The Impossible Revolution - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 63

a dream” speech. That rally has served as the template for virtually every
later rally in the nation's capital, each of which has implicitly invoked the
civil rights movement as the model of its own seriousness.
But because such rallies are symbolic—because they express certain
demands without forcing immediate action—they hit their mark only
if the government is willing to listen, only if pressure reaches an official
audience that accepts the legitimacy of popular demands. When officials
believe that they have already responded to those demands or that the
new moral claims are illegitimate, the mass rally does not make a great
deal of difference; the crowd will assemble and disband, the press will give
it passing atention, and the life of the nation will go on, relatively undis-
turbed. In that case, the rally ultimately constitutes a feel-good occasion,
a day for collective self-expression that has no real consequence. This
much, at least, is true of rallies concerning ecology and climate change;
the various rallies, protest marches, and other events in recent years have
not budged Congressional sentiment a single inch.
What about the strategies tried by the Occupy Wall Street demon-
strations beginning in the autumn of 2011? Would the more aggressive
atempt not just to demonstrate but to occupy public space have a greater
impact? For beter or worse, however, that protest movement, while
addressing real concerns, did not provide a list of demands to which
those in power might respond. he movement succeeded in puting cer-
tain ideas into the overall political debate and changing the dynamic in
the nation's capital and elsewhere, but it did not have a powerful, imme-
diate impact.
Would it be possible for activism to pursue a more courageous, cre-
ative tactic to break out of this impasse? Many nations have undergone
nonviolent revolutions over the past several decades when vast num-
bers of ordinary citizens took over public space, demanded a change in
government, and succeeded. The actions of immense, persistent, disci-
plined crowds in the Philippines and Indonesia, Berlin and the Ukraine,
Tunisia and Egypt—and elsewhere in the Arab Spring—are excellent
cases in point, even if the transformations they helped bring about have
not necessarily endured. Could such an event take place in the United
States, though for a different purpose? Could an immense rally in the
public spaces of the nation's capital—a rally that begins on the premise