The Keystone pipeline protests reveal the shifting fault lines and changing culture of protest movements.
The Keystone XL pipeline protests in Washington, which concluded on Sept. 3, were about more than the fight over the tar sands – they were, in fact, proxy arguments for many things. For climate-change activists, preventing the pipeline is a method of holding U.S. President Barack Obama accountable to his pledges. For others, it is a symbolic struggle against oligarchy. Still others view it as a spiritual movement to fix humanity's extractive relationship with the Earth.
Yet, more than any particular aspiration, the two-week exercise in civil disobedience that led to 1,200 peaceful arrests was a referendum on the capacity to build, and sustain, a political movement.
Movements are defined, and remembered, as much by their conflicts as by their conquests. These conflicts are fodder for political writers, whose editors feed on antagonism.
Every evening between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., those who planned to be arrested the following day met for a working dinner and training. During the first night's training at Saint Stephen Episcopal Church – after the opening talk by prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben, but before the rice and beans – there emerged a recognizable, if subtle and brief, dispute over the following question: Should we sing while being arrested?
In a defiant act of civil disobedience, protestors stage a sit-in at the White House to implore Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Read more on the efforts here.
The question posed, an advocate of song initiated a round of “America the Beautiful.” The response was inspirited, the singing dull. Directly, there were objections from two groups: Canadians (why sing “America the Beautiful”?), and others whose reasons went unstated. A vote was quickly taken, and the results tallied: There would be no singing.
Non-violent civil disobedience in front of the White House is a methodical piece of performance art. So long as nobody taunts the Park Police, the routine is the same day after day after day. Protesters march across Pennsylvania Avenue, turn their backs to the president's office, and wait. Police clear and cordon off the area, give three warnings, and then start escorting people into vans.
For observers milling about Lafayette Park, there is not much to do. A bit of buzz about the media (which reporters are here today?), questions about the count (how many people have been arrested today compared to yesterday?), some tweeting, chatting, and smoking.
For or against it, singing is inevitable.
Only a few minutes passed on the first day before voices were raised, issuing the kind of call-and-response chants that dominate colour wars at summer camp. "I say, 'Tar sands,' you say 'No.' Tar sands … No! Tar sands … No!"
In the weeks leading up to the protests, McKibben stressed the virtue of solemnity, encouraging people to dress like adult taxpayers, and to showcase dignity and seriousness rather than rage against the man and his machines. The effect of the chants, however, was jarring, atonal, and strangely out of rhythm with the mood. Even the police volunteered opinions. One officer told an organizer: "It sounds like people are shouting Tarzan."
Do Canada's new oil sands regulations go far enough? The Pembina Institute weighs in here.
It is said, perhaps apocryphally, that when the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, he always hummed Hasidic spirituals. Heschel was heir to one of the great Eastern European Hasidic families. These dynasties produced good theology and mysticism, but, above all, were prodigious makers of music. The civil rights movement, with its influence from enthusiastic liturgical traditions of southern black churches, was an oddly natural fit for someone like Heschel.
But this practice of integrating political rallies, marches, and singing – spiritual or otherwise – vanished after 1968, when more violent means of expressing outrage led to the Weatherman's "Days of Rage" in 1969. Try to name a popular protest song written after 1971. There’s a very good chance that you cannot. (It's not as if people today go around singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” while protesting.)
"A good book," he said.
"I was looking for a historical analogy," I said. "But it's the wrong one."
He agreed, adding, "The model for this is more the protests outside the South African embassy in the 1980s."
Routinizing peaceful protest is no easy assignment: Once a person joins a sit-in, who is to say what he or she will do? Consequently, the tar sands action can legitimately call itself the biggest grassroots movement Obama has seen, and the environmental movement's first popular groundswell in a generation. Meanwhile, nobody can claim it is merely a gang of bored kids.
Still, the absence of song points to a larger deficit. The environmental, and, I suspect, other modern movements, suffer from a culture gap. The tar sands action proved that people want to gather in the name of good politics. This much was plain from the thousands of participants, as well as the financial support, quality organization, and feelings of friendship that permeated the two-week event. The gap, however, lies in the fact that, after getting arrested, people don't quite know what to do. The next step remains unclear.
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For a modern environmentalist, the culture gap is a dilemma. These are not your father's environmentalists. There are vegans among them, but they are vegans with iPhones. They are app-savvy individuals who understand media relations and know that a choice between appearing disheveled and being taken seriously is not a choice at all. The dilemma is that the cultural options are either the “We shall overcome” mentality that existed circa 1965, or the petty anarchism that burned out the anti-globalization movement. Neither image serves the movement's high-minded philosophy, nor brings the spirit of newness that attracts more people.
Even without a common culture (beyond cause and politics) to bind people, the tar sands action made its voice heard in a period of tremendous global noise. There were 1,200 people arrested, and thousands more who came out in solidarity. The media paid attention to more than just celebrity arrests. Governors of two states, Nebraska and Vermont, declared their opposition to the pipeline. Al Gore called out Barack Obama. Washington's centrist environmental groups moved to the left. There was even one day when the faces of White House staffers appeared beneath the columns of the north portico, peering over the shrubs at the backs of the protestors. Obama surely knows a movement is forming. What he needs now is to hear its song.
Origin
Source: the Mark
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