Sentencing Statement
Mike Uca-Dorn
DC Superior Court, November 15, 2007

Mike and Eda each pled guilty and were sentenced to 3 months
unsupervised release, 3 days community service, 5 days suspended sentence, and a $50 fine.

Good Morning Judge Demeo,

My name is Mike Uca-Dorn and I am a member of Jonah House, a faith-based nonviolent resistance community in Baltimore .  On October 22nd, my wife Eda and I acted on Capitol Hill with hundreds to disturb the peace of our chronic addiction to oil.  I was dressed as a Blackwater employee escorting an oil executive into the Cannon House Office Building .  My attempt was to unmask the collusion of this government with the oil industry, the collusion that has lead to our consuming 25% of the world's oil, when we are only 1/20 of the world's population.  Because we are the country that consumes the most oil, we as citizens bear the responsibility to alter the path our nation has and will continue to pave, into global war and global warming.

Judge Demeo, I was born in 1979, eight years after Dr. M. King Hubbert's prediction of U.S. Peak Oil production came true. Despite this, I was raised in a culture that marginalized such science as inconclusive. It has treated oil not as an addiction to an unsustainable lifestyle, but as a fossil fuel exchanged for blood by war.  In addition, its myth of unlimited economic growth has armored itself with a veiling of the true costs to all species and Mother Earth.  This has been the life I've inherited, addicted from birth, struggling now at 28 to break myself from this addiction.  I acted on October 22nd to face the gatekeepers of this addiction- the United States Congress.

I have been charged with unlawful assembly and incommoding.  The experience of our systemic addiction to oil, and all the offenses to creation that it entails, cannot be found in the D.C. Law Code, nor would I expect it to be.  It's far too large to fit inside the box of this court.  I therefore ask you Judge with the utmost respect, how does a citizen of my standing sound the alarm of such gravity, to invoke immediate action of our government?  According to NASA Climatologist Jim Hansen, we have less then 10 years to make a global effort at reducing carbon emissions to prevent us from crossing the global tipping point of no return. Hansen has been censored by the White House on his statements about climate change, though he is one of the most trusted climatologists in the world. This government must be held accountable on every level, and nonviolent direct action as history has shown, is crucial to that accountability.

I ask you my fellow sister; I ask you as a follower of the nonviolent Jesus, do you hear how I'm at an impasse? I cannot unlearn what I know about peak oil, climate change, and resource wars. I can only place myself, and my addiction, before the doors of Congress, hoping that in the inadequacy of tactics, those in power see something within me I am not aware of, something worth changing the world for.

I appreciate your leniency Judge Demeo in allowing me to read this statement, Thank you.