About civil disobedience.

• Author: Berry, Wendell

MATT ROTHSCHILD HAS asked me to write a short piece about civil disobedience. This is a request I would ignore, if I had my druthers. But Matt was representing Duty, perhaps, and several hours of hard thought have not afforded me an adequate excuse.

The reason for civil disobedience, as I understand it, is simple necessity. If you belong to a political side with a significant grievance, and if your side is not represented--is, in effect, not heard--in the halls of your nominally representative government, then you have two choices: You can passively submit, accepting your grievance as irremediable, or you can, perhaps uselessly, insist by some act of civil disobedience upon your right to have your grievance redressed by your government. I am speaking here of nonviolent civil disobedience, of course. I subscribe to the commandment to love our neighbors, even if they are our enemies. But I am also in favor of making sense. Answering violence with violence is understandable, but it is also nonsense.

Matt asked me to write this piece because he knows that last February, in protest against coal mining by "mountaintop removal," I committed myself to an act of civil disobedience in the office of Kentucky's governor. In fact, I have made that commitment three times. The first was on June 3, 1979, in opposition to a nuclear power plant then being built at Marble Hill on the Ohio River near Madison, Indiana. The second was in Washington, D. C., on March 2, 2009, in protest, with a host of others, generally against mountaintop removal and air pollution by the burning of fossil fuels, and immediately against the burning of coal by a power plant within a few blocks of the national capitol. The third was on the eleventh of last February: the aforementioned attempt to discover conscience in official Frankfort.

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Only one of these adventures resulted in actual civil disobedience and arrest.

After we crossed the fence at Marble Hill, we were arrested and booked and turned loose.

In Washington, the number of us offering to get arrested--two or three thousand, maybe--overwhelmed the police, who, thinking perhaps of the hours it would take to write down our names and addresses, declined the opportunity to know us better. Or so we thought. We then had to choose between climbing the fence, potentially a felony, or, after far too many speeches, dispersing. We dispersed.

In Frankfort, the governor, somewhat delightfully, outsmarted us. Instead...