Over the past few weeks I've encountered quite a number of people who seem to think that passive and nonviolence are one in the same word. When discussing strategies and tactics to oppose neo-Nazis or timber companies or whoever, someone always seems to say something like, "We've got to do something. We just can't sit around nonviolently waiting for things to get worse."

Though often not explicitly stated, the inference is that nonviolent resistence both is passive and a way to wimp out of confrontations. As both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi illustrated time and again, such thinking couldn't be further from the truth.

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When someone hits you or screams obsenities in your face, the knee-jerk reaction for most people is to respond in kind or worse. It tends not to be a thinking response -- it's more a reaction than anything else. It's the easiest of responses possible.

It also tends to create a chain reaction of violence. Each person can convince themselves that the other party started or escalated the situation. In essence, each side views themselves as the victim who, by birthright, must now avenge the previous attack.

We see this in the world today in the so-called "war on terror". Many in the Islamic world feel they are victims of US foreign policy which, in their view and others, is terroristic. So, they return terror for terror. The US is attacked on 9/11 and so views itself as the victim. So, the US attacks Afghanistan and Iraq. All this does is create a never-ending cycle of attack, react, attack, react, attack...

The nonviolent approach consciously seeks to stop this cycle dead in its tracks. If somebody hits you, you don't hit back. If somebody yells vulgarities in your face, you don't yell back. Instead of reacting violently, the nonviolent person uses reason, strategy and, in some cases, overwhelming moral authority.

What surpises so many people about this strategy is that it works remarkably well. Dr. King used it to overturn legal segregation in the US. Gandhi used it to gain independence for India. Mandela used it to end apartheid in South Africa.

In all of these cases and more, nonviolent resistence was anything BUT passive and nonconfrontational. No, in each case the movements involved were very active and very confrontational.

For me, the difference between a strategy of violent reaction (large or small) and nonviolent resistence concerns the amount of thinking and planning. The former doesn't need much of either, the latter is thinking and planning intensive.

People tend to want what they want, right now. If a person is not willing to be patient, then a nonviolent strategy appears to be out of the question. Yet, the violent reaction actually increases the likelihood that the time frame for change will be elongated because, once initiated, it begins the cycle of back-and-forth violence.

A cycle that often never seems to end.