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- minutes to clear the area" and then herd you up thirty seconds later.) In
general, there is no need for any unplanned, arrests. Civil Disobedience, even
when decided on spontaneously, is a deliberate, thought-out act of conscience.
DEMOS Include marches (street dances!), costumes, topical skits ("loggers"
pursuing "trees" or "all-species court" convened to try "corporate plaintiffs"),
presenting our position to reporters, making demands of corporados and
government lackeys, appearing as "endangered species" at public hearings,
making a show to timber sales/dam building/condo construction sites... I
have fond memories of two-hundred pound stumps deposited on ranger's
desks, manure from public lands grazing cattle stacked against air-conditioner
vents, helium balloons with the appropriate message released inside
convention centers, hundred-foot banners strung across rivers, down
smokestacks, across the face of buildings. I remember women and men of all
ages finally and emphatically saying "no!". Not one more tree. Not one
more road built. Not one more species banished into extinction.
To be most effective, a demo should be:
-DYNAMIC & UNCOMPROMISED, with clear intent, clear
tactics.(identify the perpetrators and target them, not the "system"
in general)
-COLORFUL & CREATIVE, unique, surprising the destroyers while you
amuse and challenge yourselves.
-INFORMATIVE, getting out the simple message of your campaign
with handouts, skits, songs and chants.~.
-FLEXIBLE, ready on a moment's notice to change plans as the
situation changes (taking advantage of the sudden appearance of an
offending executive, or an unwatched piece of equipmentjust
waiting for someone to lock their neck to it with a Kryptonite
bike-lock; and coming up with alternatives when the governors no
in, the building sealed-off, the cops in a bad mood, the meeting
moved to some other location...)
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE can be the most effective actions of all, involving
situations where arrest is anticipated and possibly desired. These include, but
certainly aren't limited to:
-Office Occupations (Make yourself comfortable. Marcy once put up a
dome tent in a Senator's office)
-Blockades of logging roads, dam sites, uranium mines polluting the
Grand Canyon, radioactive waste being transported through your
town...(Methods have included locking down to gates, cementing feet
directly into a channel dug in the road, and being buried up to the
neck.)
-Tree-Sits on platforms fifty to ninety feet above the ground in
ancient trees marked to be cut. (To make the removal of the
activists more difficult, cables have been attached from their necks
to surrounding trees, or the platform set up to fall away and the
activist slides across a transverse cable to another...)
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