On Civil Disobedience, Memory, and the Threshold of Risk

Uncle Sam was having a bad day as he blocked the main gate to the CIA

in Arlington, Virginia.

The photograph was taken during a civil disobedience action over the

Iran-Contra affair in the spring of 1987. I remember that season not as

a blur, but as one of those charged periods in life when history did not

feel distant or abstract. It felt physical. It felt embodied. It was in the

streets, on the steps, in the faces, in the shouts, in the arrests, in the

way people carried their convictions in their posture. I had a fake

press pass that got me behind the scenes near the Capitol steps, where

protests converged around two great moral outrages of that era: the

secret Iran-Contra affair under Ronald Reagan and the demand to end

apartheid in South Africa.

At the time, I was a student of photojournalism and documentary

photography, and I photographed a great many activist protests. I

covered actions for abortion rights, against the Seabrook nuclear

plant, and for the Free Tibet movement. I also photographed the

Dukakis presidential campaign and other political rallies of that day. I

was not standing outside history looking in. I was inside its weather,

moving among people who believed that citizenship required more

than opinion, that democracy demanded more than spectatorship

I am no stranger to activism. What lingers with me most from those

years is not simply the causes, but the human temperature of the

times. There were many more young people involved then, and many

more who seemed willing to risk arrest in acts of civil disobedience.

Their lives were not free of consequence. They had the same practical

fears that young people have now: losing a job, getting an arrest

record, paying a fine, jeopardizing their future. The risks were real.

Yet they stepped forward anyway. They crossed that invisible line

between protest and sacrifice.

That is what I keep returning to now. What has changed?

Today, it seems to me that across the age spectrum, very few people

are willing to engage in civil disobedience. There is no shortage of

outrage. There are still rallies, marches, speeches, signs, social media

storms, and brief public gatherings meant to signal alarm. But the

willingness to place one’s body in the path of power, to risk arrest in

concert with others, to embrace sustained disruption in the name of

conscience, feels far rarer than it once did.

And yet history, when it is honest, tells us something plain: one-day

symbolic actions rarely alter the course of power in any lasting way.

They can inspire, awaken, and hearten. They can announce a presence.

But they seldom force change by themselves. The great shifts have

usually come when civil disobedience became sustained, disciplined,

and costly. The civil rights movement did not bend the conscience of

the nation through symbolism alone. Labor movements did not win by

making polite appearances. Anti-apartheid struggle did not gather

force because people showed up for a day and then went home. Again

and again, what moved history was repetition, endurance, escalation,

and sacrifice. Power usually yields only when the cost of maintaining

itself grows too great.

That is why I am skeptical of the idea that a one-day May Day general

strike being promoted by the No Kings coalition, by itself, will move

the needle in any decisive way. I do not dismiss it. I simply doubt its

power as a single event. If it is to matter, it must become something

larger than a date on a calendar. It must become sustained. It must

deepen. It must gather consequence. History is not ambiguous on this

point. Entrenched systems do not change because they were briefly

inconvenienced. They change when they are persistently pressured by

people willing to endure discomfort longer than the powerful

expected.

The Iran-Contra era itself should have left a deeper scar on the

American political mind than it did. That scandal was not merely

about one covert operation or one administration’s moral failure. It

was about secrecy, executive overreach, contempt for democratic

accountability, and the assumption that power could operate behind

closed doors while the public, sooner or later, would tire and move on.

Looking back now, it feels less like an aberration than a warning. It

revealed how fragile the guardrails already were. It revealed how

much could be done in the shadows if institutions were weak, if the

public was fragmented, and if moral outrage could be dispersed before

it turned into sustained action.

I think about that now because our present moment carries the same

odor of lawless power, only sharper, more brazen, and more

dangerous. We live in a time when rhetoric itself has become a

rehearsal for atrocity. When a leader can openly threaten civilian,

noncombatant infrastructure, such as desalination facilities in Iran,

and still remain within the accepted bloodstream of political life, then

something profound has eroded. Language like that is not incidental. It

is not bluster to be shrugged off. It is the stripping away of restraint. It

is the revelation of a moral threshold already crossed in the mind

before it is crossed in action.

At this juncture, civil disobedience feels more called for than ever

before. There is a gathering urgency in the air, sharpened by the

possibility of a wider war, by the knowledge that vast consequences

can be set in motion without the consent of the people asked to bear

them. We are again standing in a moment when ordinary democratic

channels feel frighteningly inadequate to the scale of the danger.

And still, I find myself puzzled by today’s activist leadership. Why does

there seem to be so little appetite for harder forms of resistance? Why

so little movement toward organized, strategic civil disobedience?

Why does so much activism remain in the realm of statement rather

than disruption? Why is there so much caution at a time that seems to

call for courage of a more costly kind?

Part of the answer, I suspect, lies not in personal weakness but in

structural change. Earlier movements often had thicker webs of

belonging. Students were more deeply mobilized. Religious

communities provided moral framing and physical support. Labor had

greater strength and could underwrite risk in ways that are harder to

imagine now. Local networks were more embodied, more face-to-face,

more communal. People were not merely connected by opinion. They

were held inside communities of practice, sacrifice, and trust. That

matters more than we often admit. Courage is rarely an individual

possession. More often, it is something generated and sustained in the

presence of others.

Today many people are more precarious, more isolated, and more

atomized. Even when they believe deeply, they often stand alone in the

practical calculations of risk. A lost job does not just mean hardship. It

can mean collapse. An arrest record can feel less like a badge of

sacrifice than a private catastrophe. Fear, in that kind of culture,

becomes heavier and more rational. The risks may not always be

greater in formal terms, but they are often carried with less collective

support. It is harder to step forward when you know you may have to

absorb the consequences almost entirely by yourself.

I feel this personally. To be honest, I would have to think long and hard

about being willing to get arrested in a civil disobedience action if it

might lead to me losing my job. That is not a theatrical statement. It is

a sober one. The risk is real. Yet I can also feel something shifting in

me. I can feel the inner line moving. I can feel myself drawing closer to

the point where moral necessity may begin to outweigh personal

caution. What will that inflection point be? What event, what

statement, what outrage, what unmistakable crossing of the line will

make hesitation feel like surrender?

Those questions no longer seem theoretical.

As for the Bridge Brigade, I believe any move in that direction would

have to remain a last resort, and one reached only through very broad

consensus. We are effective in our current form. We stand on bridges

and we create a visible, repeated, highly public moral presence. We

reach thousands upon thousands of people. We remind the state, day

after day, that resistance exists not as an abstraction but as a living,

organized body. We influence voters. We shape the emotional weather

of public life. That matters. And because it matters, we cannot afford

recklessness. We cannot afford to hand the opposition easy weapons in

the form of bad press or poorly considered escalation. Our work is too

important for vanity tactics. It must remain disciplined and strategic.

And so I find myself suspended between two truths. One is that history

shows civil disobedience becomes necessary when institutions fail and

power grows lawless. The other is that not every movement should

rush there, and not every tactic serves every mission. The great

difficulty is knowing when restraint remains wisdom and when it

begins to turn into complicity.

I do not claim certainty. But I know this much: people do not embrace

civil disobedience until they begin to feel, deep in their bones, that

ordinary means are no longer enough. That realization does not arrive

all at once. It gathers. It spreads quietly. It moves through private

conversations, through restless nights, through the slow recalculation

of what one is willing to bear. And then, sometimes, a society crosses a

threshold. What seemed too risky yesterday becomes necessary

tomorrow.

Perhaps that is what I am sensing now. Not yet an answer, but the

approach of one.