Righteous Protest
“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The United States Constitution’s First Amendment grants several specific rights:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
As an undergraduate student, I attended San José State University from 1966-1969, and 1970 as a graduate student. San José State at that time had a relatively progressive administration. We had freedom of political speech, we organized and staffed informational tables throughout the campus, we had access to university facilities to hold our meetings and rallies.
In fact, I was a chief organizer of a rally in support of our university president against criticism coming from some of the more conservative members of the state university board who considered our president too “tolerant” of campus anti-war and anti-racism protests and protesters.
Nonetheless, during the fall of 1967 and then again in 1968, we called for a student strike of classes. The purpose of the boycott was not to demonstrate against or criticize our professors, or even our university. It was, rather, to send a message to our leaders in government — state and national — that the war we were waging in Vietnam was wrong, that it was misguided, that it was illegal according to international law.
I will never forget sitting in Botany class the week prior to the planned strike, when Professor Thaw forthrightly threatened to give an in-class quiz on the day of the strike, and anyone absent that day would receive an automatic “F” on the quiz with no possibility of a make-up.
To this day, I do not know where my courage came from as I raised my hand and stated that “This is one ‘F’ I would be proud to ‘earn’.” To my utter amazement, other students cheered, and eventually Professor Thaw rescinded his threat.
By boycotting classes, students take a risk — however small at the time — but a risk nonetheless.
When legislators take a risk by disrupting “decorum,” they take a risk of possibly losing their positions as legislators.
And this is one of the, if not the, major points in the philosophy of civil disobedience. For it to be truly meaningful, for it to be a truly beneficial and life changing experience for the individual, there must be some aspect of risk and sacrifice; one must give something, pay something, in order to keep and to strengthen one’s principles and one’s sense of personal integrity.
My questions are thus: Will a person gain more, learn more, commit more to an idea or a cause if it is given to them for the mere asking or, rather, if they must risk something for it?
Will the experience be more meaningful if one attends a rally between classes or if one puts one’s principles on the line — and be willing to accept the consequences — to walk out or strike classes?
Schools are microcosms of the larger society. By students saying that “we will collectively take a stand,” they are, at least symbolically, lodging their vote against what they believe to be an unjustifiable stand on the part of their government. They are declaring their opposition to politics as usual.
Let us remember that three young people helped to set the stage for the relative political freedoms youth enjoy today.
The Supreme Court of the United States handed down a landmark freedom of speech case for students on February 24, 1969. It involved two Des Moines, Iowa high school students, John Tinker, 15, and Christopher Eckhardt, 16, and John’s 13-year-old sister, Mary Beth Tinker, a Des Moines junior high school student.
In December 1965, John, Christopher, and Mary Beth attended a meeting with a group of adults and other students in Des Moines at the Eckhardt’s home. The purpose of the meeting was to come up with strategies whereby they could publicize their objections to the U.S. invasion in Vietnam. They came up with an idea to express their support for a truce between the warring parties by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year’s Eve.
Meeting participants had previously engaged in non-violent activities to work toward ending the war, and they decided to join the program. When Des Moines school district officials learned of the proposed activity, on December 14 they adopted and distributed a policy stating that any student found wearing a black armband, and failing to remove it on request, would be suspended from school and allowed to return only without the armband.
John, Christopher, and Mary Beth wore black armbands to school in violation of the stated policy, and school officials sent them home. Parents of the students petitioned the United States District Court to issue an injunction to school officials from disciplining the students, though the court dismissed the complaint on grounds that the school district had the right to take its actions to prevent breaches of school discipline (a.k.a., “decorum”).
On appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the justices ruled in favor of the students and against the school district by stating that the wearing of armbands for the purpose of expressing views is considered as a symbolic action, according to the court, “closely akin to ‘pure speech’,” and well within the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. In addition, the Court found school officials failed to prove that the wearing of the armbands would substantially disrupt school discipline.
Speaking for the 7 to 2 majority in the case, Justice Abe Fortas wrote:
“. . . In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.”
This case would have implications for numerous cases that followed.
Our society is constructed in such a way as to deny voice to young people in the decision-making process in the affairs of state. Young people do not hold powerful positions in the executive suites in business and industry, in the media outlets, in the halls of Congress. Their strength, however, exists when they take collective action. Government leaders then begin to listen.
In their collective strength, they can and have changed the world for the betterment of all.
Terrorism
There is a virtually endless list of ways to engage in humane and civil forms of civil disobedience to call attention to one’s plight, to attract allies, to end the oppression, and to establish true justice and equity.
We witnessed the outpouring of protest from hundreds of thousands of residents, Jewish and Arab, over the last few months every Saturday against the proposed judicial takeover of Israel’s far right government.
People have conducted perennial protests over the years of what they see as the establishment of illegal so-called “settlements” on the territories, especially on the West Bank of the Jordan River and parts of East Jerusalem, that Israel took following the 1967 “Six Day War” against neighboring armies.
Raping, torturing, maiming, killing, and kidnapping are not in any realm of “protest”! And by engaging in these forms of terror, one loses any moral ground one may have had. One must be held accountable for these vile actions.
Terrorism has been described generally as the use of violence, or the threat of violence, to accomplish a political, religious, or ideological purpose.
The United Nations General Assembly denounced terrorist acts using the following political description of terrorism in 1994:
“Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.”
The World Health Organization defines violence rather broadly as:
“…the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.”
“Power” in this sense can situate itself on physical power, but it can also include the power of dominant authority figures and social institutions to impose physical as well as emotional and even coercive power onto individuals and groups of lower social rank – the “psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.”
I direct this to the Hamas terrorists whose goal is not to protect the interests of the Palestinian people residing on the Gaza Strip and elsewhere. In fact, these terrorists place the people of Gaza in harm’s way to be used as human shields against Israeli retaliation as Hamas inflicts terror. Hamas’ goal, quite simply, is to kill as many Jews as possible, and to kill any chances for peace between Israel and Palestine in the creation of a two-state solution.
Worldwide Jewry, regardless of individual Jews’ position on the state of Israel, is the eventual target of these terrorists’ attacks. Remember, the Nazis sent secular Jews and Jews who had converted to Christian denominations along with religious Jews to the pits and gas chambers.
The term “pogrom” refers “to the deliberate persecution of an ethnic or religious group either approved or condoned by the local authorities.” It has traditionally applied to the government supported or sponsored violence against Jews under the Russian Empire in the late 19th– through early 20th-centuries C.E. that spread throughout the Russian “Pale of Settlement,” which included the area of governmental confinement of Jews in Eastern Europe.
Pogroms can include blatant and sustained acts of violence, for example, like that depicted at Tzeitel and Perchik’s wedding reception in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, and murders and sacking of Jewish stores and homes during the infamous Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) between 9–10 November 1938 in Germany.
Everyone, whether actively perpetrating the terror, actively working against the terror and promoting peace, and all the points between these positions, is involved in some form, even unconsciously, especially those who have taken no positive action in the past.
For in the timeless and poignant words of Edmund Burke:
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is when good men do nothing.”
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