I met Benjamin Franklin in August at the Unitarian Universalist Young Adults for Climate Justice GROW (Grounded and Resilient Organizer’s Workshop) training in Chicago, IL, an exciting weekend of faith-based reflection and skill-building. Based in Houston and raised UU, faith and local environments have played an important role in Franklin’s fight for social justice. He has been involved with the Occupy movement, Tar Sands Blockade, ACLU, and is passionate about cooperative living. With the Tar Sands Blockade, he participated in non-violent direct action against the Keystone XL pipeline, leading to a harsh and traumatic interaction with the police. Below are excerpts from our conversation, in which he discusses his spiritual roots, lifestyle choices, and path to direct action. Find Franklin at @BFSCR.
So do you want to tell me about what climate change means to you and the movement as a whole?
[Besides scientific fact and an analysis of environmental racism] I think it helps being from Houston where we’re a huge source of climate change. And you can’t say it’s our fault, but Houstonians also like to downplay how we have a measurable humongous impact as well from the refinery communities that feed our economy. My family’s been in Houston for generations, and my family’s been Texan for generations, so we fed into that. For me it’s always been a very human relationships issue. And then also my family members who are being impacted. I have an uncle who’s working for the Koch brothers, managing one of their plants in Victoria, Texas and I have an uncle who’s a shrimper on the Gulf Coast. And it’s just opposite sides of the family.
So I always thought about the human aspect, but again also being from the Gulf, it changes the environment, which has always been one of my most reliable connections to the sacred has been through nature. And it’s because it’s what reminds me I’m not an individual existing, I’m not just like a brain floating in a jar. And that being changed and threatened and altered and for both my white Southern family and indigenous Chicano roots, food and culture around that food is important and that’s part of what’s also being changed. Lots of people have stopped growing things in traditional ways but you wouldn’t even be able to go back. The land gets poisoned, the sea gets poisoned and now we’re just doing it worse and worse and worse and more, more, more. Even pollution is a bubble that you can’t expand indefinitely.
When I think of climate change, I think disaster, not just what capitalism, but authoritarian power structures thrive upon. While I think it will overthrow and ruin a lot of status quo systems, from the very top, it will only empower people who were very powerful but maybe not as most powerful as they wanted, will be in the perfect position to seize control in the moment unless we change things.
Could you talk about the faith and science aspects for you? How does your faith intersect with it? Were you raised UU?
I was raised UU, so that definitely puts a different perspective on things. And my parent’s background – I was raised in a group marriage, so I had four parents. Both my mothers experimented and are Pagan, with female theology and consciousness-raising circles and are Pagans. In fact all four of my parents are Pagans now. My mothers just did it first. And that happened independently at first from UUism but as earth-centered spirituality and Paganism became accepted in UU circles, the covenant of UU pagans is a UU paganism that does what it sounds like.
So on a faith basis, our faith calls us to understand the importance of people as their own end. And it wants us to accept and embrace and celebrate diversity and how the different understands of the world, to have that dialogue, and to honor the people who are having that dialogue with creatures that aren’t human and creatures we don’t always see as people. And those are really important values to me. And they’re some of values that really help me with this work, both in making it essential and valuable, but also in sustaining it and sustaining me in doing this work.
My personal theology is Atheistic. I do not believe in any supreme power and I don’t believe in an afterlife. But that gives us any more reason and value. That means when unique lifeforms are destroyed, they’re gone. And we’re all unique but we’re not all equally unique, and that diversity is valuable right there for a host of reasons. And that applies with cultures as well, like as you’re trashing and destroying and creating these conditions that exasperate the destruction and colonization of language and culture and people, then whole avenues of thought are gone, sometimes irrevocably.
I don’t identify as a humanist anymore; it still shapes my thoughts, and those are precious human creations that are destroyed, and we like to talk and point fingers at groups that are okay to hate, are destroying human artifacts and culture but we do it all the time and we don’t ever acknowledge that.
If the universe doesn’t have any innate meaning, and nothing’s handed to you, then you’re making decisions about what your first causes are. And since you have to do that no matter what, then you should make them as ethical and moral as possible, and try to live them and improve them and go through your life. And that’s the principle that I try to go through.
Do you have any lifestyle changes or intentions you’ve set since engaging with climate change?
I’ve done a lot to shape my life on purpose to help try to live my values as a UU as someone who believes vast political changes are required and necessary. So, purposefully picking lower income lifestyle choices and doing co-housing both because my personal politics, of anarchistic communism. My ideal society doesn’t need either possessions or laws and we should share everything around, then I’d try to live in housing situations where as much as possible we’re all doing that. Where we shop together, we share food together, divide costs together, and some people get subsidized for whatever reason and it’s okay because we know we’re all trying and working. That’s worked some times better than other times in my life definitely, but when it does work it’s beautiful. And that lifestyle also helped make it easier to have lower costs, and makes it easier to take risks on some of these things.
Occupy was actually key [to my involvement in climate justice]. It gave me faith again in the possibility of mass discontent and uprising in the United States. Even with all its flaws, it was addressing one of the fundamental problems, which was people had thrown off apathy and thought they could change things. And even if we disagreed about how to take the change, we had hit the first step.
[I realized] that even even moderate, incremental change was going to be useless in the electoral system beyond anything from local action.
And then the final part that as I got involved that was so perfect was groups in east Texas [like] Nacogdoches Stop, NacStop – being the totally unsung hero of the Keystone anti-tar sands movement – had for years in east Texas, classic grassroots, affected communities, they were used to pipelines and had found out they’d been lied to by the land agents that this wouldn’t be the normal crude, they researched it and they found out how terrible tar sands bitumen is. And then did the door knocking and the canvassing and all the traditional everything, and they wrote to their congressmen, and they went to readings. And some of them even went all the way up to getting arrested at the White House. And none of that worked.
And then Keystone XL was just such a perfect project where it was a globally impacting project that embodied colonial capitalism and genocide that was coming to my city, near where my mother lives, into a community where I already had a small relationship with and knew how terrible the situation for them already was. And not only was it strategic, there seemed like real potential because of the constraints of the project where we could impact it.
This is important and vital and can actually work, and if it does work it can have a huge impact, and even if it doesn’t it’s an important thing to do because solidarity and anti-colonialism mean we have to make changes in our lives, we have to do things about it even if we aren’t sure they’re going to work. You don’t knock the master’s house down with one hit.
So then I was like, let me go talk to my partner and talk to her about how invested I can be. I want to be able to just completely commit, and that will mean I’ll have almost no income. We looked at our finances and she liked her job and wanted to advance in it and wanted to be able to support the movement, and so we made that decision.
And then my faith community gave me a framing, a basis for how to deal with the psychological consequences of what I went through. And I had re-read several of Dr. King’s books, and he talks about the necessity of spiritual training and purification for doing nonviolent resistance, and I agree with him. My commitment to nonviolence is a moral, spiritual – actually, I want to take back moral. It is a spiritual value and a strategic analysis, and I tactically don’t use property destruction but I do not consider it a form of violence.
I thought we were in a position to lose well, and I feel like we did. And my hope is that it’s the death of a thousand cuts, that if we keep hurting them and keep interfering with their projects, and gets more and more expensive and creates more and more outrage. And that’s how we will build and develop the strength and connections that make strategies and tactics actually fulfillable and accomplishable.
Do you want to talk more specifically about your direct action experience? And also, could you clarify some of these dates?
June 2012 was the official start of Tar Sands Blockade, we had a training camp in east Texas and people went around and connected with people, and I started a group in Houston.
TransCanada’s headquarters and the headquarters for the Keystone pipeline are both located in Houston, Texas. So we were doing flyering and protesting outside of their headquarters, we kept an arrest counter up outside of their thing, every Wednesday we always did it, and then after anyone was arrested we’d always go out so that way you kept the presence, which did get media attention and did help get donations. If you’re familiar with the spectrum of allies, I was helping moving people from supports to die-hards, because that’s what we needed. We needed people to get arrested and we wanted it to be people from Texas and from impacted areas because it makes the story stronger.
So they’re clear cutting the forest, and at this point they’re only a thousand yards away from our tree barricade, where we had built tree sits, around eight people at a time would be up in the trees on our thing, so that way these trees that were directly in the route that TransCanada was like, oh we can’t change the route no matter what. So we’re here on this thing and we wanted to protect this, because it was a lot of work and it was a really symbolic thing, we want to delay that as much as possible so people could be prepared as possible, because we knew it would be super intense once they got to them. And it was. They were barricaded in for over 82 days, it became a 24 hour police area, off-duty police officers being hired by TransCanada, with lights and screwing with them.
It’s important to lock down this, and Shannon and I were like, we’re ready, we like each other, we did some role play, let’s go for it. We see the backhoe digger and we run over to it, and the worker, as soon as he sees us, I will give him credit, he does kill his engine, and then jumps down, so he did behave in a way that helped with safety. He was also really angry, not really a shock. The pipe was too large to fit into the treads on the bottom, which was the original idea because then we both could have sat down and everything. So then we had to move it into the hydraulic arm, and that matters because that extra time gave the operator time to come down around, at which point he tried to shove Shannon off of the machinery. He was shorter than I am, and I just reached over his head and through the hydraulic so she could attach back on, and he tried to shove me but I’m also really large so I didn’t really go anywhere, and I just ignored him.
But once we were attached, he backed off. He glared and he muttered, but he did not take the chance to fuck us up even though he was really mad. I will totally give him credit. And in fact, to skip ahead in the story, the base worker, TransCanada contracted workers, were decent humans, who were there doing their job, and in fact at one point, one of them snuck us water to drink, and we of course didn’t rat him out when his supervisor and the cops were all angry when the guy gave us this water bottle, because obviously this water bottle appeared, so they knew someone must have given it to us. So the workers were workers, and I wish it was possible for them to have better jobs that didn’t destroy the whole earth, but in fact it wasn’t them who I was there to screw with. I definitely kept that in mind when talking to them, I kept being like, hey I don’t think I am trespassing, the owner wants me here, he doesn’t want you guys here, and TransCanada’s in court defending this which one of them at least looked surprised when I said that. But we didn’t talk much because we weren’t going to agree. They needed their money, and we knew we weren’t going anywhere, we had a big pipe we were attached to.
We sang songs. I discovered Shannon had a regrettable lack of affection for the Indigo Girls, but we both loved Frank Sinatra. I was standing and she was able to sit on the machinery, then the cops showed up finally, they messed with the pipe. They said you made your point, you already killed time, you should try to detach yourselves. They immediately tried to arrest our support team, and chased them away, which meant that we weren’t filmed, which unfortunately is significant. And it’s in the middle of pretty dense woods, except for the area that they had clear cut completely. And that’s actually another thing. Where we were, there was this oak sapling that had been driven over but was still standing and surrounded by the chips of all the wood. You looked one direction and it was complete desolation, and then behind you was the woods that we had been in, that you could see lunar moths in, and deer and hawks, and wild grapes would grow. And you had one oak sapling, that beaten and abused was still there, and had like two leaves, which totally seemed symbolic for me and Shannon, especially as we were standing there for a while. We were like, we’re like this oak sapling.
And the cops show up, and they taunt us and behave like little schoolyard bullies, about like, oh why are all your friends running away, they don’t really care about you. But besides stupid taunting us, they were well behaved for cops. So then the TransCanada supervisors show up, and it’s like a seachange. One of them is still in his full business suit, he’s taken off his jacket, is being driven up on a little electric cart with a fan. He’s also the oldest whitest guy there. He calls the cops off, they huddle and come back over and they’re immediately like, you’re under arrest. I’m like, well this is a peaceful protest, he’s like you’re resisting arrest, actually if you don’t follow my orders, you’re resisting arrest, this isn’t peaceful ’cause you’re not obeying me. That was directly his quote, which was a remarkable view into the world. And I was like, this is a peaceful protest. Before this point, all of the lockdown pipes had been made out of PVC. But this one was steel, so they thought they would just be able to saw through it, but then they went through the covering and hit the pipe, at which point they started dangling on it and tried to bang out hands and trying to see if it would disconnect and just making it uncomfortable to be involved.
So it was three sheriffs deputies and one plainclothes officer from the local town, Quitman. And he was a foot shorter than me, and being tall has often been a detriment when dealing with police officers, and it was definitely so in this case. So after putting us into stress positions, which is where the cops use physical pain to try to make you comply, that would be considered torture if it’s not done by police officers, but they like calling it pain compliance. So after yanking our arms around, our fingers, twisting our ear, moving our head, stuff like that, and they did this to both of us, this officer leaped up on my back and put me in a headlock and bent me backwards to the ground. The only reason I didn’t fall to the ground was that the pipe made it impossible for me to – I was being held by my suspended arm. The way the pipe worked, we could touch two fingers, we could hold our front two fingers, and this was a really important connection during this whole struggle. And that’s why Shannon says I actually did pass out because my fingers went totally limp for a second. And the lieutenant called him off maybe realizing that a three hundred pound guy in the middle of the woods, unconscious, doesn’t help you get anyone unattached and you still have to move me. And I’ve had back problems ever since this.
So he pulls off of me, the other officer pulls me back in a twisted arm hold and then they decide they’re going to use pepper spray. So the officer twisting my hand, who is apparently the most junior, being in the system so hierarchical, they order him to walk all the way down the hill, slippery with crushed trees, to get the pepper spray, so he’s like, oh you like attaching yourself to things. Here, I’ll attach you to something. So he handcuffs my hands, purposefully putting the wrist thing too tight because I ask him, I’m like ow that hurts, does it have to be – you’re hurting my wrist. He’s like yeah I know. Wrenching my arm into the stress position and then handcuffing my free arm to the hydraulic system, so I’m not at this point attached by handcuffs and through the lockbox, which is what you call those objects.
So then they come back, and they spray the pepper spray inside the tube, first on my end and then on Shannon’s end. And this is one of the darkly humorous moments, because Shannon and I expected pepper spray. I had done street medic stuff during Occupy, and we had training. So we both held our eyes closed, and held our breaths, we turned our heads. When they sprayed Shannon, and at that point because there was so much pepper spray, its own pressure backwashed and so the first people to feel the pepper spray were the cops, and they coughed. And I had to admit it was hard not to laugh, I knew I couldn’t. And they backed off coughing, the two junior officers. So we sat there with it. And this was when I discovered that when they had been messing with the pipe at the very beginning, they had managed to cut our knuckles, because both of us, the first points of pain for us from the pepper spray were in our knuckles, from when they had scraped against the chain. And those were like burning points, and it slowly built up.
And then after like 20 minutes, the cops were like, wow it’s been 20 minutes, why hadn’t they unattached themselves. And then they were like, oh sergeant, the pepper spray expired in 2000! Which I thought they were joking, just to f*ck with us, but once we were unattached, they showed me the pepper spray container and yeah, it had expired in 2000.
So this went on for a while, and the whole time, the TransCanada senior guys are right here watching us, watching what’s going down. So then they radioed in someone, because we had overhead they were trying to call in someone to cut the pipe, but I guess it was taking too long, because the same agro plainclothes officer was like, okay here’s what’s happening. I’m going to say taser three times, and I’m going to taser you for a second. And then I’m going to say taser three times again and I’m going to taser you for five seconds. And I’m just going to keep doing that, to each of you, before you un-attach.
Actually I did skip over a significant thing. There’s two ways to talk to cops. I’ve had a lot of media training, and I have a lot of privilege, and some arrogance. So I had a whole conversation with the lieutenant where he’s like, oh I understand, the state took away part of my land to build a freeway, and I was like, well that’s not the same because this pipeline won’t actually carry oil for everyone, so even if you’re pro-oil, it’s not actually public infrastructure, which is what the law says they’re supposed to do. But I couldn’t get through to him. And with Shannon, so not only is Shannon a woman, but she has a pride tattoo on her wrist. And so while they’re messing with our hands, on the wrist that wasn’t in the lockbox. So while they were messing with our hands in the stress position, they noticed that and made comments about it. Like, oh I guess she’s not your girlfriend. There were some other comments they made about her that indicated general disrespect and contempt.
But they had focused most of their physical attention on me. I got tased first for a second on the leg. It’s very painful. And a taser is a weapon tool that is designed, engineered so that you can’t move. I didn’t cry out and I didn’t fall down, but it’s very intense.
And I‘m glad I grew up at a UU church where Minister Bob Scheibly studied with Thich Nhat Hahn, and I had gone to the zen center with him and studied transcendental meditation as a boy, and that was really helpful for prepping myself in knowing that you can accept pain and let it flow through you. And with a taser, it’s like a flood. It will overwhelm you if you let it. And then he tasered me for five seconds in my left arm, in my bicep. And that was his other thing, was he’s like, after the pepper spray and before the taser he was like, you don’t have to take this, you’ve made your point, you don’t have to be hurt anymore. And another thing they would do, after they tasered me and before they tasered me in my arm, was they went to Shannon and were like, oh you can stop this, you can make it so we don’t have to taser Benjamin. And then to me they were like, oh if Shannon really cared about you, she would let go. And this was where it was so important that we could hold fingers, because we could indicate to each other that we were still committed, we were still here, and we weren’t buying into the lies and the separation that the cops are trying to give us.
So tasers kill you. And I have volunteered with ACLU Texas, so I knew those statistics. My thought when they tasered me was, well, I guess I’ll find out if I have a heart condition. And at about the fourth second, I had a definite, perceptible different feeling in my left peck, which was disturbing. And the officer who had choked me out in the beginning, that for me was the scariest moment, because when you’re being choked unconscious and bent back in pain, and struggling for air, what you want to do is fight, and that was my real fight. Either I accept why I’m here, and I accept there are principles and causes where you just have to risk yourself, and die even though this is the only life you’ll have — or not. And if I’m here for this reason, do I mean it, and I’m like, well I do. So I just had to surrender myself to the situation and not be happy about it, but I was in a situation where the cops would make a decision about whether or not they would kill me. I was in that place and doing what I thought was right, making my stand, and that’s what helped me, and what helped me with the tasering as well, because I was like, well this is where I’m at. I’m not going to buy into the cops lies that they’re being forced to do this. They are choosing these decisions and do these things to us, and sure those choices are contexted by their own things, but it’s not because of us, it’s because of them and the system. And that’s true here too, and if that’s what’s required, then sacrifices are necessary. While I do not seek martyrdom, sacrifice is required.
So they tasered me and they stopped after the five seconds, and I heard the TransCanada senior supervisor, who had at this point come up close, ask the lieutenant, why isn’t the taser working on him? I guess because I hadn’t fallen down. And the lieutenant was like, oh I guess his fat is insulating it from him so it keeps it from biting on him, so it was nice fat shaming in there too. So then they were like, Benjamin, you can spare Shannon from this. I guess they thought we were stupid because they just tried it. But when you torture people, you don’t think as clearly, so I guess maybe they didn’t have cop’s fever.
So the youngest police officer there, who seemed to have some Hispanic heritage, was the one who was ordered to taser Shannon. And I don’t know if it was residual humanity or machismo, but he clearly didn’t want to do it. He starts to advance on her, he’s like taser, taser, and he interrupts his own count. He’s like, lieutenant do I have to do this, and he’s like, yes. So he starts his taser count again and stops and he’s like, Shannon, don’t make me have to taser you. And Shannon said, I have an irregular heartbeat. And no one did anything. And then he tasers her. And I can tell, because I’m holding Shannon’s fingers, that she’s in real pain. And like I said, I did volunteer stuff with ACLU Texas, so I knew that tasers kill people, especially people with preexisting heart conditions. By this point, it was already 2 o’clock, so we’d already killed a ton of the workday. So I’m like, sh*t, we’ve done a lot, they’ve chased off the observation team, and while the cop didn’t want to do it, the other cop was fine and he did do it anyway, and they’re not responding. So Shannon’s like here, I’ll see if I can get out, but she couldn’t detach, because at that point I could also tell her fingers were becoming less sensitive, because they were less responsive, and I was feeling numbness in my fingers as well. So she couldn’t get out, and then I agreed to detach. And I made them pull the thing off because I wasn’t going to help them.
Then there were three things that happened pretty much all right after the other. The TransCanada supervisor thanked the lieutenant for, as always, his excellent service, his help. I don’t think he actually said service, but that’s what I was hearing. The lieutenant said, next time we’ll break out the tasers and pepper spray in the first twenty minutes. And then the third thing was, the officers saying to me and Shannon, oh we’re sorry we had to do this to you, to her, and to me, wow, you took the taser so well!
As soon as we were detached the cops were like, oh this is just how things are, literally, I’m just doing my job. When they re-handcuffed us, they handcuffed us loosely, they put us into individual cop cars, and they didn’t fuck with us when putting us into cop cars. In a lot of ways that was the most disturbing part of all. Because it’s the internalization, that they really believe themselves this way, and they expect us to accept it. That this can just be like, well I was torturing you, but you know that’s just how the system works, we just have to torture people.
After volunteering with the ACLU Texas and doing prison abolition stuff, I knew that even here, I was benefitting from privilege, because I was still getting the torture state on stun, on low.
Thank you for that. I have a lot of admiration for that. Did you continue to do direct action?
I have helped support on other direct action. Since that time I have done things that put me in risk of arrest, but I’m not doing anything where I would definitely one hundred percent be arrested. My case was really extreme, and it’s survivable. I want people to know both of those things. That’s not usually what’s going to happen, and you can make it through, and people should keep those in mind. And there’s a lot of work you can do that’s not these things, that’s super important. All three of those things are true.
Direct action is a fun tactic, and it makes concrete results that you can watch, but any tactic can be bad in the wrong situation. No tactic is so perfect that you can use it all the time everywhere. And that’s just as true with lockboxes or anything else. People should keep that in mind too.
Anything else you want to talk about?
It’s a lot of work and we didn’t win but you can do it. And that’s super important because people need to realize that, and breaking that aura of invulnerability, invincibility is super key because that’s what makes us realize we can challenge fossil fuel, we can challenge capitalism. We can undo white supremacy, we can make reparations on colonial impacts, and all of that starts with realizing it’s possible and showing you can challenge these monsters.
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