Some things will easily snap
in half at the slightest pressure—
toothpicks, dry twigs, pasta,
crackers. Clumped together, they're
harder to break. Researchers who studied
social actions over the last hundred years
saw that nonviolent campaigns are twice
as likely to achieve their goals.
They conclude, most movements mobilizing
3.5% of the population succeed. But civil
disobedience isn't just a matter of statistics.
When people come together in great numbers,
it should be because at last, they're fueled
by conscience and their great desperation
for change. What is fidelity to the law, when laws
have been twisted into funnels whose ends lead
to the mouths and pockets of dictators and their
puppets? A great wave begins with small
particles— the woman who refuses to sit
at the back of the bus, the man who stands
in front of a column of tanks where a massacre
has just taken place in the square. Students
raising pastel umbrellas against clouds
of pepper spray. Nuns and ordinary housewives
before a wall of soldiers. Holding the line.
Pushing flowers into the barrels of guns.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
