Members of the “Golden Gate 26” turn themselves into the San Francisco County Jail in San Francisco on Monday, Aug. 12, 2024. The Golden Gate 26 were protestors who were charged with felonies and misdemeanors for an April 15th demonstration on the Golden Gate Bridge against the war in Gaza.
Minh Connors/The Chronicle
Regarding “Moral obligation or crime? Competing narratives argued at start of Golden Gate Bridge protest trial” (Bay Area, SFChronicle.com, May 20): It’s frustrating that these defendants keep invoking civil disobedience as their defense, but they have never learned what it means.
Civil disobedience is the nonviolent and intentional refusal to obey certain government laws or orders to provoke social or political change, and it also means accepting the legal consequences of their actions.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins correctly said people exercising their rights to free speech shouldn’t do so at the expense of public safety.
Article continues below this ad
The self-righteous and entitled protesters want to ignore legal consequences. They want the carrot but not the stick because they are not willing to take accountability for their actions. They are guilty, and the rest is just noise.
Joseph Barrett, San Francisco
Taking a principled stand
Regarding “Moral obligation or crime? Competing narratives argued at start of Golden Gate Bridge protest trial” (Bay Area, SFChronicle.com, May 20): As a Jewish woman, I am moved by the courage and moral conviction of the protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in an effort to draw attention to the catastrophe in Gaza.
San Francisco Chronicle Logo
Make us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.
Add Preferred Source
A friend of mine is a nurse who recently returned from her sixth medical mission to Gaza. What she described is beyond horrific: C-sections and amputations without adequate anesthesia because Israel has cut off medical supplies, families are starving and hospitals are collapsing.
Article continues below this ad
Much of this suffering is enabled by American tax dollars and the sale of weapons to Israel.
As the world’s attention shifts elsewhere, the people of Gaza continue to endure unimaginable suffering. One day, our children will ask what we did while an entire population was under siege.
The protesters on the bridge were not acting from hatred or nihilism. They were acting from moral urgency — understanding that conventional avenues of dissent had failed.
I am grateful there are still people willing to risk their comfort, freedom and reputations to say: This must not continue.
Article continues below this ad
Bill unfairly taxes EVs
The electric vehicle fee tucked inside the federal highway and transportation infrastructure funding bill (House Resolution 8870) is completely backward.
California EV drivers already pay up to $429 in state registration fees every year to help fix roads. Tacking a $130 to $150 federal surcharge on top of that isn’t asking EV drivers to pay our fair share; it is double-dipping.
At 18.4 cents a gallon, the typical gas-vehicle driver pays about $99 a year into the federal highway fund. The rate has been frozen since 1993 because Congress refuses to raise it.
HR8870 adds automatic, mandatory fee increases for EVs every two years. Hitting EV drivers with an expensive flat fee means people who barely drive will subsidize the heavy commercial trucks and delivery vans that cause the most road wear.
Article continues below this ad
Meanwhile, plug-in hybrid owners get hit twice by paying a flat fee plus the gas tax at the pump.
I urge my fellow Californians to tell their representatives in Congress to oppose this bill.
Jonathan Armstrong, Sacramento
Block seafloor mining
Regarding “Companies join a deep-sea mining rush after Trump executive order, as regulators fast-track permits” (Biz & Tech, SFChronicle.com, May 21): Strip mining the seafloor will cause irreparable damage to one of Earth’s most fragile and least understood ecosystems.
Article continues below this ad
Seafloor environments take centuries to build and could be destroyed in minutes by this reckless extraction. When polymetallic nodules are dredged from the seafloor, a dirty sediment plume will smother and choke animals that were not vacuumed up.
In 2015, my organization brought the first, and so far the only, U.S. lawsuit against deep-sea mining. We challenged the renewal of stagnant deep-sea mining licenses from the 1980s and won a requirement that the government must conduct a new environmental review before those licenses can be used.
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
Read more about our transparency and ethics policies
We plan to be back in court to challenge any new approvals.
It’s humanity’s duty to protect the deep ocean. If we fail, we stand to lose mysterious creatures found nowhere else on Earth.
Miyo Sakashita, oceans program director, Center for Biological Diversity, Oakland