Meet the #RockingChair10
Media Round-Up of the #RockingChairRebellion and an inside account of the sit-in we staged at Chase Bank the next day.
This post highlights media coverage of Th!rdAct’s March 21 National Day of Action to demand that the biggest U.S. banks stop investing in new fossil fuel projects. It is coming to be known as the #RockingChairRebellion because at our Washington DC event dozens of elders in rocking chairs held 24-hour vigils outside the four dirtiest banks, blocking the entrances. I end the post with a story about the #RockingChair10 who entered Chase Bank the next day to deliver a citizens’ indictment of the bank’s crimes in funding the destruction of a livable planet.
Weeks of work for me and fellow volunteers paid off on Tuesday with a fabulous #RockingChairRebellion in Washington, DC, one of more than 100 actions across the country organized by Th!rdAct and dozens of partner organizations across the United States to demand that the world’s biggest, dirtiest banks stop investing in new fossil fuel projects.
Our National Day of Action, the largest U.S. protest ever organized by older Americans, came the day after the United Nation’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change released the terrifying Synthesis Report of its Sixth Assessment.
The report states: “climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all… The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years (italics added).
Citing the IPCC report, the Washington Post reported that the world is rapidly approaching a global average temperature increase of 1.5C (2.7 F) above pre-industrial levels, a ceiling agreed upon by all countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Beyond that level:
…temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — where humanity appears to be headed — the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals and people (italics added).
Although the IPCC’s scientific findings are not new, the window for action is smaller than ever, so the report greatly increased the sense of urgency for those of us participating in Th!rdAct protests across the country. The DC demo I helped to organize was one of the biggest and it features prominently in the extensive media coverage. Here’s a sample:
A ‘Rocking Chair Rebellion’: Seniors Call On Banks to Dump Big Oil
Older climate activists gathered in cities around the country for a day of action targeting banks that finance fossil fuel projects… (Cara Buckley in the NYT, includes video)
Why seniors are blocking entrances to the four largest U.S. banks
Protests in cities across the country will target Chase, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo…(Maxine Joselow in the Washington Post, with a great picture of the die-in we staged in front of the biggest, dirtiest bank, Chase)
Publications as diverse as Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, Democracy Now! and even Fox Business also ran stories. If the Fox Business story was only slightly snide, the comments were predictably unhinged. Reuters compiled a video that gives a good sense of the DC action, including folks cutting up their dirty bank credit cards.
Not sure that the bank CEOs had heard our message, 10 of us returned the next morning and walked into the Chase branch that had been the focus of our protests to deliver a Citizen’s Indictment of the fossil banks, including Chase Bank and its notorious CEO, Jamie Dimon. We then staged a sit-in, singing songs and reading out loud the indictment and the Washington Post story on the new IPCC report.
Here’s some video shot inside the bank (skip ahead to 4:30 to hear me read the part of the indictment focused on the catastrophic impacts of climate change on poor people around the world and here in the United States.)
The Chase security staff told us to leave, then announced that the bank was closed and told us to leave again. We said we would leave when Chase stops investing in new fossil fuel projects — as HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, did last December.
Police were called and we were arrested, handcuffed, and driven in police vans to a DC jail, where we were booked, given a court date, and eventually released. The 11 hours we spent in jail gave us plenty of time to get to know each other better; to sing climate, civil rights, and labor songs; and discuss what to do next to sound the alarm about climate change.
Sometime around hour six, one of us suggested we call ourselves the #RockingChair10. We are seven men and three women. Nine of us are Boomers, some more than 80 years old. At 68, I’m the youngest of the men. We were honored to be joined by Rose Abramoff, a young climate scientist and member of the Scientist Rebellion, who was fired from her job after she and Peter Kalmus hoised a banner at a scientific conference reading “Out of the lab and into the streets!”
We didn’t like being in jail and we were happy to be released. The stakes are so incredibly high that we feel risking arrest in this fashion is a small price to pay for a chance to deliver the message to the public and the big, dirty banks that investing in new fossil fuel projects is morally unacceptable. If you agree, I hope you will give me some claps, post a comment, and share this story with others.
Here’s the ten of us smiling when we were released:
I’ll be writing next about why we decided to engage in nonviolent direct action — the subject of one of the chapters of my forthcoming book — and how easy it was to organize our action. We members of the #RockingChair10 hope that our sit-in will inspire others, especially the thousands of elders who took to the streets on Tuesday, to organize similar actions at a dirty bank near you in the days and weeks ahead.
The week before Earth Day, April 22, would be a great time to pick. After all, in our youth, millions of us Boomers made the first Earth Day a historic success, earning us the sobriquet “the first Green Generation.”
We suggest targeting Chase, the biggest and the dirtiest of the four big dirty banks. The next three are also worth visiting: Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. See the Banking on Climate Chaos Report for the data and the Th!rdAct’s Media Statement on Tuesday’s National Day of Action page for more information.
Some of the #RockingChair10 have a lot of experience with civil disobedience. If you are new to this and thinking about organizing a sit-in, please drop me a comment and I’ll put you in touch with a mentor.
