Earlier this week, the traveling bookstore set up at a farmers market. The market manager put out signs reminding people to wear masks and maintain social distances. Besides selling used books and postcards, the traveling bookstore gave away free face masks, masks made by women in the community who have been sewing mountains of them since March.
I really enjoy talking books with people. I appreciate hearing kids enthuse about what they want to read. I like seeing someone get excited when they find a book they are searching for on the shelves – or discover a gem they didn’t even know they wanted. The traveling bookstore is small but it does have a remarkable inventory. Ask the man who inquired about a book on horses and I tried not to look doubtful as I pulled out the only three I had, but one was EXACTLY what he wanted. Most of the time, setting up the traveling bookstore brings joy.
And then someone stopped by who wasn’t wearing a face mask. In my kindest I-care-about-you voice I said masks were required at the farmers market and I had a box full of free ones so he could take his pick. But no. He didn’t want a mask. He said, with a smile, he was practicing civil disobedience.
I don’t know about you, but hearing ‘civil disobedience’ got my mind spinning on Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. I thought of Rosa Parks on the bus, the Stonewall uprising and the people in Tiananmen Square. I wanted to ask him what he meant. I wanted to say civil disobedience is an act to be honored, it isn’t a joke. I wanted to offer him a book, but he had already walked away.
And I was pissed trying to think how to react. It is a situation that plays out too frequently in my community these days. So it wasn’t anger at just this individual, but at the situation with the pandemic, with individuals and businesses who make choices that are potentially harmful to others, and at myself for feeling powerless.
But the incident got me thinking about civil disobedience and the remarkable occasions when people stood up to make the world better. Not only stood up but put their lives on the line. Gandhi’s Salt March, protests in Egypt, Ukraine, East Germany, and Selma. The list is long and if everyone who participated was counted, it would be millions. Millions! Millions of individuals who acted to make a difference, a positive difference. A difference that made the world a better place for themselves and their children and their neighbors. People were arrested and tear-gassed and blasted with fire hoses, and some were killed. Those who survived were willing to endure anything because they believed their endurance would change things for the better. And often it did.
I don’t know what vision the man held who refused to wear a mask at the farmers market. I hope he has a view larger than his own inconvenience on a summer’s afternoon. I am thankful my thoughts turned towards those who stood up for change, those who chose to walk towards something better, who kept true to their vision for days, months, even years. And this led me to consider when a choice to stand against power makes sense, and why in other instances it just seems wrong.
Some suggestions……
Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
Dorothy Day’s Hold Nothing Back
Angela Y. Davis’s If they Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance
Duncan Green’s How Change Happens
Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works
If you decide to purchase any of these titles, please support an independent bookstore.
Amazing Traveling Bookstore 
Dear ATB,
I found your blog very interesting and something that I have been pondering, also. Those who purposely refuse to wear masks (along with those refusing vaccination), seem to be doing something that might be quite harmful to themselves but also endangers others. In judging the value of one civil disobedience over another, is it a question of numbers: If enough people are willing to endure enough pain and loss, then their cause might be considered just? And, what of the rights of those who might be harmed by the disobedience? Most civil disobedience is in opposition to the power and laws of the state when other avenues of change seem to be blocked (like elections in a democracy?). When it comes to public health, I think, we are moving into very murky waters of right and wrong.
-Thornak
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