By David Glenn Cox
I want to tell you a true story about civil disobedience and the limitations of government power. Or better still, the illusion of government power. It was back during the first modern Republican economic disaster called Hooverism.
It was in Brooklyn, New York. Tenants in an apartment building were holding a rent strike. Popular at the time with slogans like “When Times Were Good – We Paid!” But now, times ain’t so good. So, the landlord called his friends down at the police station house. They decided that eviction was the proper course of action. We’ll just load up a few police cars and maybe a police officer or twelve and put pikers’ furniture out on the street.
They had badges and snappy blue uniforms. And just to look at them, you’d think it was impossible to overcome such a shiny badge or such a blue uniform. Hanging around and looking tough. So, the police set their plan in motion to show up and start putting people out into the street. But as the police arrived and started to remove the furniture. A crowd formed that soon outnumbered the police. So much so, that when the cops would bring out a piece of furniture the mob would put it back in through a window.
So, the cops did what cops always do, they called for backup. But the mob was still growing. By the time the backup got there, they needed backup. The situation was tense and turned into a standoff. The mob was in between the cops and the apartment building. Around the three o’clock, the police chief called the landlord and said, “You’re on your own.” We can’t do this; we can’t have the entire Brooklyn police department working an eviction.
Because if we do it for you today, then we’ll have to do it for someone else tomorrow. It was a fiscal impossibility; they didn’t have the manpower. They couldn’t expend the manpower like that over a non-violent crime. The police couldn’t enforce a law in the face of the people’s popular resistance. It’s only the illusion of government control. The illusion of a mouse walking in front of a candle and throwing a shadow ten feet tall. When, it’s only Barney Fife checking the doors downtown.
“The first thing is to raise hell,” says I. “That’s always the first thing to do when you’re faced with an injustice, and you feel powerless. That’s what I do in my fight for the working class.”
― Mother Jones
The bombs have dropped and this no less than Pearl Harbor. This is the moral struggle that goes and on and is a part of being an American. Reinventing ourselves every decade or so, without learning much from the experience. Don’t think for a second that the police are toothless, when they are ruthless. People are going to die in this struggle, just like they died to win the right to vote. Or to live wherever they want or love whomever they want. There is no honorable retreat, the gauntlet has been cast down and a contest of strength demanded.
Gandhi defeated the British and Dr. King filled the jails. Henry David Thoreau was a pacifist who was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the Civil War. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to check on him and asked, “What on earth are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “What on earth are you doing out there?”
My grandfather was a union organizer for the iron worker’s union in the 30s. He paid many prices for his occupation. He was arrested many times and once, twice in a single day. He had his head busted open by a policeman’s night stick that left a dandy scar. But the highest price he paid was at home. He couldn’t be at the union hall and home at night too. His children resented him as a stranger who visited sometimes. My father passed down to me what my grandfather always said, “If you aren’t willing to fight for it, then maybe you don’t deserve it after all.”
“You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
― Vaclav Havel
Be of good cheer, to few are granted the opportunity to change the world. To change this country to make it live out its promises. It’s all just one big thing you know. It isn’t just about reproductive rights. This is about everyone’s rights. The Republican Fascists have already signaled their intention to continue down this course of dismantling America.
The same people attempting to take away reproductive rights are the same people making millions of Americans homeless. The same people who make Americans work jobs for slave pay. The same people who want to tell you how you should live.
You should live as a peasant, thankful for the crumbs the master sweeps from his table. You should live under threat of gun violence and without healthcare too. No one, no one, should have their own space program. That’s nature’s way of saying that you’re taxes are way too low. All of this garbage comes for the same place. Signs on bathroom doors, Faux News, pizza parlor conspiracies. The propaganda and mental training have left their followers unable to determine fantasy from reality. January 6th proves that fact.
Millions of droids following the pied piper. But the pied piper is fading, and the followers have nowhere left to go. The piper has over stimulated them, until everyone else seems dull. The only logical answer is to get more extreme. The death penalty for parking tickets maybe or house to house searches for sex toys. The sky is the limit.
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. – Winston Churchill
By gutting Roe, they intend to roll back the clock on rights in general. By gutting Roe, they prepare the audience to lose other rights as well. Until it becomes normal to lose rights. To build their utopia of fabulous wealth for the few and miserable grinding poverty for the rest. It’s our world you know, it’s our country. I wouldn’t let them get away with that, if I were you.
Be the person your grandchildren will brag about someday. Be the one who stood up and fought back against repression, who was scarred and arrested many times. Be the one who changed the world and turned back the tide of corporate feudalism and helped to save America.
A better world is possible, we just have to build it. And it’s going to take a lot of us.
***
“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
This Carbon Based Life 
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