Dear Mr. President:
You are acutely aware that the history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or practices. As Edmund Burke sermonized, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option. Henry David Thoreau wrote with profound restraint in Civil Disobedience: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
Thoreau’s moral philosophy found expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was rejected as a defense. Indeed, military law requires disobedience to clearly illegal orders.
A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens.
Civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern civil rights revolution.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
3 comments:
Why obey any law? If you feel it's unjust. Civil disobedience has not been met with proper force. Laws are to protect the whole. Not the ones you like.
the problem here is that the administration is not obeying the law. they are rewriting it as they go selecting what they like and what they dislike. we as a country are just standing by like a bunch of dumb sheep
11:28.....have you ANY education in law, social history, philosophy, or economics? Laws are primarily made to protect the wealth, assets, property, and safety of the rich. Guess who makes the laws? The wealthy. Even the founding fathers admitted that and excluded from legal protection and recourse women, blacks, and non-property owners. Our leaders, democrat and republican alike, aren't writing laws to help the kid in the Chicago ghettos. They are making laws to restrict and suppress the middle and lower class. You think any rich people are getting "stopped and frisked" in New York? Do you think Homeland Security is randomly stopping and searching (at gunpoint, resist and die) limo's and Mercedes on American highways? The British probably used the same reasoning against the colonist -- our laws are made to "protect" you...the colonists eventually saw through thta BS. Maybe we will, too....
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