We The Students Essay
by Yihan Zhong
A child refuses to eat his vegetables. An office worker consistently comes in late. A man refuses to pay taxes on the basis that taxes infringe upon his property rights. Citizens are arrested in the park for handing out food to the homeless. Many different types of disobedience exist in a free society, ranging from the insular to the national and from unjust to just. That a free society inevitably spawns disobedience is well settled, since having the choice to disobey is part of being free, but the effect and the role that disobedience plays in a free society have been extensively debated. Some argue that disobedience is anathema to a free society because it leads to only more disobedience and suffering, while others argue that disobedience is essential to maintaining a strong, free society. Unfortunately, the former viewpoint is not well-supported by actual events or by intellectual thought. Despite its initial negative effects, peaceful resistance to unjust laws ultimately plays a critical role in maintaining a free society by checking an immoral or overbearing government and inciting positive social and political change.
Disobedience in a free society exercises an essential check on the power of governing bodies. Governing bodies sometimes make unjust laws, and disobedience of an unjust law is an effective way to incite change and create more justice. Often, people turn to disobedience as a last resort to change an unjust law, since governments that purposefully make unjust laws will be unresponsive to petitions and protests. After people have exhausted all obedient routes to change a law and no change happens, people often turn to disobedience since it is usually more effective. Disobedience forces issues into the public eye and forces a response from lawmakers. Several examples from history prove this dynamic. One of the best-known examples is the Civil Rights Movement. People who took part in that movement had exhausted all their available legal avenues of appeal, and had to turn to disobedient but effective appeals. Once protests and petitions failed to incite any action, African Americans had to turn to openly disobeying unjust and racist laws, which finally brought about change. Thus, African Americans were able to challenge and eliminate an unjust law through disobedience when obedience failed. This use of peaceful resistance to laws is also seen today. Recently, according to Global News, seven people were arrested in Tampa, Florida for handing out food in the park to the homeless. The seven volunteers knowingly disobeyed a law, but did so in protest of it. The law made a morally correct action illegal and thus the law is immoral.
Disobedience, as long as it is graceful, leads to positive social change. Graceful disobedience is disobedience during which the disobeyer is fully ready to accept the consequences of the disobedience. Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently expressed this sentiment in his letter from a Birmingham jail. He wrote that anyone who disobeyed the law must be ready and willing to accept the punishment with grace. He urged people to act in such a way in order to bring about social change and gain civil rights. Henry David Thoreau also wrote about this dynamic in his Civil Disobedience. He advocates maintaining very little so that the punishment does not take away much. Such graciousness is the only way to make sure that the public perceives the purpose of the disobedience. In the absence of grace, disobedience is always condemned by society, since there is no justification for disgrace in the process of civil disobedience. Disobedience also allows people to showcase correct moral behavior and gather people around a cause. Often, disobedience receives much more attention than obedience and spreads its ideas much further due to its viral nature. Such spread of ideas allows people to exhibit the correct moral action to greater amounts of people. By challenging the power of the law, people correct injustices and create better societies.
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