"Elysium" and Civil Disobedience

[su_vimeo url="http://vimeo.com/48834336"]“It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen,” said Aristotle.  In other words, our individual strengths, as important as they are, can never reach their full capacity until will apply them to the broader world around us – our community of citizens.This is how a number of societies, filled with good people, fell apart.  The same people watched as growing inequities, even injustices occurred around them, and failed to pick up the cause and struggle for the greater good.  Thus, law-abiding individuals and their families remained behind a veil of distance as entire populations suffered in Germany and Poland, Czechoslovakia and South Africa, India and Guatemala, and the streets of the American south and the aboriginal reserves of Canada.  If Martin Luther King Jr. was correct when he stated, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” then our civilization has been subjected to millions of normally proper people who opted to “play it safe” and preserve themselves in the process.But what must citizens do when it is not so much laws that are at fault, but policies?  This is a special predicament in the affluent nations of the West, like Canada itself, where historical processes of jurisprudence have lent a fairer edge to modern societies.  Nevertheless, poor policies can blunt the effectiveness of legal liberties, security and protection.  We have complicated and layered legislation designed for the benefit of our aboriginal populations that have nevertheless proved overwhelmingly ineffective in establishing proper levels of justice and equality.  We have laws designed to provide women with equal pay for equal work, and yet our policies and implementation continue to see women economically suffer under historical prejudices.And now we are reaching the point where civil friction is increasingly experienced in levels of income inequality.  It was the very same financial disparity that drove the Arab Spring and formed a fundamental reasoning for the Velvet, Rose and Orange revolutions of recent times.We supposedly believed in a fair and justice society in Canada, and yet, with no laws being broken (except for, perhaps, human rights infractions), we have permitted the gap between the rich and poor to widen precariously.  But our economic divisions involve much more than just the struggle between the wealthy and the poor.  The growing base of research revealing the growing riches of the 1% versus the rest is landing squarely on the consciences of Canadians, and they are growing increasingly agitated – not that laws are being violated, but that a respectful and productive society feels farther out of reach than in recent memory.Listening to Vaclav Havel speak one day years ago, I began to discern the distinction he drew between unjust laws and unfair policies.  Yes, the former was more serious than the latter, but he went on to point out that the effect of both could be just as harmful to society because they successfully forced even good people to the sidelines.  I have read all his works, including poems and plays, and this distinction has increasingly filled the human space between the written lines.Can we form an effective kind of peaceful civil disobedience, not against laws, but against stupid policies in Canada?  And what would that look like?  It appears that the growing effort of political parties to tear one another part hardly provides any solution.  It will require good people, who have raised their game to the level of citizenship, to begin to pull together to correct divisive policies before laws themselves eventually become unjust.Take a look at the video above.  Matt Damon starred in the movie Elysium earlier this year.  It was about an elite few orbiting on a station of splendor above the earth, while the majority in the world below faced crippling poverty and levels of injustice that were destroying a once productive civilization.  Damon was asked at the last-minute to address a gathering of people concerned with the direction of modern society.  Instead of speaking off-the-cuff, he read from Howard Zann’s 1970 speech on, The Problem is Civil Disobedience, and he did in such a way that it delighted the audience and moved them forward in their efforts to change society.  Damon’s speech lasted five minutes; its effect is still being felt.  He has personally addressed this subject many times. It’s time we started thinking of other possibilities for tacking the growing income inequality that is threatening to undo so much of what our parents and grandparents built together.  It is time to acknowledge that peacefully protesting bad policies isn’t foreign to democracy, but its very essence.