c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In a December 2002 interview on the BBC, Burmese pro-democracy and spiritual leader Aung San Suu Kyi dared everyone to do a simple thing: Do not support injustice.

“If (the people of Burma) know that something is wrong, if they know that something is unjust,” challenged Suu Kyi, they should not “go along with it simply because they are afraid or simply because they think that it is what those in authority would wish them to do.”

Five years later, we watch as tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns use nonviolence to confront the injustice of the military dictatorship in Burman (now known as Myanmar).

Such a daring display of faith-based nonviolence begs the question of what people of faith in the U.S. are doing to advance justice and preserve the ideals of democracy here at home.

In January 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said at his confirmation hearings that “the ideological isms have all died away _ fascism, Nazism, communism _ leaving only the dregs of abused and misused power lying in their wake. In this refuse, dictators remain.” George W. Bush and his administration are sinking or have sunk _ intentionally or not _ into this refuse. It is up to us to drag them out.

Here are a few suggestions of what a citizen can do. Full disclosure: Some of these will get you in trouble with the law.

_ Find out who your governor has tapped as a representative of Homeland Security and hound that person until he or she restores democratic rights and preserves the Constitution at both the local and national level.

_ Refuse to register for the Selective Service.

_ If you are in the military, talk to your chaplain about conscientious objection to the morally unjust war with Iraq.

_ If you are a judge, refuse to indict those who nonviolently break a minor law in order to uphold a greater law.

_ If you are a lawyer, offer pro bono services to anyone targeted by unjust laws.

_ If you are a banker, seriously scrutinize requests by Homeland Security requiring you to turn over individual’s banking records to the government.

_ When Homeland Security requires that all males in your community from selected countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among others) present themselves to be fingerprinted and photographed, have everyone _ from every religious, ethnic, or national group _ show up.

_ Open the doors of your house of worship as a sanctuary to immigrants who are threatened by harsh anti-immigrant laws; teach about the history of war tax resistance to unjust governments. During a service, have everyone take out his or her paper money and write across the top in bright red marker: “This money supports peace with Iraq.”

_ Withhold a portion of your taxes from the IRS to hold the government accountable to creating a more responsible and broadly democratic national budget _ one that doesn’t leave 15 percent of Americans unable to afford food.

Terrorists have determined that all Americans are “military targets”; the old distinctions between civilians and combatants no longer apply. In response, Bush has drafted all of us into his “war on terror.” Every citizen is now considered a foot soldier for the Office of Homeland Security. There are rules that govern the conduct of soldiers. One, according to the U.S. Catholic bishops, is that “actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions.”

One is morally bound to refuse to participate in crime. The war on Iraq is a crime. Are tanks and war materiel being transported on the train tracks through your town? Block the tracks. The key to resistance is “subsidiarity”: The most elegant solution is the one closest to the problem.

This is what pacifist resistance looks like.

Gandhi said that non-cooperation means refusal to help the sinner in his sin, and refusing to accept any gift from him until he has repented. Peaceful non-cooperation with injustice means cooperation with what is good. Non-cooperation is enacted against systems, not people; it respects the one who promotes injustice until he can regain respect for himself. This is what we are witnessing from the monks in Burma.

In that BBC interview, Suu Kyi was asked how she survived making so many sacrifices for her country. She responded: “I never made sacrifices. I made choices.”

(Rose Marie Berger, an associate editor of Sojourners (http://www.sojo.net), is a Catholic peace activist and poet.)

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