Renaissance Redneck: Civil disobedience

By DAVID KITTREDGE
As the law-abiding citizens of our major cities are fraught with images of rioting, looting and arson by vandals in the name of George Floyd, the man killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have also heard mention of civil disobedience as being an alternative to this horrific devastation.

This concept of civil disobedience was first put forth by Henry David Thoreau in an essay called “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” written in 1849 as a means to project non-conformist principles upon the government and its politicians. In his diatribe, Thoreau lays out his belief in non-violence and his stance on the abolition of slavery which were novel in this period of history.

Not wanting to aid and abet the government of his home state of Massachusetts which had supplied militias for the Mexican-American War and which allowed slavery to exist, Thoreau declined to pay his state’s poll tax for a number of years until he was finally jailed for his refusal to do so in his hometown of Concord, Mass. Much to his chagrin, one of his fellow townsfolk intervened and paid his fine upon hearing of Thoreau’s incarceration with the author spending only one night in jail.

At that time the state poll tax had to be paid by a citizen in order to be able to vote in elections and this practice continued in many of our states across the country until it was found to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s.

Massachusetts also had a highway tax at this time to maintain the public roads and byways which Thoreau did pay, regarding this as his “neighborly” duty, deeming that this tax was for the good of all citizens. With regard to the poll tax he was concerned that he no way of tracking how the money was spent. If he was concerned with unknown expenditures in those much simpler times imagine how he would feel about the quagmire of government budgetary expenses this day and age.

Thoreau starts his essay on civil disobedience with the one-two combination punch aimed at his legislators by stating that, “government is best which governs least.” And then goes on further, upping the ante, by stating that, “government is best which governs not at all.” Apparently, he was an early libertarian in his belief of a hands off type of government.

The author goes on to explain that a citizen should not just get in lock step with the rest of the community or the government by just going along to get along. If you disagree morally with the stance of the electorate, ambivalence on your part is not acceptable. You need to take a stand and in doing so if you happen to break the law while protesting, you should expect to go to jail, peaceably, because your protest is not played out in full until you are incarcerated by the state. Then, while in jail you are actually freer than your fellow citizens, on the outside, because you took a moral stand against your governing overseers, whom you consider to be evil.

The essayist felt the government should look upon its citizens as their “good neighbors,” even though their neighbors have differing views on the laws enacted by the legislators. This parallels the idea that our government employees have been elected to serve the public, not vice versa. Also, Thoreau explained further that when taking up a cause you should not judge your neighbors if they do not feel as you do. They have the right to their own opinions

Thoreau’s ideal of passive resistance was utilized by both Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King after they had read his 1849 essay. From reading their reactions to Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience I think they were at first a bit shocked by the realization that these ideals had been born in the mind and then put forth by a white New Englander in the early nineteenth century.

Although all three of these forward thinkers varied greatly on the spectrum of philosophical beliefs — Thoreau was a transcendentalist, Gandhi a Hindu and Dr. King a Christian — they all followed the tenet that “violence begets violence.”