Quick Note on Civil Disobedience
A reader had a tough time with my piece of civil disobedience and climate change. He writes: Don’t confuse the very important concepts of: public meetings; protest events; political lobbying, etc. with the obnoxious term “civil disobedience.” They are not synonymous at all and have no place in civil society.
Civil disobedience has no place in civil society? I’ll try to remember to run that by Jesus, George Washington, Thoreau, Gandhi, and MLK if I happen to see them in heaven someday. 🙂
I agree that some form of civil disobedience needs to be tolerated in a free society. But, at some point civil disobedience morphs into anarchy. Destruction of property is way beyond getting the attention of the lethargic majority.
Surely there are situations where civil disobedience can be justified. Does anyone really think that racial segregation and Jim Crow would have been ended without civil disobedience? The Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional yet it continued.
However, I would agree that civil disobedience is not ALWAYS justified and that other approaches should be used first.
Civil disobedience is very civilized, and the people who do so do so at great personal risk because they feel that their voices have not been heard, or being heard have been ignored.
Make no mistake they want you to be uncomfortable because of their actions. People who practice civil disobedience first are trained in non violence so that their actions are anything but acts of anarchy.
The anarchy is business as usual!
I would feel a lot better if the people protesting the oil and coal companies had all had energy audits and acted on the audit recommendations so that they had first done what the IPCC states is of primary importance, wasting less energy through energy efficiency improvements.
Bruce,
I agree! Too often it’s “Do what I say, not what I do.”. There are people who advocate energy efficiency but have extremely huge oversize houses and large SUVs.
When the stream that your ancestors have depended on for thousands of years dries up because the glacier has melted in your lifetime and you use no coal or oil, protest becomes a valid medium.
Check out these photos of bad-ass climate activists around the world
http://grist.org/living/check-out-these-photos-of-bad-ass-climate-activists-around-the-world/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekly-static
Good going, Bruce.
From the article:
“the 48-hour occupation of a lignite mine and power station by 3,500 activists in Germany”
It would be interesting to know how many of those occupationers were instrumental in shutting down the nuclear plants. That action resulted in more lignite being mined and more coal burning power stations being built.