Civil Disobedience and Changing Minds.

I know that nobody cares about truth and all that matters is your feelings, but it still bothers me when people use the term "civil disobedience" to describe acts that are not civil disobedience.

So here's a quick reminder. In order to be engaged in civil disobedience you need to be peacefully breaking the law, not harming anyone, have a specific legal goal, and you need to peacefully and willingly accept the punishment for breaking the law.

So if you are violently interfering with others, you are not engaged in civil disobedience. If you are hurting anyone else or damaging property, you are not engaged in civil disobedience. If you don't have a specific law that you want repealed or a specific legal remedy that you are advocating, you are not engaged in civil disobedience. If you do not peacefully and willingly allow yourself to be arrested or accept the consequences of your actions, you are not engaged in civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience can be a powerful tool for political change precisely because it points out the immorality of an existing law. If you are arrested for doing something and society finds your arrest outrageous, political change will follow.

But.

If you are arrested and your arrest does not arouse the moral outrage of your community, civil disobedience won't work. In order to preserve civilization and the rule of law you would need to begin the long, slow, difficult work of changing people's minds.

You might find it tempting to hurt people, damage property, shout, scream, riot, loot, or any number of things. But doing those things will only provoke reactions and create sympathy for people who oppose you.

I feel like the question I ask people more often than any other in the last ten years is this:

"Do you want to express your feelings and destroy any hope for progress, or would you like to achieve your goal?"

What do you care about more? The feeling of moral superiority or catharsis that comes with going along with the violent mob or actually making progress in the area you claim to care about?

Figure out what you really want, then act accordingly.

Of course there is a great quotation from Theodore Roosevelt on this matter:

"I believe in the men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step. Again my experience has been that might little good comes from the individual who is fighting “the system” in the abstract; just a mighty little good comes from the church member who is fighting Beelzebub in the abstract. I care nothing either for the reformer or the church member who does not try to do good in the concrete, and who is not ashamed to cover his deficiencies in particular concrete cases by vague mouthings about general abstract principles which are as nebulous in his mind as in the minds of others."

He warned against people who called themselves "leaders" who had "an imaginary plan for the perfection of everything which could not even be defined, and which could not have worked in one smallest part if there had been any attempt to realize it."

So, the question of the 21st century is this: What do you really want?