Ahimsa Mama

I am feeling really drawn to the idea of "ahimsa", as described by Gandhi:

"Without a direct active expression of it, non-violence to my mind is
meaningless. It is the greatest and the activist force in the
world."

So it is not just love, but the active, deliberate expression of love. It is not only acting lovingly, but choosing not to support acts of non-love and violence.

Isn't this at the heart of what Humane Parenting is all about, really? We are talking about being consciously, purposefully loving to our children and families, to our friends and community members. But we are also talking about being consciously, purposefully loving on a global scale by withdrawing our support from things that are not in accord with this ideal. We are talking about withdrawing our support (dollars) from exploitative food production, from sweatshop labor, from earth-destroying enterprises, from greedy businesses, from consumption-driven media. We are talking about speaking against these things, and helping others to learn about them so that they, too, can withdraw their support.

For Gandhi, this meant different things than it does for us, today. He may have chosen to disobey unjust laws, to make his own salt. For us, in a culture that revolves around the almighty dollar, one of the most powerful ways we can make change is by changing the way we use our Currency. We can choose to eat differently, buy differently, live differently, parent differently. We can buy local food instead of food grown by multinational conglomerates. We can go outside and hike instead of watching hundreds of commercials for plastic toys filled with PBAs and produced in sweatshops before being shipped thousands of miles to our local box store that pays its employees sub-living wages and does not offer benefits.

And when someone asks us why we do what we do (or don't do), we can refrain from judging what they do and how they live, and simply explain that we are trying to be loving towards animals/the Earth/poor laborers in third-world countries/unskilled workers in our communities.