This is a devastating message to civil rights. Let’s turn it into strength for the movement and support activism around the world.
Dear judge Christopher Hehir,
I hope your grandchildren never forget your deplorable actions.
I’ll agree the sentences are a bit disproportionate, but blocking highways is not a smart way to get your message across. Especially if you’re protesting fossil fuels. In the summer.
Like, are people going to shut off their cars? No, they’re going to idle them and run the A/C exacerbating the problem you’re protesting. Not to mention, it’s going to piss off all the wrong people and make them even less likely to even want to hear your message. I mean, I already agree with their message, but stunts like this have a chilling effect because I don’t want to be associated with them.
Blocking roads is just a dumb way to protest unless you’re blocking access roads that directly affect the companies/industries you’re protesting against. Driveways to corporate offices, access roads to drilling sites, forming a human chain around tanker trucks, etc? Whatever. Public roads where emergency vehicles can be delayed? Absolutely not.
“And your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm, and how much disruption and harm they must suffer, simply so that you may parade your views.”
Agreed fully. They’re causing harm to the wrong people with these stunts and should be punished (though not to that degree).
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
What better way to throw a wrench in the gears than to stop people from working? From stopping their labour being squeezed of value?
What method would you suggest that has more impact? Do you think asking nicely is effective? People have been directly blocking these companies for years, and nothing has changed. More drastic action is necessary.
These climate protesters are heroes.
Who says everyone is going to work?
Maybe someone’s on their way to the hospital to see their dying mom and misses her final moments because of this shenanigan? What if someone is in an ambulance and needs to get to the hospital or on their way to pick up a sick kid?
What if I just really need to take a dump? What if I’m coming home from a long shift, am starving, and just want to go to bed? Running low on gas / battery charge, it’s hot AF out, and run out trying to not bake in the sun by running the A/C?
The people stuck in traffic driving EVs aren’t part of the problem, so why are they being punished?
I drive a hybrid myself (can’t afford an EV yet), try to minimize my driving overall, and when I’m out on the road, it’s for a purpose. I’m trying my goddamned best here, and these jackasses are indiscriminately holding everyone hostage in a traffic jam.
If my $400 worth of groceries melt / spoil because of shit like this, you can bet I’m going to be royally pissed. That shit’s expensive, and I can’t afford another trip for two weeks. Guess the kids are gonna go hungry. :shrug:
That’s a lot of “what if’s” but it’s also a lot of people they’re disrupting. These protesters don’t know these peoples’ lives, but they sure as hell are negatively impacting them.
If they want to protest, fine. But don’t take it out on people just trying to live their lives, who may or may not be part of the problem, and may have important places to be.
That’s not what heroes do.
Ah cool, just complain and don’t offer any alternative suggestions. Glad you can come up with countless ways how you might personally be inconvenienced in the short term.
Unfortunately, if you think a brief traffic stoppage is bad, you might be unhappy to learn what happens if we don’t turn this around. Mass drought and famine, skyrocketing food prices, flooding, days you can’t even leave your house. Does that sound more or less inconvenient?
What does this actually accomplish huh?
Not a goddamned thing.
Cool, I suppose blowing up oil infrastructure it is then. If you’re going to get a harsh punishment either way, might as well take action that will get attention.
