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In 2008, after winning a bunch of primaries, Obama ended a paragraph he was reading to supporters by emphasizing that it is time to tell “our children” that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

That’s a corny turn of phrase, even for Obama, especially compared to what’s been going on outside his house lately.

More than 700 people have been corralled by police there in the past two weeks, among them the usual suspects – Bill McKibben, Jim Hansen, Daryl Hannah – as well as some more unexpected guests than usual, like housewives, painters, and Margot Kidder.

The spark is the U.S.‘s approval of that oil pipeline Canada is building to ferry their tar sand oil to us, a $7 billion project said to have huge economic stakes for both countries – and because it’s Canada and not, say, Saudi Arabia, delicious political benefits too. The problem of course is that oil is oil (in this case, really pernicious tar sands oil), and for some of those who realize that our planet is having a harder and harder time of coping with the effects of oil, getting arrested is the best option they have for stopping it. More of those people aren’t just activists and rabbis but regular Joes too.

It sure feels like a terrible climate, politically, socially, media-wise, for large-scale social change. But all the handcuffs are starting to look like another canary in the coal mine (pardon the expression) for a bigger, different kind of go at a clean energy revolution in the otherwise haggard-looking United States. Thomas Staley, a 69-year-old artist who traveled by bus from Guilford, Maine, told Mark Gunther:

I’ve been waiting for this for 15 years, The science has been clear. I trust what the science is telling us…If 2,000 people in a very dignified manner are willing to violate the law and get arrested, people are going to pay attention. It’s a beginning.

Another sign that’s worth noting: the recent extravagant civil disobedience of Tim DeChristopher. His crime, brilliantly, was posing as a buyer at a natural gas auction and making the winning bid, thereby scrambling the system. But his punishment of two years in prison had more to do with what he did after that. He kept talking. His offense, said Judge Benson, “wasn’t too bad.” The real problem was Tim’s “continuing trail of statements” and utter lack of regret or apology. If not for the political statements he made in public, he might have avoided prosecution entirely.

He wrote a letter to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger, one of those quiet but burning from-the-jailhouse letters that lifts you above the news cycle and gives you the chills. This is how the letter ends:

Over the last couple hundred years of quelling dissent, the government has learned a few things about maintaining power. Sometimes it seems that the government has learned more from our social movement history than we as activists have. Their willingness to let a direct action off with a slap on the wrist while handing out two years for political statements comes from their understanding of the power of an individual. They know that one person, or even a small group, cannot have enough of a direct impact on our corporate giants to really alter things in our economy. They know that a single person can’t have a meaningful direct impact on our political system. But our modern government is dismantling the First Amendment because they understand the very same thing our founding fathers did when they wrote it: What one person can do is to plant the seeds of love and outrage in the hearts of a movement. And if those hearts are fertile ground, those seeds of love and outrage will grow into a revolution.

In the facebooked chaos of Tahir Square or the riots in London, in a political context that is likely not yours, it’s hard to remember the simple power of words. But if you look in front of the White House, or at this letter, you remember that words are what make governments and societies, and what bring them to a breaking point too.

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