From Waging Non-Violence: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/confronting-the-1-percent-directly/
George Lakey
May 7, 2013
When do activists get to confront the 1 percent directly, in a situation in which we can lay out our case and challenge them to answer? I don’t mean a situation buffered through the mass media, or politicians — not a situation when they are insulated from us by police, but one in which we meet them face-to-face?
Some of us had that rare experience in Pittsburgh on April 23 when we, outnumbered by 1 percenters and police, forced them to end one of their meetings rather than listen to us any longer.
The Earth Quaker Action Team had twice before attended the PNC Bank’s annual shareholder meeting, and each time we had obeyed their rules, using the time allotted to speak truth about mountaintop-removal coal mining. Once we had with us the 80-year-old grandson of one of the bank’s founders, and he scolded the board for what it was doing. The previous encounters were satisfying in their way, but PNC continued to abuse the Appalachian people, destroy their environment and escalate climate change.
This time, therefore, we made two decisive shifts. First, we would create our own Quaker-style business meeting and conduct it at the same time and place as PNC was trying to pursue its agenda. Second, we showed that we would henceforth hold individual PNC board members accountable until they begin to “bank like Appalachia matters.” We did that through simultaneous actions inside and outside the PNC meeting.
Acting out of class scripts
Stepping it up required letting go of deeply ingrained social class scripts. While the participants included many non-Quaker students and others, the majority of the activists had been brought up middle and upper-middle class. That class background conditions people to feel an obligation to fit in. Some activists may rebel in a moment of rage and break the rules, but it is after all a rebellion; the conditioning remains, ready to reclaim most children of the middle class when they finally settle down. EQAT (pronounced “equate”) decided that, instead of fitting in to PNC’s order of business, we would conduct our own meeting in the same space, with our own agenda.
Our agenda violated another class script.
The economic function of the middle class is to manage, teach and shape up the working class in the interest of the owning class. The worry that most middle class people feel — “Am I doing enough? Well enough?” — is an expression of the loyalty expected of them by the owning class. The direction of accountability is clear. One place you can see it these days is on college campuses, where even tenured faculty find unthinkable the idea of disloyalty to their masters, the 1 percenters who sit on the board of trustees.
Continue reading at: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/confronting-the-1-percent-directly/
