In subsequent interviews to her brilliant Stop Harper protest during the Speech from the Throne, the now-former Senate page Brigette DePape repeatedly mentioned climate change and inaction on the environment as a motivating factor for her own action. Notable because the
Throne Speech mentions neither.
Yesterday SunMedia's David Akin joined the alarming number of politicians and their media fluffers - who are apparently
aghast and appalled that a woman would stand silently holding up a piece of cardboard for twenty seconds - with this long dull dreary post :
Memo to Brigette : There are no shortcuts in politics. It takes long, dull, dreary work.
According to Akin, working the inside political corridors completely precludes ever protesting against that same self-serving self-perpetuating hegemony and Brigette DePape broke that most solemn of all Fight Club rules. Oh, boo.
He also apparently did not hear
Brigette's interviews on CBC and CTV in which she said she didn't think just holding up a sign would affect anything all by itself but hoped to inspire others to action because politics and democracy is not just about elections.
Seriously, Akin, how the fuck long do you think it will take to get the environment mentioned in a Harper majority Thone Speech the "long dull dreary" way?
Antonia Zerbisias on climate change :
Time for a Climate of Change (italics mine)
"Well-known American environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben founded the grass-roots group 350.org, which attempts to get people all over the world agitating for laws, regulations and policy aimed at reducing GHG (greenhouse gas emissions) reductions.
“We need to do (civil disobedience) on a mass scale," McKibben, author of many books including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, tells me. “We need to do it in a way that makes one thing clear to all onlookers: in this fight, we are the conservatives. The radicals are the people who want to alter the composition of the atmosphere.”
“Non-violent civil disobedience is justified when there is a history of long-standing harm or violation of people's fundamental rights; when legal and policy means have failed to reduce the harms and violations; and when there is little time remaining to address the problems,” University of New England professor John Lemons and Penn State’s Donald Brown wrote in last month’s Journal of Science and Environmental Politics."
“Simply put, people do not have the right to harm others who have not given their consent to be harmed "
All the important social movements of the last century - rights for minorities, women, LGBT, children, POWs, FN, workers, differently abled, the environment - all of them were or continue to be actively suppressed by our governments, who only jump into the front of the parade after a whole lot of outside protest.
From
CathiefromCanada : About Protest - the proof that protest works
Post title shamelessly ripped from a great post by Your Heart's on the Left :
Harper stunt interrupts Canadian statement delivered by DePape
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