Civil disobedience, hard work and time
http://kindertrespass.com/index.asp?ID=37
We tend to forget how long it takes for the dreamed of, planned for, struggled for change to actually take place. It is very easy for activists to feel disheartened and defeated after the early exhilarating stages of a campaign, or the excitement of an act of civil disobedience. It’s a long slog and much of it is just sheer bloody minded persistence. The anniversary this week of the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 reminds us how very long it can take. I don’t just mean the 68 years from 1932 till the Countryside and Rights of Way Act was passed in 2000, but all the centuries of struggle by working people, the poor and the dispossessed for equal rights to the land, appropriated by the wealthy and powerful for leisure and profit. From the Peasants’ Revolt in the 14th century, which conjures the names of Wat Tyler and John Ball, through to Wynstanley and the True Levellers in the 17th, radical writers such as Blake and Thomas Paine in the 18th, and the work of Victorian liberals and radicals who founded the Open Spaces Society