The spirit of the Boston Tea Party returns

Two-hundred and forty-one years ago today, a group of about 120 men and teens ducked out of a big public meeting, donned masks, boarded a docked East India Co. ship and dumped its entire cargo into Boston Harbor. They called themselves the Sons of Liberty, and so did a bunch of other similar groups of anti-king hoodlums throughout the colonies.

In his book “Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes,” Christopher Hibbert details their tactics — organized attacks on government offices, tarring and feathering royal officials, riots, torched effigies. We call them patriots and founding fathers, but the people whose houses they burned down called them the Sons of Violence. About a year and a half after the Tea Party and the the British Parliament’s punitive Intolerable Acts, the American Revolution began.

Today the U.S. is once again seeing protests, civil disobedience and riots throughout the territories. The grief and rage that started in Ferguson, Missouri, has lit the country on fire, and as more local injustices go national, the protests are getting bigger and more energetic. Mayors and police chiefs don’t know what will make them stop, and I don’t think people in the streets know either. There seem to be no demands left to issue, no counterparty that can ensure the police will stop killing unarmed black people.

In this climate, even popular commentators are asking what happens when reform isn’t enough. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi writes, “The police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.” When people no longer feel bound to unjust and uneven laws, “it’s not just going to be one Eric Garner deciding that listening to police orders ‘ends today.’ It’s going to be everyone.” At Gawker, Editor-in-Chief Max Read asks, “Why should anyone respect the law?” He can’t find a reason except fear of being brutalized, jailed or murdered. These two guys aren’t anarchists looking for an excuse, but after video of Eric Garner being choked to death for no reason, after his murderer went free without even a trial, it’s hard to believe that black lives matter and that the law is legitimate at the same time. We are called to pick one.

So far, protesters have mostly respected the law, as Read puts it, as we might respect a venomous snake. But at the marches I’ve attended, I’ve seen the kind of determination that keeps people shouting at the top of their lungs and dodging pepper spray until 3 a.m. These demonstrations make Occupy Wall Street look like a picnic. They’re doggedly disruptive, and the kid-gloves policing that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted at first is failing fast. If the movement can’t be appeased and it can’t be suppressed using conventional means, what’s left?

America has never had a real revolution. We had a civil war, a sexual revolution and a digital revolution, but this country boasts an uninterrupted line of governmental legitimacy all the way back to George Washington. (Jefferson Davis notwithstanding.) A lot of patriots are proud of this fact; they see it as evidence of the Constitution’s staying power, proof that the country is built in a way to allow for growth, change and reform without falling into the whirlpool of revolution. What could we want that America can’t secure? We even have a black president and gay marriage.

The slogan “Black lives matter” points in part to the gap between the law’s letter, which mandates equal protection for all, and its lived reality. America has formally conceded that a black life is worth the same as a white one, but this token offers no comfort to the dead and their families. There is scant evidence that America’s laws and the police who enforce them, despite decades of civil rights reform and oversight, are capable of treating black people justly and fairly. There is no indication that our system can address or resolve the demands from these protesters.

If this situation is intolerable, and I believe that it is, then what is to be done? With no national revolutionary experience, there are no historical guidelines for us to follow. We learned in school how Americans marched for reforms, and all our revolutionary narratives — from Nat Turner’s slave rebellion to the Zoot suit riots — have been pressed into the service of a bedtime story about the little Constitution that lived forever. But maybe that 18th century document, despite a pile of amendments, wasn’t meant to be immortal. Even Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t that into our charter. Black lives matter. There’s a chance that the crisis provoked by those three seemingly uncontroversial words is enough to bring the whole house down, and we are overdue.

When the American Revolution was finally won, the Sons of Liberty got to keep their name, narrowly dodging historical ignominy. In a 1775 speech urging conciliation with the colonies, Edmund Burke warned, “We were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable.” Our current authorities are making a similar calculation. They think we will always find the routine and lawless murder of black people more tolerable than the loss of routine and law. I think they’re wrong.