Civil Disobedience: A Rhetorical Analysis

If I told you a year ago that fear and hatred would run rampant throughout the U.S., you wouldn’t believe me. If I told you that public trust in the mainstream media was at an all time low, you wouldn’t believe me. If I told you that actual lies are being spun as “alternative facts”, you wouldn’t believe me. It sounds Orwellian. Because it is. This is our reality. Our reality is a president who spreads malicious lies about the press and gets away with it. A president who surrounds himself with the elite who are more interested in their financial gain than the American public. A president who might restrict the rights of LGBT communities, the rights of women, the rights of people of color, and --especially-- the rights of Muslims. We must resist
him. Although widely controversial, peacefully breaking the law is our only resort in times like these. We do it to make sure that the people in power understand who put them there in the first place and for them to realize that when they attempt to infringe upon our rights, we will fight back.

The debate on peaceful resistance to laws traces back to when Henry David Thoreau first coined the term as “civil disobedience” in his essay Civil Disobedience and since then the debate has arisen numerous times on whether or not it is the “right path” to take when implementing social change.
The debate was thrust into a hotbed of discussion during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In 1964, Morris I. Leibman was an avid anti-civil disobedience activist. He argued that there is no reason for any citizen to find an excuse to break the law because when people agree to enter society, they accept the rules that society establishes. Once you break these laws, there is no purpose to society existing in the first place. He argues that if you give leeway to certain circumstances in the law, where do you draw the line? In his mind, civil disobedience is deplorable and believes it’s the wrong way to create change. Continuing with this train of thought, Herbert Storing argued that civil disobedience would likely die out because of its irrelevance to today’s problems. He found it’s attempt to combine revolution and conventional political action into one as a blend of ideas ineffective in its approach for change. Both of these men wrote their responses to civil disobedience at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and both agreed that black people deserved equal opportunity under the law, but they felt that civil disobedience was a regressive tactic
to convince the entire nation.

Despite the numerous arguments that declare civil disobedience the wrong way to approach inequality, in reality, it works.
It worked with Mohandas Gandhi and India’s pursuit for independence. It worked with Nelson Mandela’s quest to be rid of apartheid. It worked with Aung San Suu Kyi and the fight for Myanmar’s democracy. These heroes understood that they were breaking the law, and they took the punishment that was dealt to them. Nelson Mandela was in jail for 25 years. Kyi was under house arrest for 15 years. But what’s astounding is that they were able to see the positive impact they created. They saw how much better their countries have become because of their hard work. They won. Granted, Myanmar, South Africa and India still face many societal problems, but there’s a brighter future for all of them and if they continue to hold their leaders accountable for their actions, they’ll thrive. Even in a well developed free society like the U.S. needs to hold its leaders culpable to their actions. If it weren’t for Edward Snowden’s decision to release documents revealing how far the NSA had invaded people’s lives, we may never have realized the extent to which the government had violated our privacy. We need individuals like this because they open our eyes to what our society could be. A free society isn’t free unless we’re given the right to criticize and protest it when we’ve disagreed with what they’ve
done.

In recent weeks, 1984 has been flying off the shelves. Two years ago, I read George Orwell’s novel. I guffawed at his blatant hysteria for the future of democracy. Now I’m not so sure, and neither is most of the country. For some, it feels like the elections have failed us and we have no one else to turn to. But that’s not true. We have our own minds, our own voices, and we have our hope. With these tools, we can create the change we want-- what we need. Peaceful resistance is not only a means to an end, but also the start to a new beginning.