The Art Of Civil Disobedience

Over the years, hundreds of protests were held in America over injustices against victims and their families.From the March on Washington, to the Flowers vs.Guns protest, their resistance was something that positively affected and encouraged free societies. The practice of civil disobedience started with Henry David Thoreau, who went on to rationalize his thoughts about the term. In his lecture,he discloses into two principles that the government relies on the sufferance of the administered, and also how the citizen has the full right to determine if a law emulates or repudiates justice. This displays the right for citizens to withstand the law and accept the consequences of civil disobedience. In Thoreau's context, he criticized
how the enactment of slavery and substratum of the Mexican War were wrongful. After Thoreau's speech, the word had spread like wildfire, encouraging others to engage and recite the expression. People like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, and many more, became household names with their nonviolent protests. These activists and their actions helped other citizens, embrace their rights, because of their beliefs in equality and justice.They went out of their way to amend unjust laws set by the government, and try to relegate discrimination and prejudiceness out of society. Because the noble behavior of others, our nation has made progress into coming together as humans and conveying respect towards one another. Not all acts of nonviolent resistance have to be done physically. Technology has strongly flourished into what it is now ever since the beginning of the 21st century. We are now able to communicate with billions of people around the world, from the comfort of our own homes. People now use cyberspace to propagate information about biased proposals that the government applied over against citizens. Edward Snowden is a sole example in using the internet as a porthole to notify others how the supremacy revel in constraining civilians and constricting them of information that Snowden presume that they needed to know. In the magazine "The New Yorker", journalist John Cassidy, believed Snowden was a hero, despite the fact that he disclosed the immense range on how the bureaucracy wiretaps into Americans and other countries' conversations. Cassidy expresses his feelings on the ordeal saying that Snowden "performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed." Whether or not many people agree, Snowden is not the only former government employee to reveal information that is deemed important for the fellow citizens to acknowledge. People like W. Mark Felt, who was the key source of information on the Watergate Scandal, or former U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who was released the Pentagon Papers. To some, these individuals were assumed to be inspirational, while others who also contrive in the U.S. establishment, didn't synchronize to these actions. A lot of people who disagree with civil disobedience would say that it disruption to our society.
Morris Leibman, a former lawyer, wrote an article on how non violent resistance is a severance in the general public. Leibman goes to state that "No society whether free or tyrannical can give its citizens the "right" to break the law. There can be no law to which obedience is optional, no command to which the state attaches an "if you please." Further in the article, Leibman goes to ask why the practice of civil disobedience may be necessary, when citizens should just portray the "majestic title bestowed on those of us who create and share in the values of the law society". Why do these people contend to rebel against a country that is providing freedom and peace for you? Opposing the prospect of discrimination is something that is to be reckon with, and the sentiment of human rights are certianly important, but to not have a general idea on how to go about things, results to a corollary from Justice Frankfurter saying that "Only those lacking responsible humility will have a confident so­lution to problems as intractable as the frictions attributable to differences of color, race, or reli­gion." This statement brings Leibman to include how the introspection of civil disobedience can disintegrate into violence and work up destruction and inherently clinch the gist of the
article. Throughout the years the term of passive resistance became rampant to the world, and revert to thousands of opinions to be thrown about. The outcome to this recapitulation is that there are different interpretations of civil disobedience, that comes in all shapes and sizes, and has no become such a potent component in our universe that imprint our communities positively and/or negatively, revolving around on how it is executed.