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Civil Disobedience Impact On Society

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Civil disobedience, also defined as peaceful resistance to laws, is the refusal to obey any laws without any violent acts. Civil disobedience positively impacts free society because these acts spread awareness on unjust laws, and cause the governments to double check laws and question if they are really necessary. People may say that all laws are meant to be followed because they protect us, but that does not mean that all laws are just. All laws have been challenged by someone at one point leading to jail time, and some people that have been imprisoned did time because they stood up to a law they broke that was unjust. Our lives have been deeply impacted my civil disobedience. If Gandhi never started The Salt March, if Rosa Parks did not stand her ground on that bus, If Martin Luther King Jr. never spoke what was on his mind, and if Cesar Chavez never started all of those strikes, the world we live in would not be the way it is today. …show more content…

Many would say that civil disobedience is a problem because others are still breaking the law, but “Our problem is Civil obedience.” (line 16 Zinn). Many people have been killed because of this obedience. Take the Nazis for example: their problem was civil obedience. People obeyed the wrong leaders and the wrong dictations. As stated in the Civil Disobedience article by Morris I. Leibman, “Civil disobedience is negative, where we require affirmative process,” (Paragraph 8 Leibman) but affirmative process would not work in the same way as peaceful resistance, if Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black rights by ‘affirmative process’ it would’ve changed many years later than it did or it would still have been the

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