The social unrest roiling Quebec is colour-coded red. One cannot miss the hundreds of thousands of people with cloth of the colour pinned to their coats and satchels; the stickers pasted on street poles and storefront mannequins; and the sheets fluttering from balconies and windows. The red squares – punning visually on a French expression to be squarely in the red, or in debt – are a gesture of solidarity with university and college students on a massive general strike against government tuition fee hikes.
ALPEROVITZ: The Environmental Movement's Civil Disobedience
September 15, 2011
Civil disobedience is a transformation of consciousness, a sudden revelation that something new must be done. It is the knowledge that there are two options: disrupt and change the system or remain silent in the face of injustice. Right now, civil disobedience is emerging from the anti-war and environmental movements in significant ways, most notably around opposition to the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. In this video with historian and writer Gar Alperovitz at the Liberty Tree Foundation's 2011 Democracy Convention, he wonders when the leadership from these campaigns will inspire the shift in consciousness that will change our broken environmental and economic systems.
See his other interview from the 2011 Democracy Convention here.
