“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in response to President Wilson’s crackdown on dissent after the U.S. entry into World War I

My husband and I were among the 12 people March 20 who occupied the entrance to Sen. Collins’ office at the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building in Bangor. The crux of our complaint was simple: We charge that the senator, by her failure to stand against Bush, is as guilty as he for the war and we hold her accountable.

All previous efforts to influence Sen. Collins to oppose the administration’s war of aggression had been met with equivocations or trivializing our appeals, which we know numbered in the thousands. We were told we could only enter the building in groups of three at a time, and not as a group of 12. To be clear, Sen. Collins’ staff had no objection to all of us entering her office; this was a mandate of the “building manager.” We insisted we had the right to enter as a group of 12, and we all sat down in front of the entry doors. Civil disobedience is an act of last resort.

We waited for more than two hours for Sen. Collins’ response, but it never came. We refused to leave when the Bangor police asked us to vacate the premises.

When they came to handcuff us, we were grateful for the respect we were shown and the calm, measured manner in which it was done. They made it clear that they honored our right to express ourselves. That way, the respect and calm flowed both ways, and we were processed without incident or animosity. About three hours later, we were released and now face court hearings during the last two weeks of April. We face the charge of criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, and a maximum fine of $500 or six months in jail.

After our release, one of our support people showed us Sen. Collins’ reply, which arrived just after the arrests: succinctly put, she supports Bush’s war.

The next day, as we watched police carry off three anti-war protesters in Belfast for blocking traffic with a banner for peace, a small girl asked, “Why would people want to get arrested for peace?” It’s a good question. Her mother, knowing that my husband and I had been arrested the day before in Bangor, asked me if I could explain it to her. I looked down at the little redheaded freckled face, and saw the intelligence of innocence looking back at me.

I had better make this clear.

“Well, I began, you know that people are usually arrested when they do something wrong, and then are called criminals, right?” She nodded yes. “And,” I said, “we believe that this war is wrong, and killing innocent people is a really bad thing to do. But we can’t convince the people who are making this war to stop it. So when we were arrested, and when the people here today were arrested, we were doing something that broke a law in order to protest this war, but we hope people will see that we are not criminals. The real crime is war, the real criminals are those in power who have decided to drop bombs on people who have done no harm to us and are no threat to us, so we should do no harm to them.” She smiled, she understood.

I could have given her a lesson in the great changes that civil disobedience has brought about throughout modern history, from the Boston Tea Party to the Suffragettes, to Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Pastors for Peace. I could have told her about bad laws that need to be changed, and how sometimes, only breaking them with courage and conviction gets them overturned.

But in this case, the laws that are being broken are in fact international laws, good laws that protect countries from wars of aggression, and they are being broken by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their ilk. The democratic process was abused and undermined during the elections that put this group in power. Now, the people of the world are rising up against this government, those in power who severed the peaceful process of disarmament that was in progress in Iraq, and who would take over the world’s resources by the rule of force.

It is becoming more difficult for Americans to dissent, as Patriot Acts I and II threaten our civil rights. All of us who participated in this act of conscience are acutely aware of the precious freedom of expression we can exercise in this country, and we will protect it and use it with gratitude. But already erosion of that freedom is being felt, even in our case, when we as group of 12 citizens were not allowed into the federal building, even though the week before a similar sized group was allowed unquestioned to enter for a similar purpose. In the land of the free, dissent is an act of patriotism, and we intend to continue our patriotic duty to speak truth to power.

Nancy Galland, of Stockton Springs, is a member of the Maine Global Action Network.