Civil Disobedience: I feel as though its time.
Mass Civil Disobedience Ain't Masturbation!
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
19 December 13
In response to my last column on the call to direct action by Daniel Ellsberg and others, one commentator - # Shorey13 - suggested that without changing the system, "our protests are just a form of political masturbation." It's an old canard and could easily be taken as an excuse to stand on the sidelines, though I do not think Shorey intended that. In practice, the argument will fade away if enough of us learn how to use mass civil disobedience to change the system - and the political culture - as we go along.
This was the pragmatic, non-ideological, post-Gandhian approach many of us took against segregation, the suppression of free speech, and the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s. We called it tactical non-violence - I even taught it in a free university course at Stanford - and it worked to bring political change in the real world.
Though we did not know it at the time, the underlying idea goes back to an aristocratic 16th century French judge, philosopher, poet, and humanist named Étienne de La Boétie. He was, as it happens, born in the medieval village of Sarlat, not far from where my wife Anna and I are now growing old in the Dordogne. Local linguistic purists pronounce his name as he probably did, [bwa'ti], while a plaque on his higgledy piggledy old house commemorates his life. But few here or anywhere else know of the political time bomb he left behind with his short, brilliantly reasoned "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude."
Writing his tract while still a law student, La Boétie raised questions that almost no one had ever bothered to think about. Why, he asked, do ordinary people obey their rulers? Why does the vast majority consent to their enslavement by a small minority? And to borrow an exquisite phrase from the right-wing American anarchist Murray Rothbard, why does the majority give the tyrant its civil obedience?
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/21044-focus-mass-civil-disobedience-aint-masturbation
= new reply since forum marked as read
We're never getting control of the political system back from the plutocrats from within that system. It's all gone too far. I despise having to say that...but I think it's true.
And I need to stop right here...as most of my views on this are not allowed on DU. 
And juries aren't likely to.
I haven't seen it tested yet on DU3, but I'll bet discussing revolution would stand, provided it didn't become too explicit or violent.
When the time has come, whomever does "it", and I'll probably be gone, I hope they have a second amendment.
I really do feel that way, we're so powerless already.
