The Cup of Endurance
When the status quo becomes untenable, peaceful protest is a safety valve.
Yesterday, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were convicted of mischief for leading the wholly peaceful, multi-week Freedom Convoy protest. As my recent book explains, that historic, working class, grassroots uprising was unstintingly supplied and supported by thousands of their fellow citizens.
When the truckers drove to Ottawa in early 2022, Canada was a segregated society. Individuals who had declined COVID vaccines had endured months of hectoring, judgment, punishment, threats, job loss, and shunning. So had their children. The unvaxxed had become society’s official untouchables - the ‘out group’ that everyone else was encouraged to spit upon. At the same time that they were losing their businesses, jobs, careers, and homes, many of these people were barred from Thanksgiving dinner and uninvited for Christmas.
Sixty years ago, a series of anti-segregation protests took place in Birmingham, Alabama. Certain residents of that city were hostile to the civil rights movement. They didn’t care about desegregating society. They resented the inconvenience. They wanted the protests to stop.
Instead of addressing the protesters’ concerns, city fathers persuaded a judge to ban further protests. Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights leader and ordained Baptist minister, called that ban undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unjust. He urged people to protest, to stand side-by-side together, to peacefully fight for their freedom.
Defiantly, he marched at the head of such a protest. He was arrested, charged with “parading without a permit,” and placed in solitary confinement. During his eight days in custody, he wrote one of the most famous essays in the English language, A Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Canadian parents who declined COVID vaccines for their offspring had the same kind of heart-searing conversations Martin Luther King Jr. mentions in that letter. In the early 1960s, this man had to explain to his daughter that only certain kinds of children were welcome at an amusement park:
That letter from the past invites people to understand rather than condemn. Peaceful protest is, as Reverend King fully understood, a safety valve. When thousands feel strongly enough to protest outdoors for weeks at a stretch in subzero weather, something has clearly gone wrong.
Here are a few further passages from his essay (italics and bold added by me):
There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of…despair.
…The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history.
Thank you Donna for writing todays article. I felt broken when I heard of the conviction. A system that I had been a part of was just used to destroy good Canadians. Lawfare..nothing else.
Wow, you said what we know, and I appreciate it. I know the hysterical people that surround me would just lose their minds if they came upon this analogy. That we dare compare the COVID mandates with the corrosive racism that existed! But we are never allowed to identify the terrifying path that the government was on. Without writers like you, we are erased by censorship and mockery and made irrelevant and invisible. It is a tactic that seems familiar to me as an old feminist. None of it is new! Thank you Donna for continuing to put yourself on the front line.