Better luck this time

Fifty years after the original effort, a new Poor People's Campaign kicked off yesterday around the country. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people attended a rally outside the capitol in Charleston WV yesterday (luckily in the shade). Things were pretty laid back here, but in several state capitols and in DC there were arrests for civil disobedience.

The American Friends Service Committee, i.e. my long-suffering employer, was heavily involved in the original campaign and is all on board this time. Two national leaders of the organization were arrested in DC yesterday. Not sure about the total around the country.

The plan is 40 days of nonviolent action and education which will be "a call to moral revival." You can read more about the campaign and how to get involved here.

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.)

More on the 99% Spring

Since I mentioned the 99% Spring campaign last time (click here for that), I might as well throw in a few more thoughts about this effort to take training in nonviolent direct action to 100,000 Americans Here goes...

*First, hell yeah. This is a good idea, long overdue.

*Second, let's deal with the co-optation question. I know that some people who are political purists are concerned about the involvement of many organizations regarded as "mainstream" in the effort, as if being mainstream is an evil in itself.  I tend to regard purity as the unforgivable sin in politics so I've never been able to work up much sympathy for it. (In fact, isn't the whole idea to make things like social justice or human rights a mainstream idea?)  I will publicly state that if co-optation means getting ideas out to a broader audience than a select few, I wish to God that more such ideas get co-opted.

*Third, I hope the people who planned this didn't go to all the time and trouble of developing a curriculum, training trainers, and holding gatherings all over the country just to do some actions on Tax Day, which probably would have already happened anyway. It makes a lot more sense to me if this campaign is an ongoing and possibly long term effort. It might even be cool not only to take the show on the road for a long time but also to develop additional trainings to help people develop skills in working for social justice. Otherwise, it seems like kind of a waste of good energy.

Of nonviolence, the 99% Spring, and such

Rev. Jim Lewis invokes the spirit at a Tax Day action in Charleston yesterday. (Note: he's the guy in front, not the big orange cat strangling a worker.)


All over the country, people gathered yesterday in nonviolent actions to call for tax fairness. This is part of a massive effort by many groups under the umbrella of 99% Spring, which has the goal of training 100,000 people in nonviolent action in April and mobilizing people to take it to the streets.

I attended one of the training events and found it to be a pretty good introduction to nonviolent action for people new to it. You can check out a lot of the materials and video at the website above. I do think, however, that the trainings would be stronger if they included a few other elements.

Specifically, these include


1. a good brainstorm about why to be strategically nonviolent to start with. Trainers should be sure that the following points get made:

*that generally speaking the wealthy elite have direct or indirect control over the state with all its machinery of repression, as in police, military, jails, courts, etc. and that it's pretty stupid to try to meet force with force when you don't have any;

*that generally speaking violence is a turnoff for most people; and

*that acting violently (or stupidly in general) gives the powers that be an excuse to dismiss, discredit and repress the group.

2. A basic understanding of politics in general. By this I mean that it's good to get across the idea that on any given issue a minority of people feel strongly about an issue one way or another while a much larger groups has no opinion at all or is somewhere in the middle. A good action or campaign is one that brings people your way and isolates your opponents. This is true of ordinary politics and policy work. of the arts of persuasion, and of direct action in general. There is nothing magic about nonviolent action: if it doesn't make sense politically it's better to do nothing. I have seem plenty of useless, stupid and counterproductive actions.

3. A basic understanding of power.  A central tenet of nonviolent theory (and politics generally) is that power isn't monolithic. It depends on the support and cooperation of all kinds of people and institutions. Even the most powerful dictator or ruling class depends on many other people to keep things running. These are often called "pillars of support." A good nonviolent campaign is one that withdraws the pillars of support (see #2).

Conversely, you can do all the nonviolent protest you want but if it is done without political sense and strategy it may just convince the pillars of support that you want to remove that your group is just a bunch of whack jobs.

It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to get these ideas across in any kind of training and I think it would strengthen the overall effort.

Diversity of bad ideas

Overwhelmingly but with some exceptions, participants in the Occupy movement have adopted, often explicitly, nonviolence as a method of action. However, in some places there are those who argue for "a diversity of tactics," which basically seems to consist of throwing things at cops.

Presumably such people believe that this is the best way to win over the hearts and minds of the 99 percent they claim to represent.

Sorry, but the most charitable thing I can say about that approach is that it is, in one of the Spousal Unit's favorite phrases, "dumber than dog ****." I say that not only as someone who works for a Quaker organization that promotes nonviolence, but also as a gun owning Gandhi-allergic Scotch Irish hillbilly with a black belt.

This has nothing to do with any belief on my part regarding the moral arc of the universe, the evidence for which is underwhelming to me most days. It comes down to this: as much as some seem to like throwing stuff as a method of change, the rulers generally have way more stuff to throw. And they can throw it harder. Second, most people are not all that turned on by the sight of people throwing stuff.

It seems to me but simple prudence to avoid giving one's opponent the excuse and/or ability to crush and/or totally discredit and isolate you unless there is a compelling reason to do so and I don't imagine that happens very often.

As a friend of mine once said about ultra "left" groups that engage in provocative action, "If they're not getting paid by the other side, they're getting ripped off."

IT'S MONDAY so it's gotta be Krugman bashing austerity.

HISTORY IS MESSY, so the Tennessee Tea Party wants to clean it up--by keeping slavery and such unsavory matters of American history out of the textbooks.

WHAT IS 24 MILLION GENERATIONS? If we were playing Jeopardy, that would be the number required for mouse sized mammals to evolve to elephant proportions assuming natural selection was favorable.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Silly is the new serious

I have always had a distaste for the strident, which can be an occupational hazard (no pun intended) among people who work for social justice. That's why I find the levity in recent Occupy Wall Street protests refreshing, one example of which involves people parading around dressed as zombies. As this article, titled "Gandhi Meets Monty Python" suggests, there's a lot of that kind of humor going on these days all over the place.

Regular readers of Goat Rope will perhaps recall similar silly actions with a point in West Virginia. A few years back, when the then governor was messing with Medicaid, several of us held a bake sale for Medicaid that made around $100 bucks. That was silly enough, but then we got a big check printed and arranged a ceremony, with media in attendance of course, in which we presented the proceeds of the sale to the state treasurer's office.

This summer, on the anniversary of the Bush tax cuts, we held a Bake Sale for the Really Rich, complete with street theater. The state AFLCIO liked the idea and held hot dog sales around the state on the anniversary of the creation of Social Security. Dogs were sold at 1935 prices to raise federal revenue in order to spare the very wealthy from having to pay their fair share. After that, another event was held in which the hot dog proceeds were delivered to the Bureau of the Public Debt in Parkersburg.

You can't be silly all the time, alas, but it is good to break things up and act in unpredictable ways.

JOBS, BRIDGES AND BOMBS discussed here.

IS THE CONVERSATION CHANGING? Maybe.

THE SEVEN BILLION THING discussed here.

PET LOVING AND MEAT EATING pondered here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Guess who's coming to dinner

I've been blogging off and on lately about Beowulf, along with current events. It really is a cool story with both ancient and universal themes.

One big theme in the ancient and medieval world was the problem of hospitality or how to deal with guests, hosts and strangers. It may well be that humans are hard wired to have an in-group/out-group orientation, which makes dealing with strangers, singularly or in groups, an ambiguous matter. New people might prove to be good friends or dangerous enemies and both host and guest posed potential threats to each other.

Issues of guests, hosts and hospitality were major themes in the Iliad and Odyssey and other Greek myths as well as in the Bible and other sources. It's no surprise that this is also an issue in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which portrays societies that spend at least part of the time raiding each other.

What would you do if 15 heavily armed proto-Vikings showed up on your doorstep? Or, if you were one of the 15, how would you convince those who met you that you meant no harm? And, by the way, how much mead is there in the cellar, anyway?

Before any major monster-killing can be done, these kinds of details have to be sorted out. More on that to come.

WHAT'S NOT ON THE TABLE. Here's an op-ed by a co-worker of mine about what is missing from deficit reduction discussions.

THE LESS BAD PARTS of President Obama's proposed budget are discussed here.

STICKER SHOCK. A new Harvard study of the costs of coal finds a bigger bottom line.

AN ODD COINCIDENCE. It just so happened that just before the basically nonviolent Egyptian revolution burst upon the scene I started rereading a volume of Gene Sharp on non-violent action. I couldn't help thinking of him as events unfolded. Here's a profile of Sharp from today's New York Times.

OLD DOGS. Here's a look at the canine family tree from wolf to woof.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED