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• Thursday, December 4, 2008 05:00 PM

  Jkalos and Usetobekristen:

  Thanks to you too.

  Omooex:

  Exactly. The anger - personalized, direct, concrete, and intolerable - is nowhere near approaching the level required for a sufficiently potent and widespread campaign of civil disobedience.

  The last major example I can think of - opposition to the Vietnam War, which had mixed, delayed results - was undeniably in large part a product of the terrible draft that was sending so many young men off to actually die for the government's policies.

  A bit before that, the civil rights movement had an overwhelmingly compelling moral message, and opposed clearly, blatant injustices and the vilest political adversaries. Even then, its success was far from certain and - Clinton had a point - did require federal political and judicial action as well. Also, the initial political avenues were not working, adding pressure, popular outrage, urgency, and increased moral intensity to the movement until it reached a tipping point.

  Today, although we cannot predict the outcome, we have had significant electoral changes come about in 2006 and of course 2008 - the latter historically unprecedented - and this has rendered notions of effective civil disobedience on a massive enough scale implausible, barring added injustices and conditions so grotesque as to defy current description.

  In such a state, the inch-by-inch efforts of petition, scrutiny, and targeted political action are the tools of the trade.

  —DCLaw1 Read DCLaw1's other letters
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