The Impact Of Civil Disobedience On Free Society
Today, the United States of America is in danger. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed, and at its core lay the fundamentals of a free society. Recently, several news sources have begun to call for acts of civil disobedience to defeat President Trump’s actions, arguing that citizens have a duty to protest in keeping with their conscience. We can be certain that this kind of rhetoric, and the protests that go along with it are not going to disappear any time soon, and thus we must question whether civil disobedience positively or negatively impacts our free society.
To begin, let us examine the biggest problem with Civil disobedience: it undermines the peoples elected leader. Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan discusses the …show more content…
So, what allowed this movement to have a positive impact on free society? The answer to this question is found in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In his letter, Luther states, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: (1) Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive. (2) Negotiation. (3) Self-purification and (4) Direct Action.” These steps give us a blueprint for why the Civil Rights Movements’ acts of civil disobedience positively affected our society. So many of our modern attempts at civil disobedience fail because they ignore these key steps, and in doing so undermine their cause. Another key difference is the goal of the direct action. Today, direct action is an attempt to show disagreement, rather than a plan to promote debate and free speech. Luther also states, “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with like a boil… injustices must likewise be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Essentially, for any resistance to the law to succeed, it must ensure that the goal is to promote a scholarly debate over the issues to spark
To begin, let us examine the biggest problem with Civil disobedience: it undermines the peoples elected leader. Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan discusses the …show more content…
So, what allowed this movement to have a positive impact on free society? The answer to this question is found in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In his letter, Luther states, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: (1) Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive. (2) Negotiation. (3) Self-purification and (4) Direct Action.” These steps give us a blueprint for why the Civil Rights Movements’ acts of civil disobedience positively affected our society. So many of our modern attempts at civil disobedience fail because they ignore these key steps, and in doing so undermine their cause. Another key difference is the goal of the direct action. Today, direct action is an attempt to show disagreement, rather than a plan to promote debate and free speech. Luther also states, “We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with like a boil… injustices must likewise be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Essentially, for any resistance to the law to succeed, it must ensure that the goal is to promote a scholarly debate over the issues to spark