Mr. McKibbins- you are no Martin Luther King and this is no civil rights march- remember you are just trying to start a national protest against the tar sands XL pipeline project.
Now, with that out of the way- I do thank you for having the courage to help organize the protest and then to be arrested and put (in what must have been very uncomfortable surroundings) in jail.
Just please remember- Dr. King stood for much more than a mild protest against a pipeline. He was a pioneer in thinking that 'black' people deserve equality- and he was willing to die for his convictions.
Now 'people of color' are often described as being 'African-Americans' and have the same basic rights as 'white' people. He brought us far- with his vision of a future without racism or inequality- and his timely words continue to inspire us all.
Can you do that? Didn't think so. 'nuff said.

Your courage ushers in a new time as the Vision/Dream of Dr. King begins to manifest in America. "from the molehills of Mississippi", Freedom Rings as the Democratic Nominee for Governor of Mississippi is a Black Man. This is news of historic proportion. Victor Hugo captured this period in America quite succintly, "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come". Inexorably the idea moves toward fulfillment.

Let this be a lesson to those coming in October, it's hardly civil disobedience to exert your constitutional rights and then be willingly arrested, though I can see this as being their appeal to Obama on the pipeline. Real non-violent resistance would be refusing arrest, not letting them pick apart your ranks one by one with threats of fines and jail time. It isn't an issue for them until they have to bring out tear gas.

what if we all stopped driving three days a week?
what if we only drive to work and back?
what if we turned off our electronic devices every night from 9p to 5a?
what if we began sharing dwellings as an admired strategy?

is there nothing of substance we could do, as a group, that would accomplish more than getting arrested?

we could eliminate the profit from the tar sands, altogether, if we forego the product...
why is that never discussed?

why is the goal always to attempt to coerce a personage or body clearly opposed to your desires, and over which you hold no sway, to suddenly adopt them?

what are you going to do if they don't, and what are you waiting for, when they clearly haven't already? crying wolf loses effectiveness rapidly...

why not recommend meaningful action on a large scale that would directly impact those responsible for the damage? why not suggest a date for such?

finally, why continue to present elections, or the government, as legitimate? if a government is described as representational, but does not represent, why not call them out?

oh, yeah...

"If [Obama] decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008."

And if Obama does not so decide? McKibben's plea for ecological sanity would be a demand had he articulated an "or else." Obama has a unique chance to behave conscientiously here, free of congressional pressures, we are told. The White House has telegraphed that Obama has no problem with this pipeline by leaving it up to State Department. If administration policy does not change as the State Department inevitably approves this project, then what? Will McKibben stop entertaining delusions about Obama? Will he put away the silly buttons and threaten some form of actual resistance?

Dr. King was under intense pressure, 110% of the time. At any moment a bullet could have taken him down, and he knew it.

McKibbon is no Dr. King. This piece does gross injustice to his name.

Incredibly sad and heartbreaking it has come to this.

Dear: Bill,

Thanks for being on the line; thanks for that dedication. Now I hope I can make a few points about your comments without demeaning the value of what your doing.

First, I'd appreciate, in the future, if you didn't mix the word "nonviolence" with the words power and weapon. Nonviolence isn't a "powerful" anything. It is a personal and sometimes collective choice. It isn't based in ego. It in no way says to another, "I'm better than you." It is based upon the lack of power, the lack of ego. It is a person looking at someone who is trying to claim power over him, at perhaps the most severe abuser of human rights, with calm benevolent affection; and non-judgement. It is person owning themselves at a far deeper level than anyone can claim or try to own them through force, intimidation, or law. It is the reminder to others that they too own themselves, that they too can choose a different way, a different view of the world, and without being made to feel guilty for their previous choices, or being valued less. Non violence is a reminder that we all have value and no one can strip that value away from us, unless we let them; that include the protester and the person who's arresting the protester. We are all part of the human family, and have all been doing this dance a long time.

Now as for your courage. If you were truly terrified of going to jail for a few days, then it was for you a courageous act. I've though never found going to jail to be a frightening thing. Jail has always been to me either a bit boring or an opportunity to meet and interact with people who really need to meet and interact with someone like me, someone who can see them as a incredibly valuable person (something most prisoners have never experienced and even some cops). Jail has always been an opportunity to change people perceptions, by enjoying it, by having fun. The proudest moment of my life happened in jail, when I got a group of people into discussion about dreaming, about perception, about life, and being, and they for a moment forgot they were in jail.

Nonviolence is at root the hope of stripping all the illusions of power and fear away. To return us to an honest moment of just being.

In America, we've got to face some social fears when we take up action, but we really very rarely have to show any real courage. We do not have to get beat or killed. We just have to sit in jail for a few days or maybe longer. And that generally isn't a big deal, unless we're still trapped by "their" perceptions. Life is always a prison of our perceptions, the projection of others power, and nonviolence is always the effort to take the moment back to the truth of what it is. And in that truth, their is no power. We do not control fate, or the sun, or chance or, gravity; we are but being making choices and those choices shape the moment. Do we chose to love, or do we chose to hate? Do we chose to fear, and control, or do we see another as important as real and meaningful as ourselves?

deleted

I'm with others in here who are offended by Bill McKibben's comparison of himself and his jail time to the courageous efforts of Martin Luther King. Being held a few days longer in a Washington jail hardly qualifies as "strong treatment." While I don't wish any physical harm on anyone involved in any protest, the protestors and marchers during MLK's times were often beaten to a pulp, poisioned by gases and treated with unconscionable cruelty. There's a huge difference between these two very different scenarios.

I'm not diminishing the positiveness of this protest's goal. But I am tired of the tactics many of today's leaders employ which is to reinvent history to accomodate a current story. It's all this theater and drama in Mr. McKibben's portrait of a protest.

I would love to see this pipeline project blocked. But for the record I will not be surprised when Obama gives the green light on it, which he will. Obama has proven over and over and over to be a great orator of uplifting and promising words that always morph into non-action and lies.

I have to agree with yohocoda, that even if Obama does veto the pipeline, it in no way convices me to vote for his warmongering, Wall Street-asskissing, tea party-enabling ass. There's almost no chance he will veto it, and when he doesn't we can look forward to McKibben's next doomed strategy to make him an environment-friendly president. The guy just won't give up on possibly the worst president in US history.

But even if Obama should block the pipeline, I won't be voting for him. He'll just turn around and hand over more of the ANWR to Shell, more of the Gulf to BP, and a few more trillion bucks to Wall Street criminals. And in his second term he'll make sure Social Security is fully privatized, just as Boehner and the rest of the greedsters demand.

BTW, is it really so hard to spell McKibben's name? I've seen it mangled about a dozen ways. McKibbon, McKibbins, McKibbert, McKibblerts, McKimmon, etc. Hey, it's McKibben, all you spelling-challenged posters.

Bill has been at the forefront on the environmental movement for over thirty years and hardly needs to be lectured by the Tea Party nut jobs that post here while disguising themselves as leftists. Nevertheless, all voices have the right to be heard -- even the dull and inert -- whose entire impotent activism is derived on forums like this, while sitting in their corporate cubical hurling self righteous ejaculations as their fingers dance over the keyboard. I don't agree with Bill's gloves off approach to Obama, but I can still respect the man and his lifelong commitment to Mother Earth. Moreover, Ive seen the same type of bombast directed at Nader over the years: another man who has sacrificed his entire life to making a better world for all...

Sigh.

I find that I'm increasingly reluctant to open up my big bazoo about McKibben.

For one thing, it's hard to know whether his high profile on this site has reached Peak McKibben, so it's impossible to calibrate how to pace oneself.

He's clearly overtaken Dennis Kucinich in the race for Most Provocative, Controversial, and Polarizing Left-Leaning Public Figure; legacy champion Ralph Nader has temporarily vanished in a cloud of green dust.

I never could warm up to McKibben, but I am fitfully sympathetic to him.

He's a hell of a Tryer, for one thing; it's easy to see why those who credit "trying"-- i.e. taking action, as the supreme virtue and desideratum in and of itself-- enthusiastically root for him.

Also, despite those who are majorly bothered by his presumptuous invoking of Martin Luther King, it seems to me that he's trying to be modestly ironic and self-deprecating about it.

And it's disingenuous to find fault with McKibben on the grounds that he's only protesting to shut down one piddling pipeline, which hardly compares to Dr. King's sweeping and profound mission of achieving social justice.

Regardless of whether one thinks McKibben is accomplishing anything, it must be conceded that his overall mission of achieving environmental or ecological is just as sweeping and profound.

The pipeline is one small or limited expression of that, not a be-all and end-all. It's idle to scornfully denounce a "tryer" because a given protest is somehow tellingly trivial.

One could as easily disparage Dr. King for only wanting to give African-Amerikans in Montgomery a better seat on a bus, or getting a better deal for one lousy group of sanitation workers in Memphis.

Still, one of the characteristics of McKibben's "trying" is that he does seem to espouse an approach of trying anything in hopes that something will stick.

For example: protest and civil disobedience is fundamentally predicated on a moral or ethical argument explicitly outside of "realpolitik", aka practical politics or political expedience.

So the message to Obama and other responsible authorities is that the Keystone XL pipeline is WRONG for any number of reasons, ergo opposing it is the RIGHT thing to do.

Of course, "right" doesn't come down from heaven or arise in a vacuum; it's "right" for rational, practical, common-sense GOOD reasons. But the point is that Obama et al ought to be coming out against the pipeline independently of the diabolical political calculus that governs "politics as usual".

But it seems to me that McKibben can't help but try to sweeten the pot by throwing in that besides, Doing the Right Thing will be politically helpful to Obama! It will charm and cheer his disillusioned, abused "progressive base"!

See, we're still wearing our Obama '08 buttons above our creased trousers and on our suit jacket lapels next to our ties! If you "come back to us" on this one, we'll be your Best Friend Forever!

I know that McKibben rationalizes this by asserting that he's trying to rouse Obama's MORAL sensibilities-- hoping that Team Obama will remember The Way We Were and be moved by a hybrid moral and political epiphany.

But it's just fatuous or delusional to deny that this isn't also an implicit political quid pro quo: do what we're asking and those Obama '08 buttons will be updated to Obama '12 buttons!

It's well and good to observe that real life is in fact a mix of the ideal and the pragmatic, and to applaud McKibben for often resorting to this mixed-signal, two-tier logic.

But I think that trying to "work" Obama et al By Any Means Necessary relies on a misguided justification that the end justifies the means. And the mixed signals may seem superficially coherent, but they're fundamentally inconsistent and incompatible. I think that dangling a political dividend in front of Obama is too clever by half, and a detrimental miscalculation.

I can't blame people for getting pissed off at McKibben's penchant for effectively wooing Obama, and trying to ratchet up the pressure to Do the Right Thing by intimating that it's a win-win-- that it's both ethically right AND politically expedient.

So much for not blowing off my big bazoo about McKibben. I'm already remonstrating to myself not to do it again, because I'll probably live to regret it.

Way to go Bill McKibben and company!

You have - "kicked it up a notch".

One step at a time, "each a little higher than the last." (Conrad Kain)

Manysummits
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_______________________________________

"If he decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008.

That’s why many of us were wearing our old campaign buttons when we went into the paddy wagon. We’d like to remember -- and like the White House to remember, too -- just why we knocked on all those doors."

Give me a break! Obama sucks whether he refuses to approve the pipeline or not. And Bill, I admire that you put your ass on the line on the pipeline issue, and I'm happy that you and your organizer's are using a two-week long wave approach (that's more effective than a typical one-day protest), but as you should know there are issues other than global warming that are CRUCIAL and HUGE, and Obama sucks on all of them. This idea, which unfortunately is very common among most activists and organizations that THEIR issue is the end and be all is killing us from having a chance to ever win the battle against elites for fundamental restructuring of the economic, military, media, and corporate empires in this country. ALL of them have to be attacked in concerted action or none of them will fall! Don't you get it? We need major collaboration among various groups, new and old, to ultimately win at any of this. We don't need activists or true resistance organizations thinking that their single issue is clearly the most important.

And the idea that Obama supporters (or Obama himself) would even in the faintest way be vindicated if Obama were to say no to the pipeline is patently laughable. Obama would still suck. Look at his RECORD! And at best stopping the pipeline (which is 99% not likely to happen), while a victory, would still be a relatively small and isolated step in a decades long battle to even keep Co2 ppm below 450. And that will never happen unless we fiercely attack the corporate & capitalist system simultaneously as well.

So please, can we get real here!!

Okay, maybe I was a bit harsh towards Mr. McKibben, it just seemed wrong for him to try to align himself with Dr. King.
Of course I am against the tar sands project, and the proposed pipeline in the United States. In fact, I am a staunch environmentalist who abhors logging, mining, and any other desecration of nature.
And I dearly wish that the current protest would eventually translate into a major environmental movement, but I guess I have gotten jaded with the Powers That Be who seemingly control everything nowadays
So, my apologies, Mr. McKibben- no harm intended. I wish you the best- with all of your followers- and I hope the protests spread.

Tnd441- WOW, I wish I could exhibit that kind of adult behavior. I commend you. I also can be seemingly harsh. I have questions about the efficacy, and tactics, and motivations about Bill McK at al., but I like that they are organized and active. It is only through action anything gets better. I think we should all align ourselves with DR King- as even our interchange here has created awareness about his work. Please keep working on promoting ecology, we are all in it together.