Excuse me while I take a brief break from pictureposting to express my extreme frustration and disappointment of the sentencing handed down to Tim DeChristopher this afternoon.
In April, I posted a video of DeChristopher from Powershift in Washington, D.C. While the entire conference was incredibly inspiring, hearing DeChristopher speak for all of 8minutes made me feel like I HAD to do something, that WE had to do something if we are to ever change the current destructive and fatal trajectory that our society is honing in on. His words made me feel as though, if we all worked together, we could truly do something to alter our society and start making right, sane decisions. We could stop blowing up mtns in the name of a dirty fuel source. We could stop selling off beautiful tracts of land for oil and gas exploration. We could stand up together, change our civilization, and change it for the better. After hearing him, I realized that if we are to truly see a change, we must fight and we must fight hard. And while this fight may require incredible challenges and an inconvenience in our daily schedules of school, work, and partying, I knew it was a fight that must be fought.
This afternoon, DeChristopher was sentenced to two years of prison a $10,000 fine for "disrupting a federal oil and gas lease auction." Numerous reports and news stories state that several tracts of Utah land were being sold (illegally) by the federal govt for $2/acre. DeChristopher took a stand and bid on several tracts, ultimately raising the final bids much higher and even winning $1.8million worth of oil and gas leases he had no intention of paying for.
Activism of this kind is unheard of these days. This act of civil disobedience has raised awareness to the auctioning off of public land for decimation and environmental degradation, and DeChristopher has inspired millions of people to finally wake up and act to protect our Earth (myself, included). It appears that the judge of the trial is attempting to deter others from committing more acts of non-violent civil disobedience. I truly hope that this ruling only encourages others to take a stand and fight.
Nice writing :) Such an inspiring story. 'They' scare us away from civil disobedience with the threat of consequences - prison, fines, "records".. but those consequences are only meaningful if you subscribe to the system of which they are a product. Fuck that system.
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