I know well what it’s like to be arrested for taking part in a raucous protest. I’ve been arrested for committing acts of civil disobedience at least twenty-five times, or maybe more. I’ve lost count.
I have to remind myself that calling someone an insurgent or an insurrectionist isn’t necessarily an insult or condemnation. It can also be a compliment. It all depends on what civil authority or established government you are revolting against, and why and how you revolt.
Many of my fellow disability activists and co-members of the disability rights group ADAPT have been arrested way more often than I have. A lot of our arrests have occurred at the U.S. Capitol and on Capitol Hill. ADAPT activists love to show up uninvited at the offices of lawmakers and at hearings and such, where we make noise and refuse to leave until our demands are met or we are hauled away.
I’m not saying this to boast but because I’m trying to make a point, mostly to myself. And it helps if I do it in writing.
When I see the kinds of crazy things the rightwing screwballs have been up to lately, such as the storming of the U.S. Capitol, I’m not so quick to decry their actions as insurgencies and insurrections. My online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an insurgent as “a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government.” The definition of insurrection is pretty much the same: “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”
When I’ve been arrested for engaging in raucous, confrontational protests, I guess you can say I was revolting against civil authority or an established government. I certainly hope that’s what I was doing.
Does that make me an insurgent and an insurrectionist? If so, I’m proud to bear the title. But if those rightwing nutjobs are also insurgents and insurrectionists, that’s a problem. I don’t want to be associated with them in any way.
So I have to remind myself that calling someone an insurgent or an insurrectionist isn’t necessarily an insult or condemnation. It can also be a compliment. It all depends on what civil authority or established government you are revolting against, and why and how you revolt.
Therein lies the difference between your rightwing screwballs and protesters like those with ADAPT.
To be honest, I don’t much care for polite political rallies. I recognize that such rallies have their time and place and have played a key role in making things happen. But, generally, events where people get together and speechify and then all go home leave me feeling the opposite of empowered. I feel frustrated. I think it’s because rallies often strike me as detached. And detached protests feel ineffective.
Screenshot from a video showing the U.S. Capitol Police forcibly removing a disability rights advocate in front of Senator Mitch McConnell's office in 2017.
What jazzes me up are protests designed to get in the bad guy’s face. For example, there was an ADAPT protest in the summer of 2017 where a bunch of disabled people showed up unannounced and definitely uninvited to the Capitol Hill office of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who was then the Senate Majority Leader.
McConnell was spearheading the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have been disastrous for disabled folks, especially those who rely on Medicaid. Many of the protesters in the office dropped out of their wheelchairs and onto the floor. They chanted and made noise, as did dozens of other protesters out in the hall. Pictures and videos of Capitol Police carrying disabled people out of the office and arresting them were seen around the world. And that ACA repeal attempt ultimately failed.
Another Republican repeal attempt reared its ugly head later that year. When the bill came up for a hearing in a Senate committee, ADAPT protesters were in the gallery and they chanted and made so much noise that the hearing couldn’t continue until, once again, Capitol Police hauled the protesters from the room. That repeal attempt also failed. I like to believe that those protests helped make that happen.
I was not a part of these two actions, but watching the videos of them from afar left me super stoked. The only way disability activists had any chance of getting through to McConnell and his pack was to get as physically close to them as possible and raise bloody, blasting hell. Trying to engage them in a civilized discussion would have been a colossal waste of precious time and energy. They aren’t the least bit susceptible to appeals to logic or morality.
That’s why raucous, confrontational protests excite me.
Of course, when I say raucous and confrontational, I don’t mean violent. There’s a big difference between the two. Whenever I’ve entered the Capitol with ADAPT, we’ve always gone through the security checkpoints inside the entrances, just like everybody else. It takes a long time to get a bunch of disabled people through the metal detectors and whatnot, but that’s the way it goes.
If anyone among us tried to break a window and crawl in or to trample security personnel and stampede their way on through, that person would be promptly dismissed by our protest leaders, if they weren’t arrested, which they probably would be. We don’t carry anything that could be construed as a weapon, not even a pocket knife. ADAPT protest leaders repeatedly and firmly emphasize the importance of not engaging in any physical violence.
A commitment to nonviolence requires constant vigilance.
Often, members of ADAPT protest at the bad guy’s home. A few years ago, about thirty of us occupied the lobby of a Chicago building where then-Governor of Illinois Bruce Rauner, a particularly cold-blooded Republican, owned a condo. We demanded that Rauner come out and face us. We chanted and clogged things up until some of us were arrested.
I’ve joined other ADAPTers in protesting at the homes of other Illinois governors and legislators and outside the churches frequented by former Republican U.S. Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan.
Needless to say, in each of these situations, we were not trying to kidnap any of these people or cause them physical harm. We only sought to damage their images and political reputations.
For all of these reasons and more, I feel certain that ADAPT-style aggressiveness and the aggressiveness of the rightwing screwballs are not remotely equivalent. All insurgencies are not the same. They’re trying to subvert the democratic process. We’re trying to exercise it.
But I fear the crackdowns now coming in the name of suppressing one type of insurgency will be used to suppress the “other side,” by justifying things like designated protest zones.
I hate designated protest zones. I think they’re un-American and un-Constitutional. The whole point of designated protest zones is to render protesters as ineffective as possible by moving them out of sight and out of mind.
If your gripe is with the occupant of the White House, the police will cordon off an area where you can freely assert your First Amendment rights in a remote corner of a Walmart parking lot in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s your chance to stand up and be ignored.
For me, the key to effective protesting has always been to be where the bad guys say you’re not supposed to be. You’re not supposed to be on the floor of their offices, chanting and clogging things up. You’re not supposed to be gathered outside their homes and churches. You’re not supposed to be there because if you are, that makes it nearly impossible for them not to deal with you, which is their objective.
Bad guys who are worthy protest targets are usually sniveling cowards hiding behind a bully’s bravado. When they hack away at programs that support people, they want to do it in a vacuum. They don’t want anyone to think too hard about who will be hurt.
Empathy is a great threat to these people’s mission. They want those who will be hurt to just go cower in a corner somewhere and shut the hell up. The last thing they want to do is look us in the eye.
That’s how political cowards operate. They need a big buffer zone between them and their victims. That buffer zone is fortified by rules of engagement that keep us protesting at a safe distance so we don’t get in the way of them going about their business. It’s also fortified by literal physical barriers that halt protesting beyond a certain point and by harsh laws designed to punish protest.
I fear that it will become more difficult for us to get directly in the faces of the bad guys because they will do more and more things to expand their security perimeter. The bad guys will say it’s being done to keep the rightwing nutjobs away from them, but it’ll have the added benefit of keeping us away from them, too.
It will be used to put down the good kind of insurgency.