MY STATEMENT FROM MY DAY IN COURT

Without remorse, but assuming full responsibility, I have plead guilty to a charge of criminal trespassing. It would be beyond naive and border on hypocrisy for me to deny a charge that was the calculated springboard for my agenda - a plan to get arrested in order to garner media attention for my social statement. Yet a peculiar dichotomy has developed in my thoughts surrounding the notion of guilt. As an individual I must respect the rights of another man’s private property and have found myself to be an uninvited guest. But who drops the gavel on a nation or worse yet a multi-trillion dollar corporation, who has not only occupied another man’s space by welcoming himself across borders, but then begins to help himself to that man’s resources. Gandhi said there are unjust laws just as there are unjust men. I wouldn’t declare our trespass laws to be unjust. I’m only suggesting the self righteousness in those higher courts of our land, that meter out judgment without penitence for their own past or present sins, ought to be examined by our own body politic. From the foundation of this very nation at the expense of native peoples, to the current war in Iraq - it would do us well to ponder our presence in our neighbor’s land and the concept of borders. There are phenomenon that do not recognize our arbitrary man-made lines in the sand. The effects of global warming and crippling poverty are indiscriminate. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. 

I would also like to call attention to my first amendment rights and the charge of disorderly conduct. Day to day I have seen an Orwellian attempt to strangle the individual’s voice. The individual’s freedom of speech is being suppressed, while the threat of deregulation would provide corporations, that were nowhere near the thoughts of those who wrote our constitution, the same rights that are being stripped from the individual. As Howard Roark of the Fountainhead says - “I came here to be heard in the name of every man of independence still left in the world” As we approach July the fourth I would ask what new independence the individual might seek. Independence from fossil fuel or better the yet the independence of thought that can lead us away from such dependence. I also plead that every member present meditate on the reality that dissent lies at the bedrock of this country and men now determined to be our original patriots were for a time considered defectors to their own lords. 
Jay Weinberg