I was pepper-sprayed in Anchorage for my beliefs. I still believe nonviolence is the answer.

A year before he took office, Donald Trump held a rally in Las Vegas. During the affair, a protester had the audacity to speak out. The man exhibited a fundamental freedom everyone, including the president, should have applauded. Trump said, instead, "I'd like to punch him in the face."

Violence begets violence. Fans of Trump responded, throughout his campaign, to his exhortations in kind, turning on protesters with fists, kicks and violent words.

Is this the America we've become?

A couple weekends ago, at a nonviolent protest training, I felt the sting of that same kind of hate. It hit me square in the back of my gray hoodie, and came as a blast of orange powder. I felt my lungs, my eyes, and my balance become incapacitated. If I could only find an exit, a door. I couldn't see. "Tear gas! Tear gas!" I shouted. "Call 911!" I was coughing. Had to get out. Had to get out. I found another door that led outside and doubled up over my knees. "Dear God," I thought, "will I ever see again?"

Then I heard the others, folks older than me. Good folks who knew and practiced a lifetime of nonviolence. They were still inside, moaning, crying, coughing, retching. "Help," someone shouted. It was a colleague who had found her way to the bathroom. "You have to leave," I shouted. She coughed, "But I can't see. I can't see."

"Follow me. Hold my arm."

Soon everyone was outside. One woman lay on the ground. "The paramedics are on their way," I told her. She didn't look good. Her breathing was labored. A friend poured water over her face. "I can't see. I can't see," she said, over and over.

In the subsequent week, a man was caught and arrested on counts of assault, burglary and terroristic threatening.

While I initially thought it might have been a random incident, the assault at the Anchorage Community House was just one lightning strike in storm that has been rumbling across our country's societal landscape for years: a storm of "white power" violence.

In the early 1980s, "white-power activism largely relocated to the internet," Kathleen Belew wrote in The New York Times. Belew has studied the movement for 10 years and is author of a newly-released book, "Bring the War Home." "White-power activity in the United States is not new, nor has it been as shadowy as we may have imagined. It was known and then forgotten. We must, collectively, recognize its strength and history, or our amnesia will make it impossible to respond to such activism and violence in the present."
Given Belew's findings, Trump's incitements and our assailant's connection with white-power ideology, the attack on our group is hardly an aberration. Hateful, antagonistic language against people who stand up for social justice has become routine in the comment sections of news sites: Witness right-wing ire against young people who have the temerity to try to end the silence on gun violence.

We were, ironically, engaged in a workshop on nonviolence when we were met with violence. At a time when political demagoguery courses like a pathogen through the veins of social media, we need, more than ever, to engage our communities with nonviolent action.

In Alaska, nonviolence has a rich tradition — from the firm and famous appeal of Elizabeth Peratrovich in 1945 for the passage of an Anti-Discrimination Act, to Desa Jacobsson's hunger strikes for human rights, to the massive "We the People" marches for Native subsistence, to our hundreds of peaceful protests, glittering with their flashing signs of democracy.

Especially in Alaska, with the nation's highest per-capita violent crime rate, we should practice civility, reconciliation and a "type of constructive, nonviolent tension" that, according to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "is necessary for growth."

In Anchorage, we can begin immediately to listen to those who say we should focus on bullying as a big part of the gun problem. We should advocate more funding for domestic violence shelters. We could provide schools with social workers to help students who come from economically-disadvantaged households. And we should begin to address the violence of poverty, a violence exemplified in the uprooting of homeless people from outdoor shelters.

I and 10 others were attacked by pepper spray while we practiced nonviolence, like the civil rights marchers in Selma, like the peaceful assemblies in Ferguson, like the water protectors at Standing Rock, like Palestinians in the streets of Gaza, like the students who march for their lives against gun violence, we join their call: Enough is enough! It's time for nonviolent means and nonviolent ends.

Given hate, we respond with love.

Soren Wuerth is a volunteer with Alaska Grassroots Alliance. He, along with 11 others, was a victim of an April 21 pepper spray attack.

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