Civil Disobedience

I was at a climate change panel this morning which featured wide-ranging discussion of a number of important issues. But one thing that frustrated me was that after moderator Amanda Terkel raised the issue of “civil disobedience” the panelists commenced a discussion that was focused on the idea of “protests.” That sort of makes it sound like the famed civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement consisted of earnest and well-meaning protestors standing outside segregated lunch counters holding signs about the moral wrongness of such rules.

This is, of course, wrong. There were protests and sign-holdings associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but the core of that era’s civil disobedience was, well, civil disobedience. People actually going and doing illegal stuff and forcing the authorities to come out and stop them. The idea was to (a) demonstrate the extreme depth of the commitment the activists possessed, (b) dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow in a visceral way, and (c) create an atmosphere of social crisis such that fence-sitters could no longer say “well, this just isn’t a good time to address these issues.” The movement was causing trouble, and would have to be dealt with by either crushing it with repression or else addressing its concerns.

I’m not certain that an equivalent strategy would be useful or appropriate for the climate change issue. But I think it’s at least worth thinking about. And it would entail doing something very different from simply organizing legal rallies and marches or staged phony arrests.