“Activism is the rent we must pay for the privilege of living in a democracy. Protest is how you pay your civic rent.”  – Red Room author Naomi Wolf, quoting her late grandmother, Dr. Fay Goleman in her article "The First Amendment and the Obligation to Peacefully Disrupt in a Free Society." This week, please blog about civil disobedience, and tag your post civil disobedience blog. (Please post your entry on your Red Room blog, not in the comments on this post.)

Naomi was arrested in an evening gown on October 18th outside an event to which she’d been invited. After peacefully explaining to protesters that they had the right to walk on a public sidewalk, she was taken into custody for disobeying a police directive to leave the area. Her arrest adds to the debate about New York City authorities’ threats to Occupy Wall Street protestors for "disrupting business as usual."

How do you feel about the peaceful disruption of “business as usual” to effect political change? Have you protested, nonviolently or not, and what was the result? From the nonviolent protests of Gandhi through the countercultural methods of civil rights movements, what protests do you admire?

A few bloggers will receive books by Red Room authors:

• In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf "illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation."
• Gina Misiroglu's three-volume American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History "details the American counterculture from the establishment of the first Virginia colony in 1607 to the present day, focusing on the writings, recordings, and visuals produced to educate, inspire, and incite action."
• Dennis Loo's Globalization and the Demolition of Society is "(a) rousing critique of the rise to dominance of the belief that market forces and unfettered individualism should direct all matters in society—a recipe for disaster for both the individual and the society."

So post a blog entry today! For help on how to blog, please see the directions here. We'll choose one of these blog posts to be featured on Red Room's homepage next week. Post your entry by Friday at 10:30 a.m. PDT (GMT-08:00) for consideration, and be sure to tag it with the keyword term civil disobedience blog in the Blog Keyword Tags field so we can find it. (Please don't forget the exact tag. For more information about tags, click here.)

And don't forget to check out all spooky ghost stories from last week's creative challenge. From several creepy original stories to a humorous anecdote about renting a haunted mansion for a writing retreat, more than fifty Red Roomers got a head start on Halloween with tales about things that go bump in the night!

Thanks for blogging!

–Huntington W. Sharp, Senior Editor, Red Room