Open Letter to (Seattle) Mayor Mike McGinn

[Matariki]

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/10/05/an-open-letter-to-mayor-mike-mcginn

Don't do it. Whatever you do, don't authorize the police to sweep the Occupy Seattle protesters out of Westlake Park. Mass arrests... macings... potentially violent confrontations... nothing good can come from it.

I know, I know, the protesters are violating the law—laws you've sworn to uphold. And yeah, they're disrupting commerce and generally making a nuisance of themselves. But that's the whole point of civil disobedience, isn't it? And at your core, you know that the protesters are right, that their cause is just, and that the best thing for America right now would be for this movement to grow.

So rather than looking at this as a no-win situation that forces you to choose between doing your job and being true to your values, I urge you to use this as an opportunity to fulfill the potential many supporters saw in you during your campaign, by becoming the first big-city mayor in the nation to stand firmly with the Occupy movement, and not against. Call off the police. Go to Westlake Park and promise them your protection. Hell, set up your own tent and spend the night. Now that would catapult you into the national spotlight.

...

But stand with the Occupy movement, and you could become a local folk hero, generating the kind of genuine grassroots support no amount of political money can overcome. A risky gambit, you betcha. But since when have you backed away from risk? And besides, you know it's the right thing to do.

[frazzled]

1. Civil disobedience ...

is generally defined as a refusal to obey particular laws, on moral or political grounds. It is the laws themselves that are being protested. Thus, for example, civil rights protesters used civil disobedience to protest segregation laws--by sitting at lunch counters or train station waiting rooms that were for "whites only." A part of the deal was that they would be arrested for breaking these local "laws," thus bringing attention to their unconstitutionality.

The protesters here, I presume, are not protesting the specific laws that the mayor is using to justify their removal or arrest (e.g., no more than a certain number of people congregating without a permit, blocking a city street, etc.). They are protesting something much wider and more nebulous: corporate power. So it's not strictly civil disobedience in the classical sense. But even if it were, with civil disobedience comes the obligation to accept the consequences of breaking the law. Most protests involving civil disobdience are in fact conceived with the objective of getting arrested. For this is what brings attention to the unjust law in question. Nobody would pay any attention (unless you are Fox-News-sponsored Tea Partiers, which is a fake, not a grass-roots movement) if everybody let you just protest undeterred. Examples: the Iraq War protests, much larger than these, in 2003; also: there have been picketers in front of the Congress Hotel every day since I moved to Chicago in 2004. Since they are permitted, nobody seems to care about them.

[Luminous Animal]

2. Arrests are happening now.