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Civil Disobedience and Direct Action:
Standing up and Being Counted
One of the functions of society is to anesthetize and desensitize us. We feel less and less because it's safer to feel nothing. As animal people, what we are doing is taking on the pain of others. There's a problem with that, though. People burn out because it's too big. If you extrapolate the concern, for instance, for stopping some guy from beating his dog, to life in the neighborhood and then the city, and then the state, and then the world, it is too huge. My personal antidote for that world pain is direct action. Years ago I used to cut down billboards at night and would run giggling off into the night. It didn't save the world, but it was really good for my mental health. It doesn't matter if there's media there; it doesn't matter if there's one of you or 30 of you: if you're doing it for yourself and for the critter. For, when it comes down to it, what can they do to you that is anywhere close to what, for instance, they do to the foxes, mink, bobcat, lynx, and all the other animals on fur farms? SabotageSo what do you say about an institution like the fur industry that is founded and predicated on the suffering of animals? What is the responsibility of the individual in this context? I've done lots of CDs (civil disobediences), and lots of direct action. At my last count I've been arrested about 30 times, about eight times in 1996. It's my feeling that what we have to do is stand up personally and say that we will not go along with this. In his book of essays, What Are People For?, Wendell Berry says: "The purpose of true protest is more modest than that of changing everyone's mind. It is to hold onto that within our hearts that dies through acquiescence." That's the nut of it. What do you do to stand up for yourself; to say that you will not go along with the mechanism of death, that you oppose it? The word "sabotage" derives from the weavers who fought against the industrial revolution when machines were brought in to do the weaving. The weavers, who were called Luddites, didn't take it lying down. What they did was to take their wooden shoes called sabots and jam them into the gears of the machine and destroy the machines. I would suggest that our task is to take the machinery of death and put our souls in that machinery and grind it down so that it stops. Nothing else works. There's never enough of us doing this. So, we have to see what we're doing essentially as homeopathic activism, because courage is contagious. Winning the War With civil disobedience you sometimes lose the battle, but you win the war. Recently, we fought like hell to save the old growth forest of Rocky Brook from being cut in the Pacific northwest, and we lost. They cut it. But there were 280 other sites that were going to be cut and we pitched such a fit on Rocky Brook that they made whatever deal they had to and all the others were saved. Because we let them know that it wasn't going to happen. We need to say to ourselves: I won't go home with this; I won't give my tacit approval, I will put myself in the way, however that works. About 23 years ago I lived with a medicine man named Rolling Thunder learning traditional Native religion and herbal medicine. To him it was as important how you gather a plant and the reverence and connection to the earth as the actual plant and the prescription for disease. I was taught that to gather the plant was to go up to it, make an offering, ask permission of the plant to gather it, and feel what the answer was. If the answer was yes I'd gather it, and if the answer was no I wouldn't. But I always felt a little fraudulent because I thought, "What can I take out of my pocket that hasn't been given to me?" Everything is given to us. We live in such a land of plenty, and all of it given to us. An Offering Now I ask what we can give as an offering in thanksgiving for this magical place in which we live. I would say that all we have to offer is a little discomfort; to inconvenience ourselves for a few hours or a few days to go to jail, or be locked up, or get abuse. What else do we give up, except not to be home with our feet up in front of the TV for one evening? Some people feel -- and I'm of that frame of my mind -- that it is better, when you can (and some people can't and there's no judgment either way) not to plea out or pay the fine. It's better to go ahead and push them to take responsibility for the cruelty of these laws. If we don't put our souls in the cogs of the machine, it keeps on grinding. I really believe that the reason we cut down old growth forests and capture dolphins, the reason that we slaughter millions of animals, is because we allow it. We allow it. All of us. When we decide that we will no longer allow it, it's going to be over. Ben White formerly worked
for Friends of Animals in the Pacific Northwest. He is now Director
of the Church of the Earth.
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