Or, "You are under arrest for failing to obey a lawful order."
By Linda Felaco
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Here in the United States, we like to act as though we invented freedom and democracy, never mind the fact that the word "democracy" comes from the
Greek. Our military is currently fighting in three different countries in order to bestow the blessings of liberty in benighted parts of the world that lack it. But just how free
are we here in the U.S. of A.?
While we here in Charlestown were caught up in preparing for and cleaning up after Hurricane Irene, 1252 people were arrested outside the White House
for exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. In the largest environmental civil disobedience action in decades,
thousands of people participated in a sit-in at Obama's front door between August 20 and September 3 to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which will carry one of the world's dirtiest fuels, tar sands oil, from
Alberta, Canada, all the way across the continental U.S. to the Gulf of Mexico. (Read more about why we should all be opposing the Keystone XL pipeline here.
) Arrestees included NASA climate scientist James Hansen; author-activist Naomi Klein;
author-activist Bill McKibben; Josh Fox, maker of the antifracking documentary Gasland; Maryland State Senator
Paul Pinsky (D-Hyattsville); Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford; and actress Daryl Hannah.
Granted, these people had traveled to Washington, D.C., for the specific purpose of engaging in civil disobedience. But is this all it takes to get
arrested in post-9/11 America, "failure to move"? In the so-called freest country in the world, so free we give out lessons in freedom to other
countries, if you're on a public sidewalk, which your tax dollars pay for, and a police officer whose salary your tax dollars pay tells you to move,
for any reason or for no reason at all, and you don't move, and pronto, you can be arrested?
Civil disobedience is part of the very history of this great nation of ours. As Josh Fox stated following his arrest, "If not for civil disobedience, women would not have the vote, children would still be working in factories, there would be no unions, India would
still be ruled by the British and people of color would still be second class citizens in the United States." (Actually, we're fast on our way back to having no unions anymore, but that's a whole 'nother subject.)
Rosa Parks didn't give up her seat on the bus, even though the unjust laws of her time required her to, and as a result, ultimately those laws were
changed. But where's the civil disobedience in sitting on a sidewalk? Is any order a police officer gives automatically lawful and you're automatically
a lawbreaker if you don't obey it? There in fact is no crime in disobeying an unlawful (i.e., unconstitutional) police order. Unfortunately, there's a
bit of a Catch-22 involved: In order to get a judge's ruling on whether the police order was lawful, you have to actually be arrested and go to trial.
Law-and-order types will say that cops must be obeyed at all times and in all circumstances, no questions asked, no matter what, as a matter of public
safety. But is Daryl Hannah really such a threat to public safety that we have to arrest her for sitting on a sidewalk in downtown D.C., capital of the
free world? Tea partiers have been foaming at the mouth over what they perceive as an
affront to their freedom to buy cheap incandescent light bulbs
that squander energy mostly as heat rather than light. Where are the tea party protests over this affront to our freedom of speech and right to
peaceful assembly?
Twelve hundred and fifty-two people—some of whom spent two nights in jail—were arrested for acting as though the First Amendment actually applies to
people and not just corporations. Even if you're untroubled by the idea of a thousands-of-miles-long pipeline being built through
environmentally sensitive and highly populated areas that could potentially rupture and poison the source of fresh drinking water for tens of millions
of people, this fact should give you pause.
