to haunt me and its other viewers, I’ve come to think. For I believe it is our responsibility to re-establish nonviolence–what Gandhi called satyagraha or truth-force–as a way to go forward.

In an era of terrorism and preemptive strikes, it’s all to easy to feel my spirit sink, to be lulled into acquiescing that might, even if it doesn’t make right, makes reality. As a teacher, I notice the deflating consequencces of this mindset among my students. Why bother to pay attention to current events, or to become an informed voter (my state college students are over 18), if nothing about what’s happening calls to the best in you?

Perhaps that best is hungry, not slumbering. The sheer persistent courage of Gandhi and his followers during the Salt March of 1930, when they loosed the grip of the British upon India by absorbing rather than inflicting violence, impressed my students. So did the gutsiness of Fisk University students in the spring of 1960, when they kept on sitting by a chain-store lunch counter no matter what they had to suffer. Influenced by King, who was in turn inspired by Gandhi, these Fisk students helped to prevail over centuries of institutionalized racism. “I wish I had a cause like that,” was the first remark to break the post-video silence in our classroom.

What I love most about Gandhi, and what appealed to my students too, was his ordinary humanity. Far from being a spotless saint, he started out as a man full of fears, which he gradually confronted. The first time he argued in court he was tongue-tied. The first time I stood in front of a class, I had ashes in my mouth. My student Amber, survivor of a rocky past, identified Gandhi’s acknowledgment of fears as the most important part of his message for her: “I must learn to continue to welcome them,” she wrote, “as my guides to understanding what I must personally overcome.”

Gandhi himself said simply, “a satyagrahi bids goodby to fear . . . an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed . . . nonviolence requires more courage than violence.”

His bronze staff, at least, has been whole for quite a while now. The City of San Francisco came up with funds to repair its Ghandi statue in 2004.