Capitol Rioters Walked Away. Local weather Protesters Noticed a Double Commonplace.

The relatively small number of arrests after a mob stormed the Capitol left many environmental activists shaken on Thursday – and wanted answers. Why did so many people who wreaked havoc on the homeland of American democracy just walk away after doing so much damage, not just to a building, but to the nation’s self-esteem?

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., a community minister and activist who heads the Hip Hop Caucus, a civil and human rights group, said the sight of the rioters who were ushered out of the Capitol with seemingly no effect was “heartbreaking.” Mr. Yearwood has a long history of protesting on a number of issues and has been arrested and even beaten as a result.

“We know that we will go through this punishment,” he said in the context of the fight for cleaner energy, for environmental justice and for a better world. “Until yesterday I thought, ‘That’s how it’s done. You go out of business, you are arrested, you are treated like that, ”he said.

“It all changed yesterday,” he said. Some rioters carried guns, injured the police and committed vandalism. “Certain police officers allowed them to leave.”

“There are two worlds,” he said. “And we have to fix that.”

Jacquelyn Gill, a researcher at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, said on Twitter: “More people were arrested in the 2018 Capitol non-violent climate change protests than in the 2021 Capitol riot.”

Protests in Washington have long been part of anti-climate change activism and other movements, as have arrests.

In the fall of 2019 and through January 2020, actress Jane Fonda participated in weekly protests known as Fire Drill Fridays to raise awareness about climate change. Ms. Fonda was arrested five times, as were other celebrities such as Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen. In total, more than 600 arrests occurred in the course of these protests alone, from 16 in the first demonstration to more than 300 in the last demonstration on January 11, 2020.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the more than 10,000 arrests last year related to anti-racism and police brutality protests across the country, The Associated Press said.

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Bill McKibben, a writer and activist who said he was arrested four times in Washington alone and half a dozen times in other protests, called nonviolent civil disobedience “one” using the examples of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and the Suffragists of the greatest inventions of the 20th century “.

“At best, it catches people’s hearts,” he said.

And central to the idea of ​​peaceful civil disobedience is the willingness to accept punishment, including arrest.

By comparison, he said Wednesday’s storm on the Capitol was fraught with violence and vandalism, and some members of the mob wore guns and zippered handcuffs. “These people wanted to inflict suffering and punishment on other people – it’s the opposite of civil disobedience,” McKibben said. “And strangely enough, it was hit with the opposite reaction.”

Of course, confronting a violent, potentially armed mob is not the same as dealing with decent protesters who may want to be arrested, and police may be reluctant to escalate confrontations that can easily lead to bloodshed and death.

“It is up to all of us,” she said, to compare the images of the Capitol uprising with the images of the treatment of previous protesters, “and to ask questions about the difference.”

Many states, she added, are trying to tighten charges on infrastructure-related protests. “All aim to prevent people from expressing messages that those in power don’t like.”

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. made a similar remark on Thursday. “Nobody can tell me that if a group of Black Lives Matter protested yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the crowd of thugs who stormed the Capitol,” he said. “We all know that is true, and that is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. “

Mr. Yearwood was arrested with Mr. McKibben in Washington last year for a sit-in protest at a Chase Bank; They tried to draw attention to the financial pipeline between large financial institutions and the fossil fuel industry. Always, he said, the goal is “to be non-violent, to be as peaceful as possible” and to work with the police to “recognize the work they have to do” to restore order.

The comparatively mild reaction to the predominantly white demonstrators on Wednesday was “the epitome of white supremacy” and a dangerous precedent for the future of the protest in the United States. He said he feared that in the future, if he directed a nonviolent path, young activists would tell him that “all of the peace material you are talking about, Rev and Bill, is not working”.

“And that leads to destruction,” he said.

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