By Louis Korn – Country Activist, June 1990 and Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 1, 1990
The bombing of Earth First!’s Redwood Summer organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney involves you. This bombing is not the first attack on civilly disobedient protesters to the destruction of the North Pacific Rainforest: Greg King was punched to the ground; fifty-year old Mem Hill had her nose broken; logging trucks swerved toward protesters who were not even attempting to block them, causing them to jump off the road; a logging truck rear-ended Judi Bari’s car, hurling it into the air, injuring its occupants, Judi, Pam Davis, their children, and Darryl; Judi and Darryl received numerous mailed and telephone death threats; twenty protesters were threatened with guns and shot at. Several of these assaults and batteries were witnessed by· law enforcers who never interfered or processed charges. These consistent derelictions by police and D.A. Massini (Mendocino) tell people criminally inclined, to go ahead. The bombing is an escalation, and more is expected.
Workers at the Mendocino Environmental Center feel threatened. Friends, concerned for their safety, have suggested they close the office. And I would urge Betty, Gary, and other who have been working steadily there, to take a vacation from the relentless tension. But MEC must remain open. I volunteer one day a week.
Redwood Summer’s purpose is to slow the frenzied removal of the last vestiges of our once, seemingly endless cathedral forests, so that there will be something left for the November Timber Initiatives to preserve. Even one who disapproves of the tactic of civil disobedience must defend it against criminal violence. Allowing terrorism ensures becoming its victim. The bombing involves everyone.
Reaction as a Nonviolent Trainer
The bomb that crippled Judi Bari and injured Darryl Cherney is part of the violence destroying life on this planet. Our biospheric destructiveness is rooted in Judeo Christian values that honor violence: dominion over all beings, the divine right to rule, to enslave, and to exterminate. Class struggle incorporates this violence. In this struggle, where the most oppressed have only their misery to lose, and the dominant, an excess of material abundance, the latter seem helplessly addicted to their power and property.
Such assessment offers little hope. That pathetic little, being all there is to work on, argues no delay. Since Earth will not much longer support violent struggle, our living alternatives seem to be either submission or nonviolent resistance. But a closer look shows really one alternative. Most people have, in fact, chosen submission, which merely feeds the insatiable addiction for power and property that is devouring and transforming the earth into toxic waste.
Nonviolent struggle involves role play; very serious play, the attempt to understand one’s opponent, to experience his perceptions and gut feelings without losing oneself in them. Our common survival is the incentive for doing this, incentive one gives the opponent by forcing him to confront his destructiveness. Our force is not physical coercion. (Our opponent already monopolizes that), but rather obstruction, being constantly in the way. We must respond to his frustration, anger and fear, with understanding, empathy, sympathy, and willingness to help the other toward a mutually acceptable alternative to his destructive livelihood. We are confronting not the ruling classes, inaccessible to us and insulated by their power and wealth from the poverty they have collectively created, but the ruled, the working classes on whom their power and wealth depend, people only a few paychecks away from homelessness.
The police, including FBI, are domestic soldiers recruited from working classes to keep them and the destitute in line. A major incentive of police work is media glamorization of their role as guardians of virtue, protectors of the innocent, licensed to kill evil doers. The cognitive dissonance between propaganda and reality is stressful to police, and more so to the people they oppress. Our overcrowded jails hold relatively few violent criminals, and most of these belong to ethnic gangs who terrorize the majority.
Submissiveness to a policeman’s power is a seductive compensation for the distress of cognitive dissonance. Uncombative resistance to this power heightens the distress and need to resolve it. Massive nonviolent resistance to violence and lies is necessary in this most powerful nation to make our ideology real. Since ours is an ideology of liberty, equality, fraternity, and since many resisters will include middle class elders, workers, and upwardly mobile students confronting peers, confrontation can become cooperation toward revolutionary change. It is a slim hope, with time running out…
Incapacitating our organizers will not stop Redwood Summer. Their charisma brought us together. But we work without leaders, being autonomous people with a common purpose.