“What I learned from breaking the law”
In 1971, I helped burglarize an FBI office and leaked documents that exposed J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses of power. Here’s what that experience taught me.
I have been asked to develop a set of reflections on the moral lessons I learned from breaking the law. Here is part of that story.
In 1961 I was arrested and put in jail in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was a “freedom rider.” Then, ten years later, a group of us calling ourselves “The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into the Media, Pennsylvania office of the FBI, removed the files and released them to the news media. What did I learn from breaking the law? Here are five lessons I learned. I learned that:
1) Law is not to be trusted without interrogating its complicity with privilege and power.
2) Identity is morally problematic, especially if you get yourself born a white male of class privilege.
3) A nation that lets itself be governed by fear will become a poorly governed nation.
4) The arrogance of power contributes to its own demise when confronted by persistent resistance, and finally….
5) I learned that the anger called hope can overcome despair, create a community of resistance and build a future that seemed impossible.
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The 1960s was the last time We The People looked with hope to government to solve our problems. It was to Washington that we took our anger and our hope. We rode the buses and trains to Washington. We took to the streets in Washington. We carried our signs and sang our songs in Washington. Now here we are more than 40 years later, and as a nation we are once again locked in a battle between cynicism and hope.
Most of us are classroom teachers. I don’t know about you, but my students are angry. They are angry that the so-called “recovery” is a recovery of Wall Street that leaves Main Street behind. They are angry that the old white guys who run things in our country turn their backs on a sustainable future. After all, it is their future, not the old fat cats who soon will be dead. And they are angry that their vote is getting drowned in a sea of money, our democracy rapidly becoming a plutocracy. But the best and the brightest of my students are not just angry. They are also flirting with despair.
It is an interesting time to be a teacher of ethics as your students teeter between despair and hope. How do we help them preserve their conscience and continue to bring strong expectations to themselves and to our country? Here is what I’ve learned. You ask them to consider the past. A future of fundamental change has always seemed impossible. Who, for example, in 1959 would have predicted that the 1960s were about to happen? Significant change, precisely because it is significant always seems impossible, until in retrospect it appears inevitable. We learned, those many years ago, the truth about power and possibility, that there is always possibility beyond the reach of power to control. We learned that persistent resistance can “make a way where there is no way.”
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