the power of passive insistence

The power of passive insistence

"Passive resistance" as a powerful political tool was popularized by Mohandas K. Gandhi, first, in South Africa and, later and most definitively, in India, this East Indian attorney's homeland.

Inspired by Gandhi's example, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , a Baptist preacher, and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, applied Gandhi's principles to his own native land to free American blacks from the malignant vestiges of over a century of oppression and disparate treatment to which they had been subjected after, a far too-brief "Reconstruction,"following the slavery-ending, Union-preserving Civil War.

"Passive insistence" is a concept suggested by my recent observation of an 8-year girl, whose benign act of following a Tennessee state senator around the capital all day, induced that senator to drop her proposed bill, which had directly threatened that child's welfare nutrition benefits.

It was then that the thought "passive insistence" struck me. I saw it as a useful natural paradigm that could be employed in multiple contexts, even as it was already being employed in Nature and in human affairs.

Persistent pressure pays off! The "Importunate Woman," Luke 18:1-8, whose persistence this Tennessee child reprised, is a prime example.

Rock formations, riverbeds, deserts, and mountain chains have all been shaped and re-shaped by persistent pressure, sunlight, wind and water. 

Orthodontic braces and orthopedic aids straighten teeth and limbs through persistent applied pressure.

What if "passive insistence" was applied as a tool to combat such pernicious evils as beset the spiritually sodden, underclass of black people themselves, internally?

"Love" judiciously applied is one such powerful, persistent, pressure tool available. Surely, there are others.