Interfering with airport operations? Knowingly intimidating airport patrons, employees, and security personnel for purely political purposes? Blocking access to travelers as they attempt to go about their perfectly lawful business?
Where’s the Department of Homeland Security when you really need ’em, anyhow?
These climate scientists feel ‘a higher calling’ — civil disobedience
Fine then; I have no real problem with civil disobedience, which has a long and for the most part honorable historical tradition here in the US. I am likewise fine with these weedy shitlibs being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for said civil disobedience, which would be the time-honored, traditional result of such disruption.
As world leaders discuss climate change at the United Nations summit in Egypt, activists elsewhere are targeting private jets and frequent flyers, which contribute to global warming. On Thursday, four people, including two climate scientists, were charged with trespassing after they chained themselves to entryways at Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s private jet terminal.
It was one in a series of protests at 17 airports around the world coordinated by a group called Scientist Rebellion.
Peter Kalmus of Chapel Hill studies biodiversity and ecological forecasting for NASA. Rose Abramoff of Knoxville, Tennessee, researches how climate change affects ecosystems. She doesn’t want to say where.
They’re also both activists, who have recently turned to civil disobedience. Abramoff says she struggles to keep her work and her activism separate:
“Like all scientists, we were trained to maintain a type of neutrality in all things, especially when speaking publicly. As scientists, none of us claim to represent our institutions. But we do speak from a place of greater credibility because of our educational background, and because of our training in the climate sciences,” Abramoff said.
“But when we’re engaging in advocacy, we’re citizens, you know, we’re mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons and members of our community. And we have a right to say what we’re thinking, and almost a responsibility,” Abramoff said.
Yes, you in fact DO have a right to say what you’re “thinking.” So stipulated. What you assuredly do NOT have either a “right” or a “responsibility” to do is any of the things I mentioned in the opening line above, all of which are HIGHLY illegal acts, particular when one does them at an airport. I know all of you are suffused with great pride in your superior intellects, your higher morality and concern, and your overweening, too-precious sense of God-granted entitlement to dictate to us lesser beings as to how we must conduct our own lives.
I repeat: fine, then. Put your fucking money where your fucking fat yaps are and do some hard time for the flagrant illegalities you’ve perpetrated due to your own smug, self-righteous sense of entitlement to harass other people who have done nothing whatever to deserve it. Let’s all see whether your well-muscled, proto-simian, menacing cellmate thinks as highly of you holy-rollers and your “higher calling” as you yourselves do.
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