It has led to...You know, when I traveled the country last fall, I was very struck by how, as you say, people were aware, and they were waking up, and they were horrified that they felt absolutely powerless. They were e-mailing their Congress people and they were calling them and it didn’t make a dime of difference. They would march, and it didn’t make any difference at all. I wrote a whole chapter on protest and why the marches we do now are designed to not change anything, because the kind of protests that actually changed the world are illegal in America now, deliberately, through a process of over-permitization... But anyway, they were trying that and it wasn’t getting them anywhere, and they were literally depressed, in the sense of... you studied happiness... in a sense, a clinical depression, where you feel like there’s no point in taking action, about democracy, they could not feel they could make a difference.
Kall: Let’s talk about those protests. You used a word that I couldn’t quite make out: over-something-or-other...
Wolf: Well, it’s kind of a word I’ve made up, to explain what happened to protests in this country: over-permitization. That there is a process of killing protests by demanding excessive permits that make the protest ineffectual. So it’s a “death by permit,” a death to freedom of assembly by permit, that you have to apply for more and more constraining permit requirements in order to have any kind of assembly at all in this country, and the consequence... I mean, one typical thing, for instance, that in America you have to do in order to get a permit for a march is you have to stay on the sidewalk and not step into the street.
Well, I studied how citizens have fought back successfully against tyrants or dictators who were trying to close down a democracy or crush a democracy movement. One thing that always, always, always works, just like the ten steps of closing a society always works, there are steps that always work in opening one back up, and one of them is mass protests.
It’s not like go from A to B, on to Washington Mall, in an orderly line, without stepping into the street. The kinds of marches that always change the course of history – that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989, that liberated the Baltic states, that restored people power, that just very recently restored democracy to Pakistan... look at the pictures. Those pictures are illegal in America. There are people
thronging the street. Business as usual can not take place. It’s thousands and thousands of people bringing business as usual to a halt because they’re in the street, literally in the street. You know, Martin Luther King said, in defending marching without a permit, that sometimes the tension has to be visible, the things that are hidden have to be brought up, that business as usual shouldn’t keep going if the people are so distraught and so angry and so upset. I’m not talking about violence; I’m talking about non-violent protest, but protest that actually stops things.
That’s a new goal now. There’s a hilarious section, at least I think it’s hilarious, although it’s also heart breaking, this section of the book where I am so on fire, reading Jefferson and reading the early founders, that I go out to try to use all of my Constitutional rights as an American and show my citizen leadership.
At one point, I try to hold a rally in Union Square for the Constitution and 15 minutes in, I realize that what I’m doing is illegal, because it’s illegal to use a bullhorn in Union Square without a permit. And I look at this other rally in midtown for liberty, against the oppressors in China who are suppressing Tibet and about to hold the Olympics. These protesters are penned in like livestock, in a little pen, surrounded by police officers, blocks away from the Chinese Embassy that they’re trying to protest, and I interview one of the sergeants, and these two groups of protesters have to share a bullhorn for a total four hours – you know, half an hour here, an hour and a half there, and the lieutenant says, “Our ideal, of course, would be none, no outlet.” So... death by a thousand cuts.
And then, I went further and I looked for the permit process in New York and they can deny you a permit and there’s no recourse. So, without actually overtly overturning and stripping the First Amendment, this process has basically made people feel – and we haven’t even gotten into the militarization of the police forces by Homeland Security, but we saw a guarantee of millions of dollars pumped into police forces to give them technologies like tasers and rubber bullets that are lethal, let alone the terrifying technologies, and unnamed, unidentified agents who could be Blackwater that we saw at the RNC – people are terrified to protest now, or at least not America. So that’s one of the things that...
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