I was once on a BART train on my way from San Francisco back to Berkeley when two young men began an erratic and escalating shouting and shoving match right over the seat of a tiny older woman dressed head-to-toe in the all-black of the archetypal Eastern European Grandmother. I'd have ignored them like everyone else, as best I could, if she hadn't looked so panicked and horrified. Not knowing what to do precisely, but sure I didn't want her to get squashed, I stood up and stepped just out of arm's length. I began nodding to each in turn, as though I were listening to them carefully and watching with great interest. One turned and said "What are YOU looking at?" To which I replied that I didn't know, which was true, and kept giving them my full attention. The speaker yelled an expletive at me and broke away to storm into an adjacent car. I looked at the other guy, who shrugged and went back to what apparently had been his seat. Could I have been attacked? I suppose so, but not without witnesses and potential legal consequences. If that had been my grandmother sitting there, now with a look of profound gratitude on her face, I would have wanted somebody to do something.
When you ask questions like: "What would you do or say?" "How would you respond?" "How can we step in to de-escalate violent confrontations with people in our lives?" "Is avoidance the best policy?" the one that remains unaddressed by my story is the question of avoidance being best, which seems to me only possible to answer in retrospect. In advance, all we can do is prepare ourselves to be ready to make the decision to engage or not. For me, that preparation has involved practicing what I now call Martial Nonviolence. As we see frequently on PCDN (Peace and Collaborative Development Network), peace has more to do with "Conflict Done Well" than avoided, which is why I use that phrase on my invitations to students and colleagues to learn martial arts (my choice is aikido) to begin dealing with the fear associated with physical conflict, and theater improvisation to bring imaginative options into verbal conflict, and some process art (group process design and facilitation) to bring that imagination into groups. In short, peace requires practice. If we don't practice some specific basics, then we can't expect to have tools at hand when the opportunity to call for peace or for justice presents itself. The same is true of political violence and the wrecking ball that Big Money is bringing to our democracy. We must organize, vote, stand for office, choose carefully where we spend our $upport, and encourage everyone we know to do the same, stepping up and stepping out into the street and every place we spend our lives, holding our leadership to account as a daily activity, until everyone votes in every election, aspires to take a turn representing their neighbors, and the next generation may take for granted the freedom we are in the process of losing today.