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1 1 Crime and Dissent We feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless and protest the war. Sometimes we get arrested for it. That in a nutshell describes what we do. —Jeff Dietrich, Los Angeles Catholic Worker This book is about political dissent that tiptoes gingerly over the demarcation between legality and criminality. It tells the story of the homeless who staged a sit-in at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and converted the headquarters into their home until they were carried away in handcuffs by police. It highlights the war tax resister who has withheld some seventy thousand dollars in federal taxes in opposition to the military budget. Although this man has never been arrested on charges of tax evasion, he has been arrested for advocating tax resistance in the lobby of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). And this book introduces the reader to the Raging Grannies, an organization of women who ironically maintain that if people must die in a war, then it may as well be the elderly. Thus, they routinely visit military recruitment centers across the country and demand that they be allowed to enlist. Not willing to accept no for an answer, they refuse to budge and are arrested for their act of patriotism. Each day independent media are filled with headlines detailing the stories of political actors who engage in open and direct challenges to the dominant political climate as a means of communicating dissent. Sometimes these challenges are playful, such as when a group of activists concerned about corporate takeover of public space hold a sit-in at a downtown Disney Store and chant, “It’s my right not to live in a shopping mall!” or when activists working to protect a community garden dress up as tomatoes and stand in front of the demolition bulldozer to ensure the 2 Crime and Dissent spectacle on the evening news of local police arresting vegetables. Other times, the challenges are somber or even harshly confrontational, such as when a woman pours her own blood on the walls of the Pentagon in protest of war or when activists block access to a medical clinic where abortions are performed or when animal-rights activists chain themselves to the entrance of a national department store that trades in fur, while carrying a blood-red banner that reads “Fur Is Murder,” or when a man places his body on railroad tracks to prevent the delivery of weapons to a military base. Call these actions by their traditional nomenclature of civil disobedience , nonviolent resistance, and direct action, or refer to them as those who actually perform these actions do by using such labels as publicspace activism, creative action, carnival, divine obedience, street theater, and even taking theology to the streets. In truth there are as many names for these acts of dissent as there are strategies, and there are as many strategies as there are actors. And although each strategy differs in its level of confrontation, risk, and playfulness, they all share one unifying component : each requires a modicum of criminality in its staging and execution, rendering these protest strategies what I refer to collectively as crimes of dissent. When confronted with a policy or practice that is found to be morally objectionable, many individuals feel that they have little choice but to choose a path of resistance over the politically accepted (and expected) course of unwavering obedience to established law or social practice. For choosing this path, dissenters run the risk of being branded dangerous , irrational, destructive, subversive, and, of course, criminal. Yet these crimes are not behaviors common to hardened criminals. Instead, they are protests staged by conscientious individuals committed to a given ideology or to a particular way of life.1 Whether these individuals are antiwar or environmental activists, whether advocates for AIDS research dollars or pro-life “rescuers,” or whether they are religiously inspired or firmly rooted in secular politics, all have chosen to place themselves in direct conflict with the very laws—not to mention with the very law enforcers— that maintain the prevailing social structure, triggering what is sometimes a rather sizeable response from the criminal justice system. But why do activists need to break the law? When confronted with an offending law or practice, why not simply use the democratic structures and procedures already in place to address these grievances? What motivates an individual openly and deliberately to disobey a law as an act of [3.138.200...

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