The right to disobey an unjust law is a universal human right and is written into the American Constitution. Americans have the right to oppose their own government if it should ever become increasingly anti-democratic.
Freedom of belief and conscience strongly suggest the moral force of inner conviction– and it was exactly this power men like Gandhi and Dr. King used to overcome much of their opposition.
Some may find fault with the supposed justification for such a right of civil disobedience, but I do not. Some may claim the weakness to be both legal and moral, yet I do not claim any philosophy to be perfect or equally true in all situations.
Given the conditions of today, I do believe that civil disobedience is a viable, healthy, and necessary form of protest against current social ills. It would be preposterous to make light of a theory that had great men like Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King defending it!
When we think of the great respect felt for these men by the people of the world, would it not be foolish to conclude that their ideas advocating civil disobedience were somehow less wise than their other religious and political beliefs?
When a society has grown so large and powerful that the common man can no longer be heard, a louder voice is needed–and civil disobedience provides that louder voice. By its very nature, Civil Disobedience is not meant to be destructive or aggressive.
It believes in persuasion and non-resistance even when force is used against one. It believes in love and in the basic goodness of the human heart– believing that even its staunchest enemy can be won over to the righteous cause in the end.
Dr. King started in a South that had been strongly segregated for countless years and was still within the shadow of that most dreaded specter of American history: Slavery. By the time a decade had gone by, he was shaking hands with the President of the United States as new two civil rights bills were signed!
And he was shaking hands with the King of Sweden as the medal for the Nobel Peace Prize was placed upon his chest. In truth, he shook hands with millions of hard-working, fair-minded people all around the world. All due to his call for peaceful Civil Disobedience!
Refuse to cooperate with unjust laws, he preached. Yet those decades have receded into the past and the injustices of the 1990s have taken on new shapes and meanings. Perhaps essential power relationships were not as fundamentally altered during the Civil Rights Movement of the Fifties and Sixties as we once believed.
The same forces of Reaction that existed then still exist today, if somewhat more disguised. The Reactionaries have no doubt learned a lesson: in the open they can take a real beating from the popular masses. To coin a phrase, they have “gone underground” but their bank accounts measured in millions and billions of dollars have not diminished one iota.
Great wealth and great power may try to change its spots, but it seldom exceeds. Progressive thought in the outlook of individual wealthy people is demonstrated soon thereafter in visible works of selfless good deeds. But today’s billionaires and wealthy corporations merely make an artful pretense of being “generous”.
They give away enough to establish a reputation for philanthropy but they would never consent to allow their overall profits to be curtailed merely in the name of helping humanity.
A capitalist today, for instance, is not sloppy in how he handles his finances; he realizes today, as his predecessors did in the past, that most of his profiteering is tied directly to the sufferings and exploitation of thousands of working people.
High rents and mortgages are not figments of the imagination; this money flows into the pockets of rich, powerful people who already “own” many land deeds. They call all the shots; the laws are in their favor and they have sufficient economic clout to exert great influence over the supposedly “impartial” political system and judicial courts.
Yet our country was founded on certain democratic principles to which all concerned Americans willingly promise their support. In my view, if an economic system is controlled by a few wealthy individuals who put greed before the good of the majority, it is no friend of mine. Moreover, I consider such people to be enemies of America– enemies of America’s democratic creed and democratic history.
The avaricious capitalist prevents the democratic system from functioning properly, because inevitably the consensus of the people would restrict their power and wealth.
The people produce the manufactured goods with their own labor; they harvest the natural resources to build a modern industrial world and they find ways to transform those natural resources into inventions and ingenious labor-saving devices too numerous to count!
Yet these privately-owned mines and factories, these irrevocable land deeds, continually enrich the capitalists whose unchecked economic and political control continues to grow accordingly.
Who would argue the opposite? Who would suggest that the richest capitalists are weak and could easily be overcome if a popular movement to de-fang them were to start in that direction?
Billionaire! Think of how this new word enters our vocabulary while at one time—a mere couple of decades before-it was the height of fancy to dream of becoming a “millionaire.”
Do you think during the transition from millionaire to billionaire, this person was losing money? Was his philanthropy so great he forgot strategies on how to protect and increase his profits? Based not just on labor but on titled land deed? Did he pauper himself?
Obviously not–and yet are we to believe the capitalist class that it cares about us, the common people. Are we supposed to sympathize with this wealthy elite when it starts howling and whining that whenever new laws are proposed, it is the richest class “which will suffer the most”?
Health care for every American! The richest people cannot afford to contribute to such a plan so they oppose it with might and main! After all, there is no profit-on-investment involved in such a plan; its only moral purpose is to ensure better health care for all Americans, a plan in which the billionaires definitely lack interest.
Does a man with a billion dollars really have that much trouble conceiving of ways to hold onto his fortune if a small part of it were to go towards health care? Or does he fear that any encroachment upon his vast wealth might lead to a series of encroachments, and that someday someone might propose limiting his wealth to a hundred million dollars– and sometime after that, to nothing at all? Does greed have an end or does a billionaire always have to seek more?
Where did this wealth come from in the first place? And is not all this wealth part of the larger national picture of economic health and the well-being of millions? Shall the dollar bill be allowed a louder voice than the country’s democratic principles?
Does “the greatest good for the greatest many” really mean an individual has a right to a billion dollars and a puppet-like government that is never going to cross him?
How many Americans have anything in common with the life of a billionaire? To ask the question is to see its pretense; most Americans are not billionaires. Yet the “free” political system, supposedly representing the voices and wishes of the common man, somehow produced a billionaire for political candidate.
Perhaps this was result of a democratic process– perhaps not. Perhaps it was merely the result that money buys–and the billionaire’s attempt to take over the political life of the country was something more than mere coincidence. Why not let the rich openly control both the economy and the political system?
If indeed this is a sinister turn, do not the people have a right to demonstrate to keep their government ostensibly democratic? Certainly they do; every breath and syllable of the democratic philosophy promises as much under most solemn oath.
Is this something hard to see or understand? Were not the wealthiest classes throughout history responsible for most of the misery and suffering of the masses?
What makes us think that so much has changed, then? It was the persuasive force of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King to realize that such strong moral reasoning was virtually invincible. It needed an outlet- not in battle or war, but in non-violent form.
Civil disobedience has always held that bad laws have fatal flaws which could, in time, be clearly perceived as unjust by everyone. From this, a majority consensus can form–and from this majority, new just laws emerge alongside repeal of the old.
Civil disobedience is an important step in the movement to assert popular rights– not merely to have them in theory, but to be able to exercise such freedoms directly and to good effect.
When Dr. King knelt and prayed or sang hymns and spirituals and freedom songs, he was drawing on a power that no millionaire or billionaire ever had.
When he kept love in his heart even for those who despised him, he drew on a power that all the forces of segregation and hate could not defeat.
When he spoke of his belief in justice, and love, and compassion for all great mankind–far beyond the color of any one man’s skin– he created a new thinking that successfully swept the nation and millions of his followers onward toward their most cherished goals: a better broader freedom for tens of millions of Americans.
Their dreams of a nation honoring its pledge, of taking giant steps forward on the road to greater freedom–now drew nigh. If ideas, morality, and conviction can defeat prejudice, ignorance, hatred and bigotry, segregated institutions and racist courts, wealth and armaments . . . then I say civil disobedience contains a power that should be freely employed by the American people whenever their need for progress is at hand!
As we Americans were one of the first peoples in modern times to cherish the dream of freedom, we must also cherish the rights of people to non-violently and constructively work towards defending or restoring those same rights when they perceive governments and economic institutions have become hostile to the democratic rights and privileges of the people. (In the Sixties: Power to the People; In the Nineties: The People Seek Power).
Civil disobedience is the law of the people in motion; as all democratic laws are intended to bend towards securing greater justice for the people, it hardly is possible for a popular protest movement to be considered “illegitimate” or not in keeping with the American spirit. America was born in revolutionary protest; it is in our DNA.
Civil disobedience is a moral obligation and for those who care about their country, this obligation sometimes takes on the shape of a sacred duty.
Its practice is affirmative to change, to the teachings of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, and to America’s future as a democracy and not a billionaire’s paradise or golf course!
We should withhold cooperation from an economic and political system that is no longer cooperating with the American people. What have we done–other than to live our lives–that we should end up deserving such shoddy treatment as this as we get older?
We need to reshape the government towards popular ends and if the economic system strangles the democratic fountainhead, we need to strangle the economic system until it lets go. Capitalism is not eternal; change will come— and with it the hopes of the people shall soar skyward once more like an eagle!
