Remind Me Again; What Am I in Jail For?

So if it is time to go to the streets, what for and why and how?  I got an email the other day from seminary classmate Tim Simpson, of the Christian Alliance for Progress.  He urged readers to save the date of March 16 for a trip to Washington to rendezvous with other Christians for "for a worship service, a march to the White House and actions of civil disobedience." 

It's the usual, credible suspects:  Pax Christi, American Friends Service Committee, etc.

I wonder about the role of civil disobedience.  As it was practiced by the Civil Rights Movement, you purposely broke an unjust law, cheerfully accepted the penalty, and broke it with enough of your co-religionists to put a strain the criminal justice system.  Either they'd have to stop enforcing the law because the jails were full, or they'd be too punitive in enforcing the law, thus generating a backlash.

So what unjust laws need to be broken in the case of the war? 

The point, and correct me if I'm wrong, is not to get arrested for the sake of getting arrested. 

This is why I look on all the religious left's work at the School of the Americas with some degree of skepticism.  I'm fully prepared to believe that we have trained some very bad men down there at Fort Benning to do some very bad things back home in Central America, but why respond to that by trespassing on Fort Benning's property?  I'm not prepared to question the legitimacy of trespassing laws. 

It seems like we need some more creative thought in bringing non-violent resistance to bear in the contemporary crisis.  The goal here is not to repeal a law or laws that are unconstitutional and inhumane.  Shoot, they don't even need laws to do that.  With their signing statements and supine courts, they do what they want to do.  The goal is to end an unjust and disastrous war.

I still think that there are political options.  Not impeachment, but sitting down and having a heart-to-heart with every Republican who's up for re-election next year.  If they have to run again with high numbers of troops fighting and dying in Iraq with no end in sight, it will kill the Republican Party for a generation.  Vietnam killed the dovish left for a generation.  Iraq could do the same thing to the hawkish right. 

Not that I'm in favor of the continued viability of "shoot first and ask questions later" foreign policy, but I don't want GOP losses at the price of more American blood.

Demonstrations and getting arrested brought down the Jim Crow regime in the South, but it didn't end the Vietnam War.  It made principled opposition to our involvement in Southeast Asia look silly, reckless and anti-American. 

On the other hand, the contemporary antiwar movement's preference for blogging to marching hasn't ended the current war.  It did result in a near-miss for the President in 2004, and a "thumpin'" in Congress last year, but the war goes on.

So I'm flummoxed.  What next?

Comments

[Public Theologian]

Hi Marvin. I responded to your post over here

http://blog01.kintera.com/christianalliance/

Peace