Method 11: Records, Radio, and Television

Today we’re gonna look at Nonviolent Method number 11: Records, Radio, and Television.

Gene Sharp writes “Phonograph records may convey ideas through music, speeches, or declaration.”

Well, let’s just forget about records, because who does records anymore, right?  Nobody!  I mean everything's on like audio files now, and YouTube and stuff. 

Sharp continues: “Much of the American rock music of the 1960’s conveyed the sense of dissatisfaction, as did Bob Dylan in his song “Blowin’ in the Wind”. 

Boy, could we use that, right?  A popular culture that says “Hey, enough of this!  We’ve gotta stop this!”  That’s really what we need – to create a new popular culture!

So we need climate-related protest songs, like:

How many fires can a heat wave start

Before they talk about climate change?

Yes and how many hurricanes must swallow up cities

Before…they talk about climate change?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in GODDAMN ANOTHER TORNADO, LOOK OUT!

Okay, obviously you’d have to find a songwriter other than me. 

Or you could have Rap artists doing songs about climate change:

Well my name’s Pete and I’m just not about nice

You wouldn’t be either if they melted all your ice!

I know, I’m white, but c’mon, I’m a POLAR BEAR! 

Obviously you would need people with, like, TALENT to do this.

And if you were to change the culture it would dovetail with what happened in the sixties.  

Before all the anti-war stuff started the most popular bands were, like, the Platters, or Four Guys Wearing Sweaters.  But with the changing culture new artists emerged!

So all you budding young artists out there who are passionate about doing music that matters – hang in there baby, we need to get the next David Geffen to make you guys famous.  (Or, heck, maybe the current David Geffen!)  And in the meantime, just start posting!

Another good example from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 was the amazing amount of roles that radio took on for the society.  Radio stations not only conveyed information about what was happening, but they “broadcast declarations of opposition, called for specific acts of resistance, warned against violence and urged for peaceful discipline, opposed collaboration, cautioned against rumors, and took over certain emergency administrative functions”.  (That’s all from Gene Sharp.)

Radio nowadays is so corporate that it’s not gonna do that but there is the internet, there's blogs, there are websites.  We need to use the internet and podcasts as a resource to do for this movement!  People gotta know what’s goin’ on, they gotta know how to protest, and how not to protest, and who not to protest with.  You don’t want a bunch of guys wearing ninja hoods and throwing rocks at your rally, because those are the guys that they’ll put on TV and it’ll make your whole movement look bad and scary to people, when really what you want to do is get people to join you! 

Listen, our opponents want us to wear masks and throw rocks and make bombs, but we’re smarter than that.  They’re the ones who go to health care town halls with automatic weapons on their hips.  I mean, old guys may admire Ted Nugent but everyone else think he’s a jerk!

We’re the good guys!  This is a cause that everybody in America – parents, kids, teachers, businessmen, churches – everybody should be in on this…WE’RE TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD!

And as for television – who even watches television anymore?  You got YouTube, you got Twitter, you can broadcast all the content you want for free to everybody…I mean it would be ideal if television was covering this story, but let’s not get too hung up on it.  We’ve definitely got to protest television, and protest them a lot, but until they give climate change the coverage it deserves, we do have alternative ways to get our message out. 

Anyway, that’s Method Number 11: Records, Radio, and Television.  Tomorrow, we’ll talk about Method Number 12: Skywriting and Earth writing. (Good Lord, That’s gonna be a short one!)


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Nonviolent Method # 10: NewsPapers & Journals

Today we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method number 10: Newspapers and Journals.

Now a lot of times through history, like with the Indian Independence Movement, you needed newspapers and journals to get the word out. 

Gandhi had a paper called Young India that all the people who wanted Independence read.  And it’s a good way for people to organize and keep people informed about the movement.

But now in modern America newspapers are basically dead.  They’re all corporate-owned and slashing staff and even the New York Times and Washington Post are like “Oh, let’s cut our environmental coverage!”

But we’ve got all kinds of alternative press that we can use.  We can use Blogs, Vlogs, and websites, and aim to get covered by the city sheets and campus press, and, if you can manage to get on it, even the Huffington Post.  Good luck with that, by the way! 

Otpor in Serbia relied on alternative press to get their messages out, but alternative newspapers are getting increasingly less alternative, due to new corporate ownership and their budget slashing. 

Even campus press is now corporate owned, which is bullshit!  “Oh, we’re the voice of the students and...Comcast.”

And by “city sheets”, I’m talkin’ about weekly papers like the LA Weekly, or Madison’s Isthmus, or Denver’s Westword, most cities have ‘em, but even they are now mostly corporate-owned, so they’re smaller with a lot less stories.  So maybe you couldn’t get alternative press to cover you like you used to.

But who cares!  We’ve got the internet!  We can use blogs, vlogs, and websites to promote what we’re doing. 

Now, it helps if you post every day.  I frequently go to 350.org’s page, and read the post that they put up a week ago.  People don’t keep comin’ back if it’s not every day.  If you’re gonna lead the movement that’s one of the realities of how to communicate via the internet.  I’m just startin’ to post everyday, it’s a pain in the ass, but you gotta do it.

One thing Bill McKibben did on his Do The Math tour is he got everybody’s phone number so he could just text out to ‘em when there’s something going on.  Which is smart, I wish I could do that. 

But still, the movement needs sites that post every day, because even if you’re not doing something every day there should always be something going on with the movement.  Somebody should be doing something every day.  I mean, we’re only trying to save the world, right?  Today there should be something happening in Ann Arbor and Annapolis and Albuquerque.  And tomorrow there should be something in Kalamazoo and Kansas City.  

If actions are always happening everywhere, not only is it cool for people to read about but it gives them ideas too, and hopefully inspires them.

Another funny thing would be to have fake New York Times and Washington Post websites, where they’re like “Oops, we forgot to cover the most important story in the history of humanity.  Our bad!”

Anyway, that’s Newspapers and Journals updated to the 21^st century and the internet.

You gotta realize Gene Sharp wrote this book in, like, 1972, when there was like, just one giant computer.  So it’s different now.

Tomorrow we’re gonna do Nonviolent Method number 11: Records, Radio, and Television.


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Nonviolent Method #9: Leaflets, Pamphlets, & Books

Today we’re gonna look at Method number 9: Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Books.

And I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “Oh, leaflets are so 1700’s”.

And I’ve been there, you’re walkin’ down the street and some yahoo gives you a leaflet and you’re like “Ah, dude, no thanks,” and he’s like “Oh, come on take one”, and even if you take one, you’re like “Okay, where’s the next trashcan”, right?

Leaflets are, by and large, bullshit.  You gotta have a repressive regime or something where it’s really daring to hand out leaflets, otherwise people don’t want a leaflet.

I mean, if you’re gonna do a leaflet, it better be eye-catching, it better be funny right from the get-go.

When the Nazis invaded Poland they distributed a bunch of leaflets saying “Oh, the Germans are so great, look at all we’ve achieved.”  So the Poles took that leaflet, and using the same exact design they created a biting satire.  So the Germans thought it was their leaflets people were reading!  “Oh, look, there’s our leaflet again,” but they didn’t realize that what people were reading was “Oh, Germans are dorks!”

If I was gonna use leaflets, I would hand ‘em out to people who were walkin’ into fossil fuel companies or Koch brothers think tanks or, even the network news organizations or their local affiliates – they need to know how bad climate change could really be.  All most people have heard about climate change is “Oh, in a hundred years it could be 3 degrees warmer.”  Big whoop!  Why not try “In a hundred years it could be 18 degrees warmer.  In 20 years it could be 3, 4, 5 degrees warmer!”  No one knows, this has never happened before, people don’t know how fast it’ll unfold.  Scientists are giving their cautious best guesses.  Cautious!  And more and more evidence shows scientists have been underestimating this.  Besides, what if you were 5 degrees warmer and had a temperature of 103.6 degrees and people were all “Big whoop”, and you’d be all “YEAH, big whoop, get me to the hospital, bitch!” 

So the news organizations need to report on what’s really happening because no one knows it, people are seriously uninformed!  Therefore you hand out fliers outside news organizations, you get the oil employees to understand who they’re aiding and abetting, you get the think tank secretaries to realize they’re working for a bunch of the ideologue jerks who are essentially destroying to the world for her kids…or his kids. There are plenty of rugged guys who work as secretaries.  No disrespect.

Also, you could leaflet government bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior or the State Department, people who can green light or slow down fossil fuel requests, and leaflet state government bureaucrats who approve things like fracking permits too!  Let ‘em have it with how bad climate change could be, but always be sure point out that practically all the climate scientists got your back!

Another example is about books, which are quasi worthless because a lot of people have written a lot of books about climate change, “It’s happening!”  “It’s a hoax!”  Whatever!  Books take a long time to read so you’re basically only gonna get people who agree with you to make that time commitment.

The book example I like was in the 18th Century this Russian guy N.G. Chernyshevsky wrote this book in prison called What Is To Be Done, and the censor thought it had already been approved by other censors so he just green-lit it and it got published and then became a blueprint for how to do a revolution.  Very cool, right?

Well, just so happens that I’m hoping this blog kinda helps the climate movement that way.  I mean, in my own humble polar bear way, this is why I’m doing this! 

So, there ya go, that’s method number 9, Leaflets, Pamphlets and Books.  Tomorrow we’ll do method number 10: Newspapers and Journals.

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Nonviolent Method #7: Slcgans, Caricatures, and Symbols

Today we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method number 7, Slogans, Caricatures, and Symbols.

Now, a little editor’s note here: the preceding nonviolent methods, number 1 through 6 that we’ve done, they all fall into the Formal Statements category, and now we’re moving onto a much more exciting category, which is Communications with a Wider Audience.  These are basically designed to gain converts and get sympathy from the other side, and even garner support for the nonviolent group.  Considering only at this point 16 percent of the people really understand how serious climate change is, we really need to cast a wider net, right?  So Communications with a Wider Audience is basically just what the doctor ordered. 

Alright, so Method number 7: Slogans, Caricatures, and Symbols.  This one’s pretty cool, alright?  A lot of these examples are cool.  In 1941 and ’42 in Berlin, there was this awesome group of Jewish youths called The Baum Group.  They’d go out at night and paint resistance symbols on walls and stuff, and it was really dangerous!  Even though none of them ever got arrested it was really dangerous.  But just the ability to do it was considered a test of your revolutionary ardor.  We need that.  We need revolutionary ardor for the climate movement. 

We need people with some stones!  And we also need to ignite the youth.  Young people should be the coolest people in this movement.  After all, most of their adult lives they’re gonna be completely screwed by climate change so they have the most to lose, right?  So they need to lead! If you’re a young person in some little town you need to get people on your side and start goin’ out and doin’ stuff.  Or find the people who are! 

Also in World War II there were these Polish resistance youths called the Little Wolves (I like that, the Little Wolves…  Maybe we’ll have the Little Polar Bears.  I dunno, it doesn’t sound quite as scary, even though a little polar bear could take a little wolf any day…but we’re nonviolent, so we’re not gonna talk about that.)  But the Little Wolves would go out with cans of indelible paint and write on fences, and even on German trucks, and sometimes even on the coats of the Germans themselves.  When they weren’t lookin’ they’d sneak up really quietly, and paint the stuff on their back, and then run away.  I don’t know how they did it, but they did it, right?  So every morning Warsaw would wake up to all these cool messages that this band of little wolves would paint overnight.  That’s so cool, right? 

More recently, in Serbia, this group Otpor would go out every night and just paint and paste the neighborhoods with stuff.  Now, they learned pretty quickly that, even if they only had a few people, those few people could go out at night with cans of spray paint and get the whole city’s attention the next day.  So it made the little group look big!

And they had a clinched fist symbol that could easily be made into a stencil and so you could just slap it against anything and spray paint it on and there was this fist of resistance, right?  Everywhere! 

And as they grew people kinda knew who they were, “Oh it’s the Otpor guys!”  I mean, they didn’t know who they were specifically, but they knew what the movement was about. 

And they got more sophisticated as time went on.   They found that the smaller the message the better.  Eventually they’d have signs that would just say “It’s Coming”.  And by then everybody knew what “It” was!  So they were really smart.

We need good, short messages for our movement.  You know, stuff like “No Hoax!”

Now you gotta be really careful when you go out and do stuff like this because the U.S. has all these tough anti-graffiti laws.  

And I don’t know what the stickers laws are, but if you could get cool stickers, like, I dunno, a Pissed-Off Polar Bear, you know…you could help spread the message fast.  Just slap it on a sign, or on a wall, or something. 

Symbolism really counts.  People are into that.  There’s a reason that corporations spend billions for a tag line and a logo.  This movement spends too much time speaking in paragraphs!  On that note, I’d better shut up!

So remember, it's a great way to spread the message, it’s fun, it’s a great way to show your revolutionary ardor, but you gotta be careful.

Also, if you really want to get inspired about this, go rent the movie about Banksy and Shepard Fairey called Exit Through the Gift Shop.  But only watch the first half.  The second half’s dumb. 

Alright!  Next time we talk about Nonviolent Method Number 8: Banners, Posters, and Displayed Communications.


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Nonviolent Method #6 : Group or Mass Petitions

Today we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method number 6: Group or Mass Petitions. 

Now, petitions I normally am not really crazy about.  They’ve kind of been done to death, right?  “They’ll just do what we ask ‘cuz we got all these people on this petition.”

Has anyone noticed that that completely doesn’t work? 

If somebody gives Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who’s terrible about the climate, by the way – but if somebody sends him a petition with a bunch of signatures from people from everywhere but Oklahoma – or maybe like 5 from Oklahoma – he’s not gonna care!  He’s probably not even gonna see it, his assistant’s gonna go like “Eh, well...Next!”

Which is not to say that petitions don’t always work.  The book has all kinds of examples from Roman history, which might have been like the first petition.  “Oh let’s send something to the Emperor Commodus because the Farmer General is making us work too hard.”

And the Emperor Commodus is like “Holy shit!  They, they put together what?  A giant list of names and…?  Huh!  Well that’s…I admire their moxie!  That’s never been done before, has that ever been done before?”

“Not that I know, Emperor”.

“Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna grant their petition.  Their request.  Their grievance.  It must be very vexing!”

And they also have a thing where some merchant marine guys for Rome were like “We’re being vexed!  Help us out!”  And they were important guys, so the Emperor’s like “Alright.  I’ll help ya out.”  (And maybe that’s the key is to use the word “vexing”.  “Dear Senator Inhofe, Global Warming vexes us so!”  It’s worth a try…not!)

But let’s be honest, the real thing that these guys are gonna pay attention to is if the petition is signed by a lot of people in their district or state OR by super important people (and by that I don’t mean Jon Bon Jovi).

If you’re a big Republican and all of a sudden you realize that all these industry business luminaries and Wall Street executives and, I don’t know, the Farmer General….

Farmers could have an impact!  Church groups too, I know I keep goin’ back to churches, but come on people!  Get with the program.  It’s God’s creation we’re talkin’ about here, you gotta protect it, right?  He wanted you to protect it.

Actually, if you did a drive through Oklahoma and just got everybody in those areas that are just getting clobbered by drought to sign a petition saying “Uh, yeah, we think global warming is real.  It’s a million degrees outside and, yeah, we’re gonna sign this petition.  Please do something about this.”  They’d pay attention to that!

Or if you went to all the colleges and universities in those areas, and high schools and elementary schools and all that, and you collected thousands and thousand of signatures, that would have some impact! 

OR we could do a big petition to the network news or whatever.  “Um, hello, this is a little more important ultimately than Kate Middleton’s baby bump.”  “Um, you’re kinda not reporting on the most important thing that every will happen to anybody.”  “Uhh, you’re kind of making light of something that’s gonna kill, like, everybody.”  “Um, you’re abrogating your duty and we’ve had enough.”  That’s the sort of thing that the editors in the major papers and the national news networks might pay attention to finally.  “Hello!  By not reporting on it, you’re making this a non-issue! It’s an issue!  We’re boiling outside, the mountains are on fire!  Look outside your building, the flood waters are rising from the Atlantic.  I mean, Hello!”

Journalists could do petitions against their bosses – the editors and publishers and media owners.  “Guys!  We care about this!  We wanna cover this, this is important, we get it.  Our industry has a responsibility to provide info on this so people have a clear picture just how dangerous this is.  You’re not allowing us to do that.  We wanna do it!”

Anyway, that’s how petitions work, and I guess they’re not that bad of an idea so long as you’re smart about who signs it and you at least consider throwing in the word ‘vexing”. 

Next time we’re gonna talk about Nonviolent Method #7: Slogans, Caricatures, and Symbols!

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Nonviolent Method #5 : Declarations of Indictment and Intention

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to save EVERYONE from untoward catastrophe, it becomes incumbent upon us to form a more perfect movement!

Most of these examples in this book are things you never even heard of, right?  You know, like the Botswana Union of Ministers Rally for Independence, or whatever. 

But here, this is something everybody’s heard of:  The American Declaration of Independence, right?  “When in the course of human events”, baby!  That gives you an idea of just how powerful nonviolent actions can be, I mean, you know that catalyzed people.  It’s like “Wohh!  A Declaration of Independence, that’s heavy duty!”

In South Africa they did this thing called a Freedom Charter, right?  It was essentially a Declaration of Intention, and it talked about how apartheid had to be abolished and then they finished with “These freedoms we will fight for, side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty.”

Wow!  I love that!  We’re gonna keep at this until we get it done!  And, you know, with climate change it’s not something where you can be like “Aw, fuck it.  I give up.  It’s not worth the effort”.  I mean you’re talkin’ about the destruction of the world, everything’s pretty much worth the effort!  Everything needs to be done, you can’t quit. 

Anyway we should have a Declaration of Intention like that, so you don’t settle with lame, weak solutions and we get the whole planet on board.  That’s how this is gonna work!  You really can’t solve climate change half-way it’s gotta be all the way.  Nature doesn’t care, they’re not gonna be like “Oh, well, you tried hard enough.  That’s fine."  You know, the pack ice won’t melt just because we made an effort.  Right?  The tundra won’t stop thawing just because some of us got it and were able to create modest emission reductions. 

You can’t reason with nature!  Right?  I mean that’s like when that tsunami hit Japan.  You know they built a sea wall that was 30 feet tall.  But they didn’t count on the whole coastline dropping 6 feet below sea level.  So the sea wall wasn’t tall enough!  But the sea didn’t care.  It just went over the wall and just destroyed everything.

That’s the thing about nature and science: it plays by hard, fast rules.  There’s no wiggle room.

So anyway, we need to make such a declaration.  Have it on my desk by Thursday morning.  Or at least, in the comments, post your suggestion of what it should be.

And let’s not forget about the Declarations of Indictment part of the equation.  I mean the fossil fuel industry and the think tanks that spew out all their misinformation, and the politicians that always vote against climate solutions – these guys are guilty of putting all of humanity at risk, right? 

These guys are putting their own ideology and personal wealth above common sense, a staggering amount of scientific evidence, and the well-being of everyone on the planet!  I mean a Declaration of Indictment of these guys is long overdue! 

Instead they get richer and richer and do everything they can to cloud the issue, make people think this isn’t such a big deal, I mean these are high crimes!  Everybody’s gonna look at them like the greatest villains that ever lived!  Climate change is gonna kill way more people than any war ever did.  They’re gonna make Stalin look like an underachiever. 

Anyway, I guess I just did my own Declaration of Indictment.  Dirtbags.

But, you know, since my pack ice is already melted it’s like I come from the future.  I know how bad this is gonna be.  I know who the bad guys are. 

And let’s not give the media a pass either, I mean they could stand a little Declaration of Indictment of their own. 

Future generations (if there are future generations) are gonna look back at today’s newscasts and think “They hardly ever talk about climate change!  What the hey?!”

I mean people tell me that reporters actually want to cover stories but it’s their editors who say “Oh, we did a story about that last year!”  So they continually ignore the biggest crisis in the history of humanity!  And, when they do talk about it, they talk about it like “It’s not gonna be that bad.  I mean, you know, maybe in a hundred years…Oh I’m sorry we have breaking news, there’s a hurricane coming our way. Not that that has anything to do with climate change.”  It’s ridiculous.  So, yeah, these guys deserve a Declaration of Indictment also. 

Students could do a Declaration of Indictment against their administrators saying “Why do you pretend to care about our futures when you’re not making any stand against the greatest threat to our futures?” 

Alright.  Clearly I could go on ad infinitum about this, but Declarations of Indictment and Intention can be effective, and should be considered. 

Alright, gotta go!

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Nonviolent Method # 4: Signed Public Statements

Method Number 4 in Gene Sharp’s brilliant work The Methods of Nonviolent Action is Signed Public Statements.  

For instance, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 the government and the population was doing all these freedom reforms and the hard-line Communists in government couldn’t stand it, but they were a minority in their government so they couldn’t stop all these great new laws, and they were like “Fuck that!” and they called the Russians and said “Could you please help us out by invading our country and putting our group in supreme power?  And the Russians were like “Okaaay”, and they invaded.  And the Czech people were all “Oh no you don't!”  So the leaders of the legitimately elected Czechoslovak government all signed this public statement saying “Hey!  This invasion’s illegal, we don’t want this.”

Anyway, that’s how Signed Public Statements work in theory.  The book didn’t have any examples of signed public statements that were actually successful, so I don’t know if it works or not. 

Interestingly, this is a method that’s already been used by the know-nothing climate denier faction.  They basically wrote this letter that says “Oh it would be bad for the environment and for public health if we did anything to stop climate change, in fact climate change might even be good!  Yeah, and polar bears might sprout wings! 

Anyway they got 31,000 quote unquote “scientists” to sign this thing called the Oregon Petition, but some of them were just like celebrities and fictional characters, not even scientists at all, and almost all the scientists weren’t climate scientists, they were mostly, like, engineers, right? What do they know about climate science?  “Oh, I’ve never studied this and I really don’t know that much about it but I do know how to put up bridges, ANYWAY, since I have a degree in science people should just trust me when I say climate change is a hoax.”

What?!

I mean if they were engineering a bridge and a bunch of climate scientists said “Oh, this is bullshit, you don’t know what you’re doing!  We know more about building bridges than you people who’ve studied it your whole lives!”

That's just not gonna happen right?  Climate scientists are cooler than that.  Engineers, not so much.  Anyway, I kinda don’t think Signed Public Statements would work in climate change’s case because they other side doesn’t believe what scientists say!  They’re all “So what if 98% of climate scientists say that, THAT MEANS NOTHING!”  Really?!  So we can deduce that 99% also wouldn't be good enough.  They're not gonna believe what 100% of the climate scientists say.  "Holy crap we're out of climate scientists, quick, get some engineers!"

But how could Signed Public Statements have an impact?  Well, in those places where they elect climate denier politicians – particularly in places that are getting hammered by extreme weather – prominent citizens could make it socially acceptable to talk about this.  I'm talkin' about business leaders, religious leaders, hard-workin' farmers!

And as long as we’re talkin’ about business leaders – these guys  are a big part of the coalition that elects the guys that say nothing should be done about climate change.  So, “Hello!  Business leaders!  Climate change is gonna take you down too! 

And if you don't believe a Pissed-Off Polar Bear, maybe you'll believe Christine LaGarde of the International Monetary Fund, who said if we don’t act soon to stop climate change everybody’s gonna be “roasted, toasted, fried, and grilled!”  That’s everybody!!!

So, it’s gonna be really important if we get a lot of big-time business leaders to say “Uhhh, yeah we gotta do something about this”, ‘cuz that’s the only way you’re gonna get through to the business community.  

So Signed Public Statements are really gonna be most effective in the communities where climate denial is in vogue. 

Alright, next time, we’ll talk about Nonviolent Method Number 5: Declarations of Indictment and Intention.  


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Pete Knows Nonviolent Struggle!

Watch the video on Youtube!

As a polar bear, I want to clear up some misconceptions about nonviolent struggle. 

People say to me “Pete!  You’re a hypocrite.  You claim to believe in nonviolence, and yet, you’re a carnivore!”

Indeed I am.  I eat seals, not salads.  But I’m am a disciplined advocate of Nonviolent Struggle. 

Perhaps I can explain best by illustrating what Nonviolent Struggle is not.

Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with passivity.  We do not believe people should sit back and say “Gosh, I wish they’d do something about climate change!”  First of all, what’s this “They”?  WE.  We’re going to do something about climate change.  THEY are gonna follow. Capice?

Nonviolent action is a means of conflict where you conduct a struggle on your terms.  Those in power WANT you to use violence because they can easily trounce you with the police and the military.  But with nonviolence you emphasize your strengths, which puts them at a disadvantage.  You use people power, or, polar bear power.

Nonviolent struggle does not depend the assumption people are good.  And I can tell you right now people are not always good. Sometimes they’ve even been known to shoot polar bears just to put our heads on their walls!  Gawd!!!

Also, people think to do nonviolent struggle right, you need to be a saint, like Gandhi, or the Reverend Martin Luther King.  How many people are like THAT?!  Not bloody many!   We’ll be waitin’ forever for another guy like that to come around, and climate change needs to be dealt with NOW!

Take me, I’m a polar bear.  I sneak up on seals, maul them, and eat them.  Then with blood staining my face and dripping from my muzzle, I go out and try to seduce lady polar bears.  This disqualifies me from being Gandhi, who never ever mauled a seal or tried to seduce a lady polar bear!  But, hell!  My Arctic is melting!  I’m gonna do the smartest, fastest thing possible to stop that.  Just so happens that smartest, fastest thing is Nonviolent Struggle!

Here’s the main ingredient of nonviolent struggle:  Stubbornness.  “Massive stubbornness can have powerful political consequences”. Well, I, for one, am stubborn.  Once, I even fought off a pack of wolves who were trying to steal a narwhal kill.  You have any idea how hard it is to catch a narwhal?  It’s like wrestling a unicorn!  I wasn’t about to give that thing up.  And I’m not about to sit meekly by as my Arctic melts away and the rest of the world heats up to catastrophic levels, and neither should you!

No one knows how bad climate change’ll be, but if the permafrost melts it could trigger the sixth Mass Extinction Event EVER!  On the planet!  And the collapse of civilization.  Other than that, it’s not such a big deal!

Compromises and mild solutions aren’t gonna save us!  Nature is spinning out of control faster than anyone ever expected.  We need drastic solutions now! 

But the fossil fuel industry and their allies are gonna use every means at their disposal to keep things the way they are.  They don’t want to hurt their profit margins.  They don’t mind putting the entire world on the precipice, but nothing must touch their precious profit margins!

But ya know what?  As powerful as they are, they depend on lots and lots of people to supply them with lots and lots of things.  If we can make it uncool and unacceptable for those people to do that, we can strip away the power of the fossil fuel industry, and save the world from catastrophe.

Which, I would say, is even better than a nice, juicy narwhal.

Groouumph!

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Nonviolent Method #3 : Declarations by Organizations and Institutions

The third Method of Nonviolent Action that Gene Sharp writes about is Declarations by Organizations and Institutions.  This, too, could help the climate movement when President Obama pushes to get something done about it.

My favorite example came in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1943 when the Dutch Reformed Church AND the Roman Catholic Church came out with a letter that told their congregations it was their RELIGIOUS DUTY to do civil disobedience and to refuse to collaborate with the Nazis. 

That drove Hitler’s Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels crazy.  He said it was an “exceptionally insolent letter”. 

Oh, right, Goebbels!  It’s INSOLENT for churches not to want to help mass murderers.  “Where do these people who worship the Prince of Peace GET OFF not helping us exterminate people?!  They’re insolent, I tell you!”

Dirtbag.

Anyway, isn’t it also a RELIGIOUS DUTY to save God’s creation?  I mean, how can it not be?!  “Oh, thanks for creating all this, God, now we’re just gonna use it all up!”  God’s not gonna be cool with that.  Not the human God and not the great mama polar bear spirit, who’s breath of life colors the sky of the Arctic night. 

Anyway, more and more churches are realizing they all have a religious duty to protect our planet from climate catastrophe.

In Nazi-occupied Norway, on one Sunday in 1941, one pastoral letter was read from almost every pulpit in the land, then copies of the letter were handed out and posted all over the place.  It would be great if, when the President really needs our help to pressure congress to do the right thing, a letter about saving the climate was read in houses of worship from coast to coast.

All kinds of organizations and institutions can do this, not just religious ones.     Trade groups, business and industry groups, they all should do it because they’re all in line to get hammered by climate change: artists’ unions, educational institutions, school districts, parents’ and students’ groups, athletic leagues and organizations, journalist groups, farm groups, unions, guilds, charities, advocacy groups, animal herds, wolf packs, parties of polar bears hunting in concert. The list is as long as the sea ice used to be.  There’s all kinds of organizations and institutions, and all of them could help, and they ought to!

If you belong to any of ‘em, you should start workin’ it!  Don’t take no for an answer!  Keep pushing, get allies, get the organization’s leaders and membership to realize how urgent this is! 

You can light the spark!

So that’s how declarations by organizations and institutions can work.  Next time we’ll talk about Method #4, Signed Public Statements.



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Nonviolent Method #2: Letters of Opposition or Support

Today we’re going to talk about Nonviolent Method #2, Letters of Opposition or Support, as outlined by Gene Sharp, in his seminal tome “The Methods of Nonviolent Action”, which you must buy or I will maul you.  (Nonviolently of course.)  

As lame as letters may sound, they can help the climate movement in lotsa ways. 

Let’s start with the letters of Support concept.  President Obama has indicated that at some point he’s gonna push forward initiatives designed to protect the climate.  If you don’t think he’ll be opposed, you’re living in an imaginary world of unicorns and fairies.  So, people need to make statements in support of him!   These can be private or public.  Suppose you live in a state with a senator who can reliably be counted on to vote against any action on climate change.  Well, parents, students, churches, and businesses, can send said senator letters or postcards of support for what the President is doing. The more the senator gets, the more pressure he’ll feel to do the right thing. 

There’s also Open Letters, which are generally published in newspapers, but popular blogs would work too.  Open letters can be from prominent citizens, like doctors groups, business groups, religious groups; or from pillars of society, like, I dunno, Tom Brokaw.

In Nazi-occupied Bulgaria the Union of Bulgarian Writers sent a letter to their government saying that an anti-Jewish law would “enslave part of the Bulgarian people and blemish Bulgaria’s modern history.”

Inaction on climate change is gonna completely tarnish America’s history.  God, history’s gonna HATE us for it!  Especially if civilization collapses, which it easily could.  (Course, then there’d be no one there to record history, but still….)  Anyway that could be what America’s remembered for, because America’s always been the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases – until just recently – and the biggest political obstacle to international action!  People’d be like: “Yeah, America…they did some cool things with freedom but then they went and destroyed the world!  Idiots.”

Or we could be remembered as the heroes and good guys that led the way to save the planet from catastrophe.  Our choice.

Another thing that would work is using the internet.  Famous people could post youtube messages in support of action on climate change. 

Got that?  I’m talkin’ to YOU Bieber! 

Also, groups could publish full-page ads to pressure network news organizations to do more stories about climate disruption and how serious it is.  Because that’s a HUGE part of the problem, too many people think climate change won’t be a big deal until way off future and then it won’t be all that bad.  Hello!  When the natural feedback loops kick in it will be HORRIBLE EVERYWHERE!  That could be triggered at any time!  But no one knows that cuz the news organizations aren’t doing their JOB of informing the public.

Alright, next installment we’ll talk about Declarations by Organizations and Institutions.  I can feel your excitement.

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Gene Sharp's Nonviolent Method #1: Public Speeches

So at some point this year the President is going to ask us to step up to support his push to do something about climate DISRUPTION.  And we gotta be ready when that happens! 

Currently this movement follows only a couple leaders, and apparently they don’t have the resources to drum up actions more than a couple times a year.  SO, we all need to use our own creativity, resources, and friends to step in and come up with our own Nonviolent Actions.   So you’re gonna need to know all the nonviolent weapons at your disposal!

In Gene Sharp’s book The Methods of Nonviolent Action, he outlines 198 different methods.  Here’s the list.  Good lord!  Those are just a bunch of words!  Just reading that list is kind of a useless exercise for nonviolent activists.

That’s why Sharp included 300 pages worth of examples, which gives you a much more tangible feel of how these things work…and a lot of them could work for the climate movement!

Today, we’ll look at Method #1: Public Speeches.

Now, lots of times public speeches are lame!  The Serbian resistance movement Otpor decided right from the get-go that their movement wasn’t gonna do speeches! 

But they can work.  It depends on who’s giving the speech and when and where. 

For instance, if you stand on a street corner and give a speech about climate change, it’s not likely to be effective.

BUT, if you’re, President Obama, and you go on at length about climate change in your 2nd inauguration speech, that would qualify as surprising and therefore effective. 

I mean, everyone was like “Holy crap, he talked more about climate change than anything else!  My God, he really means to do something about it!”

It was also big news when mayor Bloomberg endorsed Obama after Hurricane Sandy hit his city.  It depended on the moment!

One of the guys Gene Sharp talks about was a Catholic Priest in Nazi Germany named Bernard Lictenberg who told his congregation that he wished to share the fate of the Jews who were being sent off to concentration camps.  That was brave.  And the Nazis did send him off to Dachau, and he did share their fate.  But thousands and thousands of people were dying, and he did the only thing he could.

Now, no minister in America is gonna get killed if they speak to their congregations for action on climate change, but a lot of people in those congregations do NOT believe in it and do NOT want to hear about it.  So it would be a great moral stand for a member of the clergy to do that.

Also, Republican politicians would be really brave and would have an eye-opening impact if they stood up in favor of action.  You know they can’t ALL believe climate change is just a hoax. 

I mean they got kids and grandkids and they need to do the right thing for them.  They don’t want those grandkids to one day say “Yeah, grampa was a senator but I don’t want to talk about him”

“Why not?”

“He was a climate denier dirtbag!” 

“Oh, that’s horrible!  Now America is a dried up wasteland”.

“I KNOW!  Stupid grandpa!”

Seriously that’s how they’re gonna be remembered.  (Polar bears already talk about ‘em like that.  It’s brutal!)

So public speeches can work depending on who gives the speech and when and where. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Method Number 2: Letters of Opposition or Support.

“Oh wow!  He’s gonna talk about correspondence!  Can’t wait!”

Well tune in anyway, we all need to learn all these methods.


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