A more authentic ring

Bentonville protest made more meaningful by resistance

I doubt Bentonville’s school board intended to make Wednesday’s protest by its students more meaningful. That is what happened, though.

The one-in-six or so Bentonville High School students who joined a nationwide walkout of classes were supposed to be marked absent. They are also supposed to receive detention. That assumes, of course, that the board’s 4-3 vote Monday night to enforce the rules is widely obeyed. After all, there are 400 students due the penalty, administrators estimate. Detention could get crowded. Also, the administration is sympathetic. The board voted to overrule school administrators.

Other districts gave license. I mean no slight to students in other Northwest Arkansas towns who got more lenient treatment. I am quite sure many of the students in the other big towns would gladly have paid the price demanded of students in Bentonville. Still, the fact remains. They did not have to.

I respect a protest more when there is some resistance, some sacrifice, when deciding to act carries some consequences even if it is just school detention. Protests, marches and such are fine things. Still, few would remember Rosa Parks had she been allowed to keep her seat, however unjust that would be to the rest of the life of the “first lady of civil rights.”

The 10 a.m. walkout was made to draw attention to the fact that, sporadically and unpredictably, students attending classes somewhere in the United States get gunned down. This is a serious matter. Still, some of the scorn directed at the Bentonville School Board by protest supporters backfired. At least it did with me.

The gun issue is a divisive one, but it is also one I have written on many times. My topics today are marching, protesting, civil disobedience and backfires.

I have heard quite a few people say the board’s decision was the denial of some sort of right, that the students should be heard. My argument is, the students were. The protest in Bentonville was amplified.

It is a truth of human nature that the more something costs a person, the more inclined he or she is to believe it was worth the cost. This is a fact the status quo remembers often, so it often lowers costs. Civil disobedience without consequence may not be civil disobedience at all. It may well be the status quo letting the would-be forces of change blow off a little steam. Also, that may be the effect even if the allowing authority’s intention was sincere.

At least one fellow of my acquaintance said, rather intemperately, that the whole board in Bentonville should be removed. My reaction can be fairly summarized as: Huh. That was not exactly a “Give me liberty or give me death” response. He seems awfully perturbed that something that is supposed to jolt the status quo into action was not given an open runway.

Leave aside the question of whether a long-standing rule that students should attend class is just or not. Assume for the sake of argument that this otherwise unexceptional rule in Bentonville was unjust this time. “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” Dr. Martin Luther King wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham. “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

By the way, King was in jail for parading without a permit.

I reread his letter Thursday night — and discovered that throughout my many years, I had only read abridged versions. Here is a passage new to me that seems relevant today:

“There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society …

“If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring.”

As I said, the kids of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and many other places were sincere on Wednesday. But Bentonville’s protest had the more authentic ring.