On Civil Disobedience
Brick, Allan R.
INCREASED agitation this year by those devoted to pacifism or to racial equality often resulted in civil disturbance. Planned demonstrations sometimes were, and frequently bordered upon,...
...Ideally, they had predicted all the ramifications for inner morality and outer effectiveness...
...Such coercion should play no part in enabling a worker to reflect freely upon the horror he is helping to erect...
...Was sensational publicity his only desire...
...At their best, the agitators had foreseen what sort of no-man's land they would enter, and charted the conse quences of possible friction with group standards...
...but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law...
...Certainly, counter friction was never more literally applied than by Calkins...
...In any case of symbolic action "how it looks" (i.e., to the public) comes very close to being how it ultimately is...
...Such a one is Ken Calkins, who took action in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to oppose construction of the first ICBM launching base in America...
...Following the most extreme methods of Gandhi and what they believe to be the ideas set forth by Thoreau in "On Civil Disobedience," they practice and advise non-registration for the draft and nonpayment of taxes to the war-making state...
...Theoretically speaking, a pilot or naval gunman might have been ordered to blow the "Golden Rule" out of the water...
...After trying by conversation and Ieafiets to persuade workers to leave their jobs, Calkins and a few companions sat down in a roadway to block construction equipment being moved to the site...
...actually, it was foreseeable that the Coast Guard would keep herding the ship into Honolulu and its "middleaged" (N.Y...
...But the chief brilliance of Albert Bigelow's feat lay in his actually being within legal rights and thereby forcing the Government to create a post facto law (of doubtful legality) after embarcation...
...Unfortunately, this action doesn't "look" good enough...
...Calkins' action is more comparable to Gandhi's satyagraha demonstrations, in which scores of nonviolently disobedient Hindus—many of them beaten and shot to death by more or less weakening soldiers— practiced essentially unpacifist moral coercion with miraculous practical results...
...Not so in the case of Calkins...
...It was specific warfare fought to release the Indian people from intolerable enslavement, freedom its foreseeable goal...
...Times) sailors into jail...
...Certainly there was no chance of the men stopping work, of this or any other projected missile base not being built...
...Perhaps moral violence is necessary to break through I00...
...Planned demonstrations sometimes were, and frequently bordered upon, vioIations of local or federal laws...
...More common still was the jarring of mass proprieties...
...HIS ACCOMPLISHMENT deserves to be compared with the voyage which the United States Government forbade the ketch "Golden Rule" to make into the Pacific nuclear-test area...
...In Gandhi s case as in Bigelow's the purpose—indeed the necessity—of the action is clear...
...Those who went on peace walks, those who joined groups of Negroes to sit in Southern restaurants committed the minimum affronts...
...If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil...
...But though comparable in method Calkins' deed was chiefly poetic and its results metaphysical...
...What is salient here is Calkins' imposition of moral violence upon the construction workers—his attempt to force them into agreement by means of their fear of running him over and then by means of their guilt because one of them had intentionally done so...
...The maximum violations were achieved by those who had purposefully set out to break ordinances which they thought involved, or implemented, injustice...
...Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine...
...Calkins acted as a member of the Peacemakers, a small band who struggle against their country's military establishments...
...INCREASED agitation this year by those devoted to pacifism or to racial equality often resulted in civil disturbance...
...And yet how free is a mind conditioned by that American education which C. Wright Mills calls "a routine training in nationalist loyalties," and then by the years of miliatry service...
...Although within their rights as citizens, they still faced community displeasure and sometimes arrest under local interpretations of the law...
...Their obstruction ended abruptly with arrest for all and hospitalization for Calkins, who was run over by a truck which a foreman had ordered to keep moving...
...it is no proper component of the issues which Peacemakers should lay before his mind...
...In contrast, Gandhi's campaign was profoundly hard-headed...
...Time after time the resisters were carried or dragged from the road by the truck drivers—sometimes considerately and sometimes with kicks...
...Probably they would recognize their most vital text for civil disobedience in Thoreau's solution for unjust laws: "If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go...
...What did he want or expect...
Vol. 6 • January 1959 • No. 1
