One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to expose yourself to legal consequences will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue to be.

What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that officials and the media will invent their own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and the statement the public thinks you’re making may bear no relation to your intentions.