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Where would Ghandi be?
Date of Review: Feb 3, 2000
"I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." These immortal words were first written by Henry David Thoreau in response to an overnight stay in the local jail. He was arrested for refusing to pay poll tax to a state that practiced the institution of slavery.
They were words that would find themselves in his essay, and greatest achievement, Civil Disobedience. A work that would transcend Thoreau's own fight against slavery to find itself lending support to Ghandi in his fight for Indian freedom from British Oppression, and give Martin Luther King, Jr. solace in his war for Civil Rights.
The idea that peaceful resistance can bring crashing down even the greatest of tyrannies has brought hope and prayers to oppressed circling the globe. Thoreau's insistence that 'just refusing to fall in line' will bring results no matter the strength of the enemy, directly resulted in Ghandi's salt march to the sea, King's march on Washington, the sit-in's of the sixties, and the peaceful protest of the WTO in Seattle.
Thoreau himself was a man to be revered. The mind set that he knew the wisdom of his decisions, no matter the pressure of his peers is evident in much of his writing: "I saw that if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax."
A short but dense work, Civil Disobedience is a must read for any man who knows that what is right can only be trusted in his own hands and that the price of true freedom is eternal vigilance.
