Can Civil Disobedience Cause Change in Today’s Society?
Civil disobedience is the refusal to follow certain laws, as a peaceful protest against certain unarguable ideas. This idea has been followed hundreds of times throughout history in order to gain or abolish certain things. Civil disobedience can help change the world in the modern day. However, there is a right and a wrong way to do it. People such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi led, what today would cause the most change, peaceful protest.
While they both fought for unlikely causes, they had a similar mind set on how their people’s treatment was unfair. Martin Luther King Jr. saw colored people being prosecuted based on the color of their skin. Gandhi saw Indians being separated due to their race. Both men came to the conclusion that the only truly successful way to put an end to their prosecutors was by standing up for what they believed. Mahatma Gandhi decided to use civil disobedience because he knew that it was the right thing to do for the protection of his people. Gandhi called it “Satyagrahis”. Gandhi said that violence was not allowed in his peaceful
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He started to organize sit-ins and marches he used as tactics. He believed that only in that matter would the government be forced to give in and try to negotiate to give the colored people some respect and power. Just like Gandhi forced the Great Britain government to negotiate some type of compromise by not giving in, and letting his followers go to jail. Martin Luther King Jr. did the same with his followers with his marches and his sit-ins. King Jr. believed, just as Gandhi believed, that the only way to get any change was if they protested. Just as Great Britain had seen that they were being unfair to the Indian people, the American government saw the injustice they were showing towards colored people and made them negotiate a compromise with
Peaceful resistance is necessary for social change. The founders of the United States believed in this idea when writing the Declaration of Independence. John Locke, an enlightenment thinker who our founding fathers took ideas from, came up with the idea of the social contract. This is the agreement that a government and its people have and when citizens feel their government is wronging them then they have the right to revolt. Civil disobedience is a form of expressing the social contract and the consent of the governed.
In 1922, Gandhi was sentenced to 6 years in prison for sedition. When the court allowed Gandhi to plea, he did not defend himself and he said that he is guilty as charged and will take the most severe punishment. This shows that Gandhi stood up for what he believed in and was able to accept his consequences.
Have you ever felt the need to disobey authority in a fight for change? If so, then you are similar to some of the greatest leaders of monumental movements throughout history, including people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. These leaders worked their way towards change through nonviolence and civil protesting. However, they were not the first to tread a peaceful path to change.
Gandhi got arrested for his protest, but got arrested with pride, for he had fought for what he believed was right. “I… did not feel the slightest hesitation in entering the prisoner’s box” (Doc 7). After the large movement Gandhi led, he was proud of what he had accomplished. Gandhi was not the only one arrested for this movement, but like Gandhi, everyone who was arrested was perfectly fine with spending their time in jail. “Everyone of us was firm in his resolution of passing his term in jail in perfect happiness and peace” (Doc 7).
Through peaceful demonstration, King tried to bring change in the society. In the past, colored people have waited for more than 340 years to declare their freedom, said King. Martin Luther King’s desire is to see all human kinds to be respect and love one another. The segregation create huge wall between colored and other people so he wants to narrow the gap. When colored people wants to go the hotel or other places, the owners wouldn’t allow them to enter into their premises so he wants the next generation entitled to work, go to school, or to do anything equally with white people.
Gandhi once said, “An eye-for-an-eye makes the whole world blind.” What he meant is that fighting violence with violence helped no one. During his lifetime, Gandhi fought against oppressive British rule in India, and his journey was known throughout the world. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela both shared Gandhi’s thirst for freedom, basing their respective movements for peace on Gandhi’s. All three men fought peacefully for equality, whether it was for India’s freedom from the British empire, emancipation from apartheid laws that prohibited black Africans from being truly free, or liberation from Jim Crow laws to keep black Americans inferior to whites.
Consequently, those protesting an issue must work to bring about change earnestly through truly believing in their cause. Henry David Thoreau shared this sentiment in his “Civil Disobedience”, writing that one person who maintains their beliefs can change the world “For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever.” Though while not all peaceful protests are successful enough to inspire true change, many of today’s free societies were inspired by those that did. Mohandas K. Gandhi was able to coerce the South African Boer government to “end the most objectionable parts of the registration law” and convince the British to grant India its independence from Britain”(Gandhi and Civil DIsobedience”). Therefore, it only takes one individual to inspire a change in the world because “Without their courage those injustices would never have received the attention required to compel national action” (“Civil Discourse and Petitioning”).
I consider civil disobedience to be an easily-ignored pillar upon which our democracy was founded. In fact we are only established as a nation now because our founding fathers engaged in civil disobedience themselves. We were in a “social contract” of sorts with Great Britain and when we felt that they had not upheld their part of the contract (they did not allow us to create courts to maintain order, or to create a navy to defend ourselves, or to sustain our economy due to an inability to trade with any other countries), Thomas Jefferson concluded that it was our not only our right, but also our duty to break away. And it was Thomas Jefferson that combined all of the works of the great thinkers before him such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke
My Standpoint Civil Disobedience is an effective method of change that has been used throughout history against unjust laws. “Antigone” The story of “Antigone” uses this idea of civil disobedience through Antigone who defies the law given by her new king. As Creon starts off his first day of work he is emotional due to the loss of his eldest son. Because Creon is so emotional, he states that the person who brought war to the land causing his eldest son’s death, shall not be buried.
Civil disobedience does lead to progress, just like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. disobeyed the laws which gave African Americans more rights. Rosa Parks is an American Civil Rights Activist. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks disobeyed the bus driver when he told her to give up her seat in the colored section to a white person just because the white section was filled. She got arrested because she violated Alabama 's segregation laws. Although others African-Americans had already been arrested for the same thing, Park 's case went all the way to state, so she was the best candidate to challenge the court.
However, it could also be argued that civil disobedience is beneficial to ridding a society of unjust law. If there is law, you have a duty as a citizen to obey the law or you may try to convince those in charge to change them. If using civil disobedience is a method of convincing others to change unjust law, civil disobedience must be unjust. If it is true that being a citizen of a society binds you to obeying the laws, and civil disobedience is an act which breaks the law, then it is not just for
Civil Disobedience by Thoreau is the refusal to obey government demands or commands and nonresistance to consequent arrest and punishment this had an extreme effect on Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi. They were fighting for different beliefs. However they both had the same believes about civil disobedience and they both end in the same place, jail. In the first place Gandhi believed that the only way to confronted injustice was with non-violent methods.
Herbert J. Storing, an Associate Professor of Political Science, in “The Case Against Civil Disobedience,” writes, “One of the practical consequences of this institution [civil disobedience] is to divert disobedience and even revolution into the channel of law” (97). What Storing is saying is that civil disobedience will encourage people to break the laws and they will hide under civil disobedience to avoid the law. Also, civil disobedience might split society by creating disagreements with the people, and it could create a political instability. However, Storing fails to see that those who break an unjust law, as discussed above, do not avoid the law, in fact they show respect to the law as they willingly accept the consequences. By accepting the consequences, they show that they are not acting for their own interests but for society’s.
For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his use of civil disobedience is extremely honorable and still memorable today. He used the power of speech and marches to fight for African American rights. Also, Mahatma Gandhi is another influential leader that practiced civil disobedience while leading India to independence. Similarly, both heroes were harmonious in the way they stood up for their beliefs. They used nonviolent resistance to spark waves of revolution throughout the world.
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world” These astonishing words that Mahatma Gandhi said made me suppose that Civil Disobedience is a Moral Responsibility of a citizen because when breaking certain laws, a citizen perhaps incorporate a good intention or a bad intention for breaking it. Citizens break the law occasionally to have their beliefs be heard so change can be assemble. Some ways that Civil Disobedience can be a Moral Responsibility would be breaking the law for the right intentions. An example of breaking the law for the right intentions could be The Salt March that Gandhi Created or, Rosa Parks standing up for her beliefs about her actions, MLK wanting equal rights with caucasian. Illegal Immigrants coming into the