Civil Disobedience as a Continuation of Participating in Democracy: War Protesters Charged with Disturbing the Peace

Five people took a step beyond weekly local peace vigils to react to illegitimate President George W. Bush's January declaration of a further escalation of the immoral war against Iraq. They blocked one lane of traffic outside the Peace Abbey in Sherborn until the police arrested them. They were in court in Natick on February 27 and each able to make a statement on the reason for their actions while pleading no contest to a reduced charge (from disorderly conduct to, ironically, disturbing the peace).

Disorderly Conduct is only supposed to have the potential for at most six months in jail, yet six months in a house of correction is the sentence for any of these five for violating the six month continuation without a finding– which nonetheless, itself, requires (I think) 10 hours of community service and miscellaneous fees amounting to well over $100.

I find it quite frightening that the government can hold the threat of such a sentence over people who were completely nonviolent and barely could be said to have inconvenienced anyone.

Neither paper nor electronic text can do justice to the emotionally, resolute statements made directly to the judge in court that day, but here are two of the prapared statements regarding arrest for civil disobedience against escalation of war which these two resolute women were kind enough to forward to me:

• Statement of Carol Coakley to court
• Statement of Judy Rich to court

In protest of war.

(Related to my contention that these five stood not just for principled civil disobedience, but for democracy through civil disobedience, David Sirota describes just how undemocraticly our elected representatives are behaving, especially in regards to the unambiguous public mandate to end the war against Iraq.

Further notes and statements regarding the disturbing the peace that was really a critical attempt to disturb the war will be linked from here.