Jonty Skrufff's Blog

Silent ravers in action (click on the picture)

A Federal judge formally criminalized silent dancing at Thomas Jefferson’s DC memorial last week as he threw out a claim by civil liberties campaigner Mary B. Oberwetter for wrongful arrest.

Ms Oberwetter was charged with demonstrating without a permit after she and 20 friends gathered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial at midnight on April 13 2008 to celebrate the anti-tyranny guru’s 265th birthday by dancing silently to their ipods.

Independent news portal DCist described how ‘a group of about 20 nerdy libertarian wonk types . . . quietly danced around the memorial (which, to be clear, is open to the public 24 hours a day’, before cops handcuffed Ms Oberwetter and took her away.

Speaking to Fox News following her arrest (which was captured on Youtube) she described their moves as ‘pretty restrained dancing; I believe a little moonwalking,” she admitted.

“He (the arresting officer) was asking us in an aggravated manner to leave and didn’t give an explanation. We weren’t being aggressive. We weren’t being rude. It seemed as though he was more interested in sort of asserting authority instead of giving us any kind of explanation. Several people asked, ‘Why are you asking us to leave? What are we doing wrong?” she added.

U.S. District Judge John Bates sided with the police, however, formally ruling that ‘expressive dancing’, with or without music, ‘does constitute an act that undermines “an atmosphere of calm, tranquility, and reverence” at the memorial.”

The judge’s ruling came despite the 18th Century president being virtually universally recognised as America’s greatest citizen, in recognition of both his role as the key author of the Declaration of Independence and one of the States’ greatest philosophers and uncompromising opponents of tyranny.

Stressing the dangers of passivity he urged fellow Americans to ‘educate and inform the whole mass of the people, they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty’ and to ‘act’: Action will delineate and define you’ while incessantly warning of the inherent dangers of government agencies.

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent,” Jefferson stressed on another occasion, adding, ”Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”  He also presciently pleaded for the protection of minorities.

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression,” he declared.

“Experience hath shewn (sic), that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny,” America’s third president warned.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826)[2] was the third President of the United States(1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States. (Wikipedia)

Jonty Skrufff (http://skrufff.com) Follow Jonty on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jontyskrufff

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