MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — In a world where the president goes on Twitter to call a woman “horseface” it seems pointless to call for “civility.” So let me suggest that we start with a lower bar, maybe one we could still hope to achieve: Let’s stop threatening to kill one another.
One morning last week I had to write to a young colleague in the environmental movement. He works in South America, he’d been getting death threats over social media and he was rightly alarmed. I could counsel him a little because I myself have been getting them, sporadically, for a long time. But I couldn’t counsel him much, because what is there to say beyond “Be careful, know that it’s a tribute to your effectiveness and don’t hesitate to take some time off”?
I was his age when I first started getting such threats, in the 1990s, and they’ve escalated over the years as campaigns I’ve helped organize against pipelines or for fossil fuel divestment have gained traction. I remember one police officer telling me that “the ones who write you aren’t the ones who shoot you,” which I found comforting for about 15 seconds till I thought through its implications.
My practice has been just to delete threats from my email — I find that if I don’t, I keep looking at them, and I imagine (I hope) the main goal of their authors is to distract me. If you’re going to be a lightning rod, some sparks are probably the price.
An hour after I’d written to that young man, though, something happened that moved me to think about this more thoroughly. It began last week when The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed article of mine describing a trial in Minnesota where some protesters — acting peacefully, threatening no one and informing the company they were protesting against — engaged the emergency shut-off valves on two pipelines and forced the company to temporarily shut off the flow of oil from Canada’s tar sands into the United States.
The case against the protesters had been dismissed on the grounds that they’d done no damage; I was trying in my essay to explain why nonviolent civil disobedience helped in the fight for a workable climate.
Not everyone agreed. Indeed, a few hours after my essay appeared, awebsite called Watts Up With That? published an attack on my article. This enterprise — which bills itself as the most widely read website about the climate, and claims about three million to four million visitors a month — is devoted to proving we have nothing to fear from climate change. The author of the blog post, David Middleton, called me a misfit and made reference to my “sunken chest.” Sure, whatever. Sadly, this just seems to be how politics unfolds in the age of Drumpf.
But then the commenters went at it. One said: “Anybody got Bill McKibben’s home address? Let’s see how he really feels about ‘civil disobedience’ if it shows up at his front door.” Another added, “Give him a smack for me.” One or two tried to calm people down. But there was also this comment, from someone named “gnomish:” “There is a protocol worth observing: S.S.S. It stands for shoot, shovel and S.T.F.U. Hope that saves you some trouble.”
This “protocol” was left over from the right-wing fight against endangered species laws. If, say, a protected woodpecker was on your land, the “Three S’s” doctrine held that you should kill it, bury it and keep your mouth shut about it. It was, in this case, a public call for someone to murder me, and not long afterward another commenter, “Carbon Bigfoot,” supplied my home address... (continues)
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