Today I ugly cried in front of a group of about 40 strangers until some guy came and held my hand for long enough that I could finish what I was trying to say:
As long as our systems are designed and maintained to hurt people, business as usual cannot go on. The time has come for drastic action.
That doesn’t sound like a terribly weep-worthy statement. In the quiet before the Poor People’s Campaign protest today, as everyone risking arrest shared their reasons for joining the campaign, we weren’t supposed to stand up and fall apart. I don’t exactly know why I was crying in that moment, except that months of frustration and anguish and fatigue started to pour out the moment I said these words out loud. Years of pain I have witnessed and (just barely) experienced welled up alongside the simple words and few sentences that made up the story of my journey to that seat, in the Unitarian Universalist church with forty beautiful strangers.
I’ve not long felt that protesting was a worthwhile thing to do. Shouldn’t we do something concrete to effect change besides shout at the general public? Couldn’t we put all that work into caring for someone specific, or meeting with our elected officials, or expressing our opinions as individuals?
I suppose I’ve also not long been convinced that democracy, peace, and basic human rights were actually threatened here. While I’ve understood for several years that oppression and injustice were alive and well in the USA, I didn’t see voter protections being actively rescinded and voting barriers erected; I didn’t see basic welfare programs like housing assistance and food stamps being gutted. I didn’t see education treated increasingly as a privilege, I didn’t see a gun violence crisis casually dismissed, and I didn’t see xenophobia, racial profiling, and racial terror becoming national policy before my eyes.
For the first time I have understood what it means to discover that all the normal channels and lawful means of making change in our communities mean nothing. To find yourself up against a government that’s happy to let us plead, write, phone, post—and yes, cry—while it goes about its death-dealing business as usual.
This afternoon, I watched on the sidewalk with my friend’s children while she was arrested in her clericals and stole. Later a friend posted a photo of the arrest, and the inevitable comment came: why was she arrested if she was peacefully protesting?
The short answer is that civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest. We can’t go around praising [wealthy white dudes in] Silicon Valley for idolizing “disruption,” then roll our eyes when regular people are actually disruptive. Protest says, this cannot go on.
Civil disobedience is meant to call attention to the injustice of the State. Civil disobedience proclaims,
Life under this government is no longer tolerable—I will do anything rather than let this go on—By any means necessary other than violence, I will refuse to acquiesce to my own disempowerment, disrespect, and abuse.
As long as these policies remain in place, I will force this government to symbolically enact that abuse on my own body, until the law guarantees the safety of my body and all bodies.
The more specific answer is that if you take a photo of a person being arrested to mean that that person is a violent criminal, you have never loved a truly poor person—someone trapped in the ghettoized poverty of urban housing projects, immigrant communities, or rural Appalachia. Someone who lives in fear of the police because our society has imagined a thousand ways to criminalize poverty. The Columbia police were models of professionalism and respect—but as a broader group, police officers can usually only enforce the laws handed down to them, through the cultural lenses they’ve been given. As long as our society and our laws display contempt for the poor, racial hatred, the belief that poor people deserve additional obstacles while the wealthy continue to rig games in their own favor, and the belief that violence solves problems? Our police will display those same biases.
The fact is, peaceful and innocent people are arrested every day, and we who stand to benefit from business as usual declare ourselves judge and jury—ruling in favor of the uniform every time, because the uniform represents power, represents more of the same, represents the comfort of benefiting from the system.
And I guess that’s why I was crying. NOT, to be clear, out of pity or guilt. I was crying for myself, for the pain that pierces when you open yourself up to a world that is hurting, a world in which some people can no longer bear to live, a world where we continue to act out horrible, broken—and frankly, boring—old stories of fear, violence, and greed. I was crying for myself because the Bible that guides my every day tells me our lives cannot be untangled from each other’s any more than a hand can choose to live without an eye. When I pray to see with Holy Spirit’s eyes I find that there is no suffering anywhere in the world that does not touch my life; there is no unjust system that truly benefits anyone.
There is no place to really escape from the suffering of others and the voice of truth deep in our own hearts. There is no material advantage worth the price of injustice—the loss of community, trust, learning, joy, simplicity, neighborliness. There is no privilege that, once given up, isn’t exchanged for something of a stranger, more difficult, and vastly deeper beauty.
That is why I’m honored to belong to a movement committed to the leadership of poor, black and brown, queer, disabled, and other non-privileged people. The heroes of today’s story of protest are the trans, black, and poor people who put their bodies on the same line as the white clergy, even though the marginalized have real reasons to fear arrest. And as long as they are willing to stand in the street toe-to-toe with the State, I have no choice but to be there, witnessing and standing with their declaration:
I am a human, and I will stand in the way of the machine of oppression until I am crushed if that is what it takes to retain my humanity—if that is what it takes to resist business as usual. I stand for life, beauty, prayer, song, joy, I stand in defiance of the uniform-as-tool-of-oppression, I stand for the future of God’s peace and prosperity for all, the future that is breaking in here and now in this street and in our world, the shalom I still believe will always find a way.