This thing is not going away … First, take note of Karenna Gore’s op-Ed today on the Globe. She was arrested a couple of weeks ago protesting the West Roxbury Lateral pipeline, and gives a very nifty précis of the community, regulatory, and climate issues involved. She references Thoreau. The question is not what she’s doing getting arrested in a pipeline ditch; it’s what we’re doing *not* being in a ditch ourselves.
The Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, born and raised in Boston, invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as she eulogized the people dying from the effects of climate change in cultures that consume far less than ours. King was famously jailed for resisting a government that was actively infringing on human rights, and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is now recognized as one of the greatest arguments ever written about civic responsibility and the “inescapable network of mutuality” that binds us together.
In Massachusetts, there is also a strong tradition of resistance. In his essay on civil disobedience, written after a night in jail on July 23, 1846, Henry David Thoreau put forth the notion that when the law itself requires us to be agents of injustice, it is right to peacefully disobey. “We should be men first, and subjects afterward,” he wrote. Surely this is all the more true when the law requiring us to abet injustice is written behind closed doors under the powerful, hidden influence of a corporation pursuing profit at the expense of the future of humankind.
Furthermore, six more courageous souls chained themselves to the pipeline today, and were arrested.
These are our friends, who refuse to take part in our collective suicide-by-fossil-fuel. We owe them and Ms Gore our thanks.