Tink-tink-tink: reflections on nonviolence in a violent world
- Aug 5
- 4 min read
“We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., Springfield College, June 14, 1964)
Today is August 5, the day of relative innocence. I’m going to team up with a couple of my favorite namesakes once again, the unforgettable Dr. King and Marty McFly of “Back to the Future” fame.
Today our good friend, Mr. McFly, is going to take us in his DeLorean back to another August 5, eighty-one years ago, in 1945.
When I say this date is connected to a time of “relative” innocence, we need to put that in perspective. Because World War II, then still raging, had already seen such cruelty, such violence, more people killed than in any war in human history, before or—thankfully--since.
So it was not absolute innocence by any means. But in August of 1945, as now in August of 2026, there was still beauty and heroism in the world. And hope for better days ahead.
Dr. King was just 16 back then, already a precocious—if challenged—student at Morehouse College in his home city of Atlanta. He had barely traveled out of the Jim Crow South at that point, other than a revelatory job working on a tobacco farm in Connecticut the previous summer. (For a great look of King at the time, check out Lerone Martin’s Young King, just published in 2026.)
With our time travel, King, McFly, and I head to Japan on August 5 to meet up with a fourth person, alas not exactly our namesake. Enter the honorable Nichidatsu Fujii.
He was an older fellow, born into a peasant family in Japan on August 6, 1885. By age 19, he had become a Buddhist monk. In the early 1930s, he traveled to India and met the great Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1940s, he was back in Japan during the ravages of World War II. When we connected with him, he was busy trying to cultivate a culture of nonviolence—admittedly a hard sell in that context.
The next day, he turned 60. A great fireball rose over Hiroshima.
The world had entered the nuclear age.
Life would go on. The war would soon end, and a school of thought existed then, and exists now, that it was brought about by the decision to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is not the debate for today, though. Suffice it to say that the age of innocence was over. Human beings, graced with the unbelievable opportunity to live on this beautiful planet, were capable of bringing about our own destruction.
Martin Luther King, Jr. would go on and become the American vicar of nonviolence. Though felled by an assassin’s bullet at age 39 in 1968, his wisdom and eloquence challenge us still to build the more perfect union, the beloved community.
Nichidatsu Fujii would go on and live until 1985, dying at the age of 99. With his Nipponzan-Myohoji sect, he built a series of Peace Pagodas, dedicated to world peace, to inner peace, to cultivating a sense of connection and nonviolence. The first pagodas went up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now there are more than 80 across the world.
The first in North America was completed in Leverett, Massachusetts, in October 1985, just months after Fujii had passed.
So let us spend a little time there in 1985. That was the year when “Back to the Future” was released, bringing my man McFly into the world. And that 1984-85 school year was my first as a teacher, spent at a tiny Quaker school on a farm in New Hampshire. The Meeting School was an amazingly idealistic place that lives in my heart even now (though the school, always on a shoestring, finally closed in 2011).
One day in the spring, we took a field trip down to Leverett where the Peace Pagoda was being built. Working alongside monks and nuns and other volunteers, we put in a day of service on this beautiful hillside in Western Massachusetts. I worked on a crew that salvaged nails from donated lumber, tapping them out of boards and dropping them into one of two Folgers coffee cans: those that could be reused, and those that could not. I loved the simplicity of that job. I can still hear the “tink-tink-tink” of the nails dropping into the cans.
We returned in October during a driving rainstorm. With a crowd of 2,000 people, we climbed up the hillside, following the haunting beats of the monks’ celestial drums. The completed pagoda was astonishingly beautiful. We listened to the keynote speech by Gandhi’s granddaughter who had come in from India specially for the event.
In the years to come, I would often return to sit on the steps of the pagoda, looking out to Mount Greylock, the tallest point in Massachusetts. I basked in the silence and the serenity. Several times I came on August 5 to contemplate the world before the nuclear age.
It was also the place where I proposed to my wife.
And now here we are back in the present, August 5, 2026. Maybe the nonviolence of Nichidatsu Fujii and Martin Luther King seems naïve.
Still, we recognize the wisdom that, indeed, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. We know that we are all here together for a short time on this precious and precarious planet.
We know that we need to find a way.
**
This post is dedicated to my best Buddhist buddy, Geoff Phillips McEnany
**
To learn more about Dr. King’s challenges advancing nonviolence in a violent world, check out my new book, Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida.
Comments