'Civil Disobedience' still resonates today

Tom Montgomery Fate writes in his Daily Herald Viewpoint June 15 about Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience."

Thoreau makes many timeless claims in this essay including:

• Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

• All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

• All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.

• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

• Why has every man a conscience, then?

Thoreau demands that we carry the weight of the world on each of our shoulders. He refused to pay a poll tax to support the Mexican American War, which allowed Texas to become a slaveholding territory. He was jailed for this action.

Thoreau writes, I "ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." He concludes on an optimistic note, "A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."

Today, will we act on Thoreau's assertions or " ... serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies."

Charles Elwert

Addison