#28 -- GETTING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

“Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Sometime back, a co-worker noticed I was reading Walden. Though I did not ask him what he thought, he told me anyway: “Thoreau. I’d know how to take care of him.” He was a nice, hardworking, retired career military man. Of course he was referring to Thoreau’s treatise on civil disobedience, which had inspired the anti-war protests of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, which had ultimately gotten us out of the Vietnam War. He felt that Henry David Thoreau, and all the malcontents following in his footsteps, had fouled the world with their complaining, and that swift and thorough violence was needed to put them away so the rest of us could go on with our legitimate business. After all, what had worked so well for fascists ought to work just as well in the Land of Liberty. My co-worker made the same mistake regarding civil disobedience that authorities have always made: thinking ruthless coercion would get rid of the troublemakers and warn others to mind their own business. Now in 2011 we are again situated so that many citizens feel the need to protest the status quo by purposely breaking laws and accepting the consequences. And those in authority are again making the same mistakes as always, thus assuring the success of civil disobedience once again.
What authoritarians fail to comprehend (perhaps because they cannot) is that civil disobedience works because it bestirs a slumbering universal conscience. This conscience, once awakened, will not rest until major issues, which normally have scant relevance to whatever minor laws the protesters momentarily disobey, are addressed. In Thoreau’s famous case, he went to jail for not paying his poll tax. But his argument was with slavery, not poll taxes. So it went with Gandhi in India, whose point was not the salt tax, but that a hundred thousand British had conquered, exploited, and enslaved three-hundred millions in India. The civil rights protesters in the Southern United States were not so much trying to ride buses or cross bridges—their goal was to end a reality in which millions of human beings, freed from slavery a century earlier, were still being treated like slaves. In episode after episode, the intent of civil disobedience is to violate small laws, provoking the authorities to over-react, so that others must wonder what other laws might be viciously unfair.
Movements based on the principle of non-violent resistance create their own supportive energy. Violent reactions on the part of authorities feed that energy. The more violent the reactions, the less sane the authorities appear to people awakened to the reality of social and economic injustice. Practitioners of civil disobedience play by the rules, breaking the laws, submitting to arrest and incarceration, letting the drama play out for the general public, which sees its leaders acting insanely. Ultimately even the authorities (all but the true sociopaths), come to realize and to question injustices they are committing and perpetuating. Then punishment stops and progress can begin.
We know civil disobedience is not a cure-all. Human beings, having problems, will always create problems for each other. Our awareness of this fact accounts for the slow growth of protest movements. As our own Declaration admits, small injustices are better endured than confronted, so long as they remain small. We all know life is never very fair, and we readily adapt to that reality, each in our own way.
But when a situation becomes intolerable, when misery reaches epidemic levels, when even those not personally experiencing that misery realize that they could be next, humans will act in concert to make changes. Change is hard to bring about, because those who profit from inequalities are invariably those in charge. Incapable of foregoing profits by ending injustices on their own, they must be made to do so. But change can happen when enough regular citizens, watching people just like them, withhold support for the law, risking the law’s wrath. Non-violence is the key, because it gives the authorities something of an out at the same time it sets a moral example for the citizens. People who commit civil disobedience accept arrest and incarceration. They expect to be tried in court. Law enforcement will be burdened, the courts jammed, the jails filled. Prosecutors will have to decide whether to use scarce resources fighting real crime, or punishing minor crimes committed by protesters. Either the establishment must admit weakness, or the public will witness a desperate State trying to hold power by brutalizing harmless citizens.
Once it is seen as petty and tyrannical, the State can no longer maintain the respect of its subjects. It must change or become more brutal, as it feebly attempts to maintain its authority. The axiom holds true whether the State is democratic or dictatorial. Civil disobedience does not work overnight. But even seemingly invincible dictatorships are susceptible to the battering-ram of public opinion. Witness the apartheid regime in South Africa. Witness the Soviet Union. America’s government structure was created to change peaceably, before injustice becomes so intolerable that violence is the only choice. This is one more reason why the authorities cannot succeed in their attempt to maintain an unjust and unworkable status quo.
In fact they have already lost.