Of the 99% spring, nonviolence, civil disobedience, Plutarch and the Spartans

I've been reflecting lately on the 99% Spring campaign lately, which aims to train 100,000 people in nonviolent direct action in April. Earlier posts are here and here.

One good decision on the part of the campaign was to try to convey the range of possibilities for nonviolent action without really getting into civil disobedience. That is a topic of its own and requires a great deal of planning and preparation to be successful in the best case scenario.

While it can at times be a very powerful thing, in my opinion, civil disobedience is an option that is greatly and grossly overused. Some people apparently think that you get points for getting arrested. You don't. As I see it, you get points for winning. Some people use civil disobedience not as a last resort but as a first resort when they haven't even come close to exhausting alternative strategies. Sometimes it seems to me that it's the refuge of the politically inept.

This is the martial artist in me talking, but the value of a technique generally diminishes with its repetition. Habituation happens. If you overuse one technique you become predictable and your opponents can easily counter and/or dismiss it. The last reaction a group working for social change wants is for people to say, with a sigh of boredom, "there they go again."

Random classical digression....This train of thought was inspired yesterday as I was re-reading Plutarch's Lives. I'm on the life of Lycurgus, the ancient lawgiver of Sparta. The author states that the Spartans made it a policy that

"they should not make war often, or long, with the same enemy, lest that they should train and instruct them in war, by habituating them to defend themselves."

(Random historical digression...Eventually the Spartans failed to follow this advice, which resulted in them getting their butts kicked by the Thebans.)

Dirty institutions

Rosa Parks, 1955. Image by way of wikipedia.

Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience didn't make much of a splash when first written, but it was destined to have a major worldwide impact. The events that led to the essay took place during his stay at Walden Pond.

Here's how he laconically describes what happened in Walden:

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone into the woods for other purposes, But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckle-berries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state.

Of course, people have been resisting unjust laws and governments since ancient times--the Greek tragedy Antigone is a literary example of ancient civil disobedience. The histories of Josephus provide examples of Jewish non-violent resistance against the Romans under Caligula and Pilate. But Thoreau was one of the first to articulate it clearly and his essay about an almost accidental encounter would have a much greater influence than anyone at the time might have dreamed.

It's amazing what people can do sometimes even when they're not trying.

LIVING ON EARTH devoted a program to the changing view of the late WV Senator Robert Byrd on coal issues.

BAKER'S DOZEN (minus ten). Here are two good columns by economist Dean Baker. The first is about the politics of unemployment, while the second is about the growing inequality that is at the root of the economic crisis.

ANOTHER INTERESTING TAKE on the economic crisis can be found here.

GETTING EMOTIONAL can have its benefits.

BIRD BRAINS. They are more similar to those of mammals than previously thought. Having watched the complex behavior of the feathered inhabitants of Goat Rope Farm, I can't say I'm surprised.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED