“The Manhattan district attorney’s office fully supports the tradition of civil disobedience and that all individuals have the right to protest, if they do so in a law-abiding way,” assistant DA Michele Bayer said in court Thursday.
Ms. Bayer disrespects more than just basic etymology—as it is prima facie ridiculous to be for legally not obeying the law when your job is enforcing that law—in her statement, however. This “tradition” that her office is supposedly venerating argues that adherents should be uninterested in her support; rather they should seek her scorn. When protesting injustice using civil disobedience, the goal is, expressly, to break the law to highlight its injustice through the punishment you are forced to face. One suspects the DA’s office is simply trying to pressure future protesters to keep their disobedience obedient, or face similar prosecutions.
“Unjust laws exist,” says Thoreau, the godfather of modern civil disobedience, and he then asks, “shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” His answer is that we break those laws and accept the punishment as part of exploiting their inherent injustices: “…break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., two twentieth century icons, were enamored with this theoretical argument of Thoreau’s. The latter’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written while he was illustrating his solidarity with Thoreau’s point that in an unjust country, sometimes one must “cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence” by going to jail for disobeying an unjust law.
Sadly, some of the protesters seem almost as ignorant of the follow-through part of this tradition. If you are arrested and argue to a judge that what you did was really legal, you are not acting in civil disobedience—rather that argument seems to imply you thought you were being civilly obedient but were just too dumb to look up the appropriate laws. Where are the protesters whose answer to a judge’s “guilty” or “innocent” is “innocent in the eyes of justice, guilty in the eyes of the state,” and who then accept their punishment?
I don’t see them. What I do see are a lot of people trying to get out of the consequences instead of accepting the final piece of the act—perhaps the most important part—of civil disobedience. Protesters de-radicalize the concept when they are too frightened to deal with the fact that disobedience means open conflict with the powers that be, and in doing so, they make it easier for state officials to try and define the idea by its contrary. If you’ve legitimized yourself to the DA, you’ve likely de-legitimized yourself to the civil disobedience tradition.
Both the protesters and the DA may want to revisit their volume of The Portable Thoreau. I have a copy they can borrow.
