In the essay entitled, “Resistance to
Civil Government”, Henry David Thoreau raises a profusion of valid arguments
for civil disobedience. He begins with
the maxim “That government is best which governs least.” (Norton Anthology, Pg. 843) He then builds upon the notion that
government, though intended for expedience, can often render itself completely
impotent. To this end, Thoreau states
that citizens ought not to stand idly by but instead demand accountability when
the system of checks and balances becomes corrupt. His work is passionate yet composed regarding
his commitment to progress and therefore not surprisingly deemed radical by
local conservatives of his day. Thoreau’s
overall approach and writings in “Resistance to Civil Government” applies to
twenty first century American government, specifically the current social and political
climate, in a myriad of ways.
Initially, Thoreau denotes the
Mexican War as an abuse of power by those in high ranking positions. He asserts that the American people would
likely never have agreed to such a conflict if they had been given due
representation. Because President Polk launched
the strike against Mexico without congressional declaration, many perceived
this as a strong-armed, white collar power play endeavoring to extend territory
for slavery. Consequently, Thoreau
refused to pay taxes to the state of Massachusetts which resulted in his
imprisonment. This is comparable to numerous
examples of modern non-violent protest such as the imprisonment of various
figures throughout the Civil Rights movement of the middle twenty first
century. In 1955, Claudette Colvin was an
African American teenager who, in deliberate disobedience of the law, refused
to relinquish her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. She was subsequently arrested and jailed. To protect Colvin’s innocence and provide a sturdier
case for the movement, the NAACP staged another incident later that year,
wherein Rosa Parks also refused to concede her seat and was also subsequently arrested. Thoreau makes mention of this very concept
when he discusses the idea that if even just one man was to arise in revolt
against slavery and be locked up in jail, this would be a means to complete
abolition “for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is
once well done is done forever.” (Norton
Anthology, pg. 850) Thoreau solidifies
his argument by his insistence that if a government imprisons a person without
just cause, the place for a just person is then certainly in prison. This aspect of Thoreau’s work largely informed
Mahatma Ghandi’s revolution of non-violence in India, who then bestowed the
same virtues upon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who then effectively inspired
black women during the civil rights movement to gaze in to the eyes of those
who demanded they cower and say, “I will not move”. As we’ve
seen here, this type of civil disobedience develops as a rather organic
solution to a man-made problem constructed to effect change and actualize a
common vision or as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Almost always the creative
dedicated minority has made the world better.” (A Knock at Midnight, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)
Thoreau did
not necessarily advocate for the eradication of government altogether but
simply for a better government. He
encouraged citizens to demand more respectable governing, claiming this would
be the first means of attaining it.
This concept is relatable to almost every aspect of our nation’s democracy
from infancy to the modern political climate. In fact, social protest now occurs daily worldwide
due to the wildly controversial American presidential election of 2016. As we are bombarded incessantly with news and
red-eye Twitter ramblings of Russian meddling, potential collusion, and the
unbridled sexist, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric perpetrated upon the American
people by the president elect, we resolve nearly every half hour to ask for a
better government if not an altogether new one.
This has been a daunting era thus far, brief as it may be, but we
continue to organize in non-violent revolution against inequality and
incompetence in leadership. Within our
rights, we have marched for many causes since the election, but most notable
was the Women’s March in November 2016. It began organically as one woman’s brainchild
and subsequently evolved from a gathering on the nation’s capital into a global
phenomenon of protest for gender equality, women’s rights, wage gap awareness,
and every other sort of injustice leveled against people who happen not to be
classified as Caucasian, male, 63 years of age, and embarrassingly wealthy. Millions of women, men and children marched
around the world in celebration of diversity and in protest of the governments
propensity for marginalizing it. Undoubtedly,
Thoreau would have given the Women’s March of 2016 his stamp of approval.
Furthermore, at the core of Thoreau’s
resistance was his belief that one single individual has the capacity to effect
change. He discussed the idea that there
could be no real resistance without action and that no man or woman is
obligated to do everything but to do something.
In other words, to simply verbalize one’s opposition to unjust laws only
serves to recount the problem, but to exercise the right to stand within our
own truth by acting against injustice is paramount to achieving a
solution. This concept is quite personal
to me as I have experienced it in various forms throughout my life. In respect to the quest for equality in the
LGBTQ community, there have been great strides since the riots at Stonewall Inn. Though much work remains, we have been
fortunate to witness brave leaders facilitate peaceable protest, civil
disobedience, and non-violent revolution far and wide. This movement is somewhat unique in that prior
to activism, a person who identifies as LGBTQ must often first “come out” or
stand in his or her own truth for better or worse. Though an individual must come to some type of
reckoning within themselves whether for the sake of protest or not, the coming
out process is often a more poignant, defined, and punctuated moment in the
life of an LGBTQ person. It is a
deliberate and calculated process, and can often culminate in a scene
resembling a criminal trial when families and friends are unsupportive. It is
a process which is often painful, sometimes dangerous, and always
life-altering. In my case, I arrived at
a point in my life when I realized that I could never fully become an ally to
my own community if I did not first resolve to take action on behalf of myself. In this regard, coming out was, among other
things, a moment of protest for me. It
was a gateway to future activism and a master key to my divine truths. It was, at once, a moment of surrender and a
moment of victory. It was a journey generous
in liberation and betrayal, but I believe Thoreau spoke precisely about this
process when he discussed that action changes things and relationships. He elaborates by deeming the essence of
action fundamentally revolutionary and denoting its acute departure from the
status quo thus challenging those who wish to remain within it. “It not only divides states and churches, it
divides families: aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in
him from the divine.” (Norton Anthology,
pg. 848) In summary, the process of
coming out embodies Thoreau’s idea that we must become an army of one before we
can become an army of many. We cannot
participate in the manifestation of our own destiny if we are not visible. I now know that my spiritual evolution is
strictly dependent upon my willingness to risk existence as I know it which I
believe will always be the crux of an effective sociopolitical movement. Never will we experience more freedom and
strength than in letting our own lives be “a counter friction to stop the
machine.” (Norton Anthology, pg. 849)
Another valid
assertion for resistance to civil government in Thoreau’s essay highlights the
idea of class inequality and its impact on the balance of power. Thoreau argues that money can diminish the
virtue of a man, and that no matter how wealthy he may become, he would better
serve society by holding fast to the plans he made when he was poor. We can make many comparisons to this in
modern society. First, it is widely
known that the current American president and his cabinet retain more assets
than most of rural America combined, and they don’t mind saying so. According to Thoreau, this would indicate a
shortage of virtue among the leaders of our country which unfortunately appears
to be an accurate appraisal. I do not believe
Thoreau’s intention is to say that all wealthy people are inhumane and terrible
but simply that if they are detached from reality by way of their wealth, a
trail of wreckage is imminent. This is
his reason for suggesting that though we may have plenty, we should remain
humble. Thus far, we have witnessed no
evidence of humility within a hundred miles, roughly estimated, of the White
House. The leader of the free world has
never once possessed a bank account with less than a cool million in it so it
would seem his chances of making plans while he was poor are less than zero. He is quite obviously existing in an entirely
different reality than a large percentage of citizens he claims to be working
for. This is painfully apparent in the
recent drafting and proposal of his party’s healthcare reform. Because most people who currently comprise
the executive and legislative branches of our government possess a limited
capacity for empathy, it is near impossible for them to have any regard for people
who struggle to pay healthcare premiums.
While many communities in America rival third-world countries when
comparing poverty lines, we are proposing to loot healthcare coverage from
millions of lower and middle class working Americans to give tax breaks to the
rich. There is indeed no virtue in
this.
Lastly, Thoreau’s discussion of
prison is compelling as he raises the possibility that government may utilize
incarceration to protect its interests, its money and ultimately its
power. Though the context of his
discussion is mostly centered upon the increased ability of the imprisoned to
better combat injustice once he or she has endured it, I believe we can draw a
more complex comparison in the modern social construct by examining the mass
incarceration of minorities. To
understand the pathology of such injustice, it is important to go back to the
beginning or for the sake of brevity, the day black people won the right to vote
without the threat of discriminatory restrictions in 1965. Subsequently, a struggle ensued among white
supremacists in power to maintain the status quo. Because they were no longer legally able to
restrict voting based on skin color, they sought a more duplicitous effort to
disenfranchise an entire culture of people.
Exacerbated by the War on Drugs in the late twentieth century, the
incarceration of minorities, specifically black males, increased exponentially during
that time and throughout the beginning of the twenty first century. According to data collected by the United
States Census Bureau and the Bureau of Prisons, black males are five times more
likely to go to prison than white males and twelve times more likely to be
convicted of drug related offenses than white offenders tried for the same
crime. After all, when a man is trapped in a cement
box, he will surely have a difficult time making it to the voting booth. Thoreau
mentions that prison is the place the State sends those who are against her or
in terms of civil disobedience, those who are well within their rights to
protest her. Therefore, when the African
American community joined in successful peaceable protest to acquire first-
class citizenship during the civil rights movement, the government essentially began
devising more creative ways to marginalize them. Adding salt to a centuries old wound is the
agonizing fact that many young black men detained by law enforcement don’t ever
even make it to the back seat of a police car but instead fall victim to
excessive force and perish at the hands of those who swore an oath to protect
and serve them. In this portion of his
essay, Thoreau intends to raise awareness of government overreach and
imprisonment as a form of silencing the resistance. As aforementioned, we see many examples of
these transgressions in modern American society.
In conclusion, throughout his essay,
“Resistance to Civil Government”, Henry David Thoreau draws upon his profound
knowledge that peace and happiness cannot be obtained externally. At the core of his writing is the idea that
if we all keep our own side of the street clean, the street will indeed be
clean, thus diminishing government strongholds. He sought to keep government out of moral
affairs, and proposes that we, as citizens, are equipped to arrive at most of
our own social and political solutions through simply maintaining a mutual
respect. His ability to transcend the
physical realm undoubtedly furnished his courage to negotiate the social and
political quagmire of his time. Though
there remain many comparisons to such gloomy circumstances in this modern time,
it seems a rather cyclical process. The
more we demand progress, the more resistance there may be, and the pendulum
swings. Yet slowly we advance. Rooted deeply in his adherence to
transcendentalist philosophy, Thoreau understood that everything we truly need,
we already inherently possess; however, he recognized that if we refuse to
embrace our own truth and scale the summit of our own self-awareness, we can
never be of service to our fellow man and certainly, we can never have any
success resisting injustice in government.
Works Cited
Baym, Nina. Levine,
Robert S. “Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Eighth
Edition.” W.W. Norton & Company, New York,
London. (2013)
Adler, Margot. “Before
There Was Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin”. NPR,
http://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-
claudettecolvin. March 15, 2009.
King, Dr. Martin Luther/ Carson, Clayborne/ Holloran,
Peter. “A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration
from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr.” Grand Central
Publishing.
January 1, 2000.
“United States Census Bureau”.
https://www.census.gov/topics/population.html. (2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment