On Sunday November 15^th, I found myself marching to Boston Commons with The Leadership Campaign, a student group of activists trying to get progressive climate action legislation passed in Massachusetts. Somewhere around 250 students and community members marched from M.I.T. to the Commons, singing and chanting ‘Hey hey! Ho Ho! Global warming’s got to go!’ I suspect that the level of energy and enthusiasm would have made Emma Goldman happy—she who famously coined the phrase ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.’

Once we reached the Commons, The Leadership Campaign ran a rally with Bill McKibben, a well-known climate-change activist who heads up the group 350.org. And after the rally, 150 of us camped out on the Commons all night long—a misdemeanor worthy of citation for ‘trespassing.’ Indeed, at 2:30 am the Boston Police came around, shouting that if we ‘did not step out of our tents,’ we would ‘be subject to arrest.’ Once we were all out, the interaction was quite cordial—name, address, social security number please. 122 campers were cited for trespassing (some international students opted not to get cited, finishing the night in the nearby Swedenborgian church), and then we all went back to bed, exhausted.

All of the wonderful, radical work of civil disobedience has an aura of mythos around it—wow! We got cited! If we go to court, it will provide even MORE publicity for the necessity of decisive legislation on climate change! And it’s also exhausting, especially for those students who have been camping out on their campuses for the last month, ‘refusing to sleep in dorms and homes powered by dirty electricity.’ The work that this group and the few others, as radical as it, are doing is powerful, necessary, and hopefully not too late.

But that’s not what I got really caught up thinking about, standing there under the street lights 500 feet from the Massachusetts state house at 3 a.m. I was thinking about words—as usual. ‘Commons,’ it’s called. ‘The Boston Commons,’ a word that says to me ‘public,’ which says ‘open,’ which says ‘space to be part of a people.’ And yet, at 11 pm, our presence there became a crime.

Our presence, which if for nothing else, was for the purpose of the ‘common’ good—that is, ensuring that laws get passed to keep our earth habitable—was outlawed in the ‘public’ space.

What does it really mean to be part of the ‘public,’ then? Does it mean we act in certain ways? Or think in certain ways? Is being in ‘public’ understood to mean toeing the line, sticking within the rules, and not questioning authority? For hundreds of years the ethos and way of being a citizen of the United States of America has been founded on several fundamental principles, one of which is the ability to speak out in public when we perceive that the government is not acting in our best interest. (http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1: 'Right of the people peaceably to assemble')

So what, then, does it mean to trespass on public ground? If we take a wide view of what public means—that is, that anyone can be there, doing whatever one wants, within socialized limits—then, what we did is not an offense. And again, homeless people who use the ‘public’ ground as the only place where they can safely (or sometimes not-so-safely) get forty winks, are also routinely criminalized for trespassing. How was our presence different from that of a homeless person?

Some might argue that homeless people are not acting in the public good, not intentionally ‘peaceably assembling,’ and therefore should be cited. But we were acting in the public good, and we were also cited. TO have both groups be at risk of being criminalized—activists and people without ‘private’ dwellings to return to—seems a deep contradiction.

It’s not an easily answered question. To make a crime out of sleeping is heinous, and it seems as though what the law seeks to do in this case is prevent the possibility of worse crimes. But it seems to me that neither homeless folks nor activists are the ones most likely to commit ‘worse crimes’ than sleeping out in a public space. Activists use their bodies to make statements about what needs to be done in the world—it is with our bodily presence that we become extralegal in behavior. And so too for people with no permanent dwelling: their bodies are a political statement, a ‘private’ presence in the ‘public’ space.

As I fell asleep there on the lawn in front of the State House at 3:20 am, along with 122 other newly criminalized young and older bodies, along with visionaries and folks who just do the right thing when it comes along, these were the thoughts running through my head. I don’t have any neat way to wrap it up for you, just a few of questions that perhaps more of us should think about more often:

How much of your time do you spend thinking ‘I can’t do that here, in public?’ What does that mean? How do you alter your understanding of what is ‘appropriate’ when you’re not at home? Do you feel less comfortable speaking out, calling attention to yourself and asking questions? Is this what public is meant to be?

I know that every time I participate in a good old civil disobedience campaign, I come across these same questions.

For the time being, thank goodness it’s mildly illegal to sleep on Boston Commons—otherwise The Leadership Campaign wouldn’t be getting nearly the leverage it has in the House and Senate of Massachusetts. Every so often it’s good and necessary to ‘peaceably assemble’ and let the government know we expect them to step up to the plate.