If orderly Civil Disobedience was the most powerful tool for change...

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Sun Aug 11, 2013, 12:08 AM - Edit history (3)

would we teach school children how great it is?

What is taught in school is not typically intended to empower people to up-end the status quo.

The fact that "everybody knows" that quiet dignity and passive resistance are the only things that work suggests that the system is now pretty darned comfortable with the threat, if any, posed by such tactics.

That a system bitterly opposed certain tactics in the past before later embracing them as "the American Way" is not surprising. Co-option is part of the historical process. (Look at the demands in the 1848 Communist Manifesto... today it reads like the Republican platform from 1914.)

I am all for Gandhi and MLK. Great men. Did things that worked in the context of their time and place, which is what counts.

But their now universal popularity in a world where there is nothing universally popular about wresting power from The Man suggests that they have been made into sanitized symbols of acceptable discontent.

Just to be clear—this is not a comment on those men or their methods, in their historical context. This is about the fact that the system today clearly feels no threat from 'traditional' civil disobedience, to the point where stooges for the status quo actually have the gall to lecture dissenters about how they are required to limit themselves to the techniques of old-school agitators.

Concensus-approved dissent is an oxymoron like "free speech zone."

When your opponents tell you what game plan THEY are comfortable with you using, does one suppose that they are really generously telling one how to win?

[liberal_at_heart]

1. If we saw the kind of protests now that we saw during MLKs time the government would be

very unhappy. That level of protest is a threat to power. It's meant to be in order to bring about change. The reason they have been sanitized is because schools are so underfunded and curriculums have been crammed packed so full to accomidate state testing requirements that schools cannot properly convey what a struggle the civil rights movement was. I am in my thirties. I was not there for the civil rights movement, but I am smart enough to know it was no walk in the park. People were beaten, arrested, and killed. They don't talk about that part in school anymore, mainly because they don't have time to talk about that anymore. They are too busy teaching to the state standardized test.

[KG]

2. as if civil disobedience should be codified.

[cthulu2016]

5. We already have approved protest zones, right?

[Fumesucker]

6. Unfortunately the approved protest zones largely came from liberals

Arising out of "abortion clinic" protests, free speech zones were originally pushed by liberals as a way to keep anti choice protesters away from women seeking to enter clinics.

[Mnemosyne]

3. I am not so sure passive resistance will work as well in these days of weapons like LRAD. They have

nifty microwave weapons to cook us just under the skin.

[kath]

4. Great post, thought-provoking. K&R

Want to write a lengthier reply, but have to head out to run an errand.

[HiPointDem]

7. i think most people don't understand that mlk had rather powerful establishment allies who

wanted to end segregation & jim crow.

i agree, the establishment is pretty comfortable with peaceful civil disobedience.